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Comment by chr15p | Hacker News Reader

do many people still use KDE?

I never really got on with it myself. No distro seems to ship it as their default desktop any more, only as respins. Gnome seems to have pretty much won the desktop environment wars.

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> No distro seems to ship it as their default desktop any more

There are a few KDE-only distros. openSUSE offers many desktops, but KDE is installed by default.

Netrunner uses it as a default. Also openSUSE and Slackware seems to showcase it as a default, though in openSUSE you can pick Gnome too, but I don't remember if Slackware lets you pick Gnome (I'm sure there's some way to get it regardless) or what. There's also Kubuntu, which is technically a distro even if it is "just a spin of" Ubuntu.

Also, aside from myself I've seen our system admin at my job using it, and I think at least one or two more coworkers. Also Tyler[0] uses KDE ;)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQM5fU7V-MM

One thing I didn't like about KDE was that it presents you with a lot of configurability, but it's configurability I never cared about in the first place.

Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.

Configurability is the Number 1 reason to run Linux on the Desktop. KDE's number one selling point is Integration. There is no better integrated desktop in the world and that message is lost to 99% of people. I find that I use two desktops the last 5 years. KDE or i3 (tiled desktop) but my applications are always KDE even with i3.

I think that KDE has had so much FUD thrown at it that people just have a negative view of it right away. Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.

> Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.

KDE put it out, everyone complained it was terrible, unstable and not ready, then KDE called it a beta.

> Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place

The defaults seem very sensible in my experience. Having the freedom to customise it further doesn't seem like a bad thing but perhaps I'm just old-skool.

Let me give you an example, I hate working in Windows because I can't change the keyboard shortcuts of the Magnifier application so Windows forces me to use the Win+ +/- key and that is bad because I have to use two hands to press it. My point is that maybe default options are good for a large majority but what about the rest? Should I not use computers because adding accessibility features like options for font sizes, color schemes, zoom applications or the great zoom options in KWin because some other people feel intimidated because the options popup has too many options?

People that are intimidated by buttons should use Gnome, they will remove everything that is possible from the options dialog.

Do you also complain about vim or Emacs having literally hundreds of configuration options?

The point is, flexibility is not by itself a sign of bad design (or avoiding design decisions). Good design is choosing sane defaults for the average user, and providing discoverable and understandable configuration options for the power user.

I'm not saying that good design is directly correlated to the number of configuration options. Some configuration options are genuinely indicative of bad underlying design, and can be removed once a better design is in place. But when you remove configuration options for the sake of removing configuration options, you obtain Gnome 3.

It's the default on SUSE.

Minor correction: It's the default on openSUSE. On SUSE (the commercial version of openSUSE), GNOME is the default.

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