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I don't mind them experimenting with new ways of doing things at all, I just really don't understand why this needs to be done in a way that prevents people from doing things the way they've done it before if they decide they don't like the way you're doing things.

Same reason it happened with Firefox: trying to attract more users. The broader you want your user base to be, the less customizable you have to be. Regular users can't handle heavy customization: it's too complicated and they freeze up.

Power users interested in extreme customization of their environment will always be a tiny niche. Add to that the Anna Karenina Principle [0] and it makes even less sense to try to compete for such users.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

The keyword is "trying." When they intentionally disable functionality they are throwing away the userbase that depends on that functionality for the hope of getting a bigger userbase in return.

But there's no need to be that myopic. Like I said, I don't mind if they add these features and make that the default way of doing things. I don't mind if they bury the "less broad" functionality deep in some hidden configuration that I have to get at. Just keep it around for those users, give them QA articles on how to re-enable their way of doing things, and then you can have both.

There have been countless counter-examples to this "priciple", by the way: The Digg to Reddit migration being the foremost in my mind, but also the Windows Mobile to Windows Phone migration and the last Firefox redesign (that was eventually mostly rolled back or made optional again after hemorrhaging users).

>Same reason it happened with Firefox: trying to attract more users.

The thing is that Linux users are self-selected power users. If you want something to just do your work, you'll stay with Windows or macOS (or whatever your computer came with).

And while I don't need the power of i3, I don't see why my desktop can't have a maximize button

> The thing is that Linux users are self-selected power users. If you want something to just do your work, you'll stay with Windows or macOS (or whatever your computer came with).

Not always, I had my dad using linux for years because he got a new lease of life out of an old machine and this was a time when windows would get random malware installed just from regular web browsing. The default solitaire that came with Kubunutu alone satisfied 90% of his computing needs. The configurability of KDE was a constant issue though, even when I locked the the taskbar/desktop he found a way to screw it up.

The problem isn't configurability, just the way it's handled. KDE (at least in my terribly outdated experience) adds all kinds of options in things like right click menus or application menus, this confuses and scares ordinary users. I find the gnome approach of having a dedicated app (tweak tool) for configuration is much better for ordinary/casual users, it moves all the clutter to a dedicated place instead of stringing it out everywhere. For power users there is nothing wrong with putting the config in a dot file or scripting language.

I too have installed Kubuntu for many, many people. Literally every week I would have to reset someone's borked KDE settings because they accidentally clicked or right clicked or dragged in the wrong place. After install I would simply ` cp .kde{,.BAK}` and set up SSH to restore it when needed.

For one user I even added `cp .kde{.BAK,}` to their login script. I wish that I remembered how, actually, because there seems to be only one way to get that to run before KDE reads it and I can't remember now.

I love configurability and everything from my fountain pen to my car is heavily modified. But normal people cannot seem to deal with the ability to modify their surroundings.

If accidentally clicking or dragging results in messing up their settings, I'd say the problem is a brittle user interface, not normal people having problems configuring their surroundings. If normal people cannot use the user interface, then the user interface has a design failure ("bug"), by definition. (Unless the intended audience is not normal people, but if that is the case for Linux, we shouldn't be installing Linux for normal users.)

I agree 100%. KDE 4 was terrific, and it came _so close_ to being great for normal users. But the settings were just too easy to set.

What you're saying is actually an age old UI error, related to this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

Search in the page for "half the screen was grey" :)

I remember that page well. Joel was probably the first "blog".

> For one user I even added `cp .kde{.BAK,}` to their login script. I wish that I remembered how, actually, because there seems to be only one way to get that to run before KDE reads it and I can't remember now.

A quick reading of `/usr/bin/startkde` suggests that `~/.config/startupconfig` is sourced sufficiently early. Alternatively, `~/.profile` (or `/etc/profile`, for that matter) should also work, although that might be asking for trouble if the user knows how to open a terminal emulator.

Thank you. ~/.profile is a problem because _I_ might open s terminal there! The startupconfig file was probably it.

I don't think it's anything particularly to do with the users themselves but rather the difficulty of supporting both well without making one of the two groups suffer.

Chrome and Firefox did the correct thing by burying the advanced settings in chrome:flags and about:config respectively.

Gnome and Unity actually removed features -- that's what this complaint is about.

Is KDE back to KDE3 functionality? If so I will give it another try. But KDE4.x was sooo bad, it was a complete rewrite and every single decision was ill-advised. In retrospective it almost looks like someone had great fun running both KDE and Gnome to the ground and keep users away from Linux desktop. I mean KDE3 and Gnome2 were good, almost perfect. KDE was more Windows alike and had ton of settings to adjust things. Gnome 2 was more MacOS alike and more opinionated with little settings. When KDE4 tanked, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 tanked I switched to Ubuntu with Unity. Now Ubuntu 17 tanked with its shitty Gnome 3 where Terminal app has no tab-support and Gnome Texteditor is a weird zombie that lost most of the Gnome3 Texteditor functionality and toolbars. I hope Ubuntu 18 LTS comes with some reasonable improvements to Gnome 3, or I will look elsewhere.

KDE 4 was on par with KDE 3 since about the 4.4 or 4.5 release, a few years ago. I too was a KDE 3, then Trinity, holdout.

KDE 5, last I tried, was still missing some features and had troubles with panel positioning on multi-monitor setups. It is also missing all the little touches that made KDE 3/4 so pleasant to work with, such as Ctrl-U to clear a field (lifted right from Emacs). I stick with KDE 4 on CentOS.

Ctrl-U works, just tried it.

Thanks, I haven't tried KDE 5 in over a year. I might give it another look.

KDE 4 was the biggest disappointment I had in the Linux world. It became usable to me a few years later.

KDE 5 is fine, doing a few changes like disabling plasma volume and starting KMix at startup instead. Still have to use pavucontrol occasionally, though.

Yesterday I discovered you can switch the menu style (right click -> alternatives) to a more classic type (like KDE 3, plus favorites), or to a full screen win8 type (for tablets).

You can also download Simple Menu [1] and Tiled Menu [2] with a right-click on the panel, then Add Widgets -> Get New Widgets.

I think, they'll be available in that Alternatives-menu then. If not, you can add them through Add Widgets.

Plasma treats everything as either a widget(/"Plasmoid") or as a panel. So, you also have to have your widgets unlocked for all of this to work (including the Alternatives-menu).

[1]: https://store.kde.org/p/1169537/ [2]: https://store.kde.org/p/1160672

Simple Menu looks really neat. Thanks!

> I use sloppy focus follow mouse and mouse raise only on titlebar click so I can use windowed applications in actual nontrivial ways.

That's sounds interesting. Where did you learn about this? It sounds like an unusual usage of the UI.

Greybeards who still used SunOS because they didn't like the Mac/Windows way of doing things.

It enables things like:

1. Found a web tutorial on how to do something in *nix with a bunch of shell commands interspersed between paragraphs? Keep a small terminal open in a corner on top of the fullscreen browser, read the article and actually click-and-select commands and then copy-paste in the terminal by just moving your mouse back and forth between the applications.

2. Looking at a scanned PDF and want to do a bit of math to confirm the numbers you're reading? Load up a calculator and type into it when the mouse is hovering over, go back to scroll the PDF. Easy peasy.

Basically by separating the actions of window positioning from using it, you can actually use more than just fullscreen windows one at a time.

2 works in Windows, xfce and Unity too, mostly (and has been for years). The focus stays on the calculator if you wanna type into it, but you can still scroll whatever your mouse is over.

1 certainly works in any Linux DE I've ever used, as long as I make the terminal stay in the foreground whether it's focused or not. Personally, I prefer to use guake for sucha usecase, however.

Those were examples. The key point is that this is generic behavior for any window at any time. It doesn't have to be special-cased (with the calculator) and it happens all the time (making the terminal stay in the foreground is at least two clicks, for instance).

That's not special cased for calculator. Scrolling goes to the window that the mouse is hovering over. Your point in general still stands.

2 works on macOS too, for what it’s worth. (My memory of this, which may not be entirely reliable, is that Linux and OS X both had 2 forever. I wish I could say the same for 1.)

FWIW 'focus follow mouse' is possible in Windows. With a few hacks/addons.

It's also possible to switch to single-click for open.

Which is a very relaxing way to use Windows until you accidentally open every file in a folder!

It never worked well in Windows for me. I tried, a lot. The main problem is that it doesn't have a focus stealing prevention like KWin (and maybe other Linux desktops) and eventually got annoyed and got used back to regular focus activation.

How was the KDE 4 -> 5 transition? I test-drive KDE every now and then, but every time I get the impression that they're always tweaking this and that at the expense of stability. When they first announced KDE 5, my first reaction was "But KDE 4 has only just become usable!" But it seems it was more of an incremental update than a complete rewrite like KDE 3 -> 4. As a daily user, do you find KDE 5 stable enough nowadays?

KDE 4 to 5 was very smooth, though I waited ~3 months for reports from others before I jumped. :)

It feels like KDE 5 was focused primarily on polish rather than new features. (I honestly can't think of a feature in KDE 5 that wasn't in KDE 4.)

My only complaint I have for KDE 5 is that the system tray applets can occasionally disappear after multiple sleep/awake cycles on my laptop without rebooting, but right-clicking on the tray, disabling an applet, then reenabling it causes anything missing to reappear, which is probably the most minor thing someone can have for a desktop environment!

Oh, and people confuse my KDE laptop for a Windows laptop because it looks a lot like Windows Vista by default.

Yeah, KDE 4 looked a lot like Vista, KDE 3 looked like Windows 95, and KDE 5 looks like Windows 10.

Not complaining, I think it's nice that at least one major DE is consistently taking ideas from Windows when everyone else tries to copy the latest Apple product.

KDE has generally had similar layout and approach to Windows, agreed, but I'd argue that pretty much ended with Windows 8 and up.

KDE 5 has more in common with 7 than it does with anything Metro.