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Comment by sharno | Hacker News Reader

I understand how hard it is to improve an open source software to get to be on the same level of proprietary ones, but it seems that Gnome took multiple steps backwards, or rather maybe the ubuntu adaptation of it.

I saw multiple UX hiccups and small missing functionalities that makes me wonder when would a DE reach the full maturity to stay as it is with small improvements and doing what's intended to be done. For the time being I think KDE is a more stable and functional DE than Gnome, hope Gnome returns to its glorious days soon though.

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I understand why Ubuntu doesn't switch the default to KDE; there's too much history and people would recoil at such a big change. That said, I always run Kubuntu rather than the default Ubuntu desktop and I'm really happy with it. Switching to KDE is almost as smooth as it can possibly be: once I have Ubuntu installed, all I have to do is "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" and then choose KDE at login.

Some of the reasons I really like KDE:

* I have keyboard shortcuts for switching desktops; I feel much more productive with 9 easily accessible virtual desktops. I use the "windows" key, sometimes called "meta": meta-Q, meta-W, meta-E, meta-A, etc.

* I've added rules for automatically changing the window title bar colors to make it easier to distinguish between very similar-looking windows. My Sublime Text windows in particular have a different bar color for each project. Sometimes I have as many as 4 projects open at once.

* I can lay out and enhance my screen any way I like. KDE doesn't quibble and even encourages it.

For anyone like me who loved KDE 3 and then was profoundly disappointed by the big changes and rewrites in 4, I have to say KDE 5 is back to being brilliant.

It's also the only desktop I know with a Fuzzy Clock that can be set to "accuracy=halfling" so you know when second breakfast has turned into elevenses.

It hadn't occured to me until now to try going back to kubuntu though (having been on Arch since KDE4).

Try Manjaro. Based on Arch with KDE Plasma desktop. It's awesome.

Thanks. I'm currently using Antergos, which I understand is roughly the same thing, with the difference being whether or not you use Arch's repos.

KDE is honestly amazing. My environment is exactly they way I want it, every shortcut does exactly what I want.

I used Gnome before it for a while. I remember writing extensions for it and fixing other people's extensions. I remember logging in to some crash message every day, possibly because of the idiotic way extensions work: they just monkeypatch the actual DE code (?!?!??!)

KDE provides all the functionality that I need without extensions. Nothing crashes, ever.

I think Gnome is fine for people that are OK with default settings. For anyone that needs more, Gnome just doesn't suffice.

I currently run Budgie Desktop (specifically Budgie Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). IIRC, it's based on Gnome (not sure which version) - but it doesn't feel like it.

Maybe this isn't what you like - but to me, it's the closest I've come to having a "MacOS"-like interface on my Linux desktop.

I've heard a lot of grief people have on MacOS (maybe it's just the people I hang around with?) - but I honestly like it, for the most part. It has its quirks, true. But overall, Apple did a helluva job in making it "just work".

Ubuntu Budgie seems to come closest to that experience, without the Apple tax (ie - the hardware - stuff is expensive).

I have long stayed away from KDE because it used to require better hardware than Gnome, which requires better hardware than Xfce. I haven't even kept up with KDE's performance and hardware usage on older systems. Does it still need better hardware compared to Gnome (for a machine that's, say more than a few years old)?

I am running KDE full time off of a 6 year-old laptop featureing an i54xxu and an integrated HD4400. I'd say anything older and not intelish might be problematic but I have no problems running all the bells and whistles of those sweet animations and wobbly windows.

Gnome still leaks and Nautilus is still an old asthmatic tractor though. Nautilus is 50% of the reasons why I switched to kubuntu and I still keep on using awesome-wm when sysadmining. edit: Now that I think about it I also upgraded to an SSD some months after switching to KDE so maybe gnome is way snappier on that same machine and I wouldn't feel the same about it.

Frankly, I seem to remember the KDE harware thing is like 15 years old.

I've had an impression that the slow computer I've used worked better by default playing videos in Kubuntu than either Lubuntu or Xubuntu. If some internet sites are to be believed, something something compositors video players hardware acceleration whatever:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=212094

And all that problems still appear strange to me, as the computer is not too old, it just has slower processor, whereas I've had better experience playing videos on the notebook bought in 2000, in Windows XP (using open source mplayer!)

And using some of the "lighter" editions apparently doesn't mean "plays better" just... something (as some don't even have an official goal anymore to be actually better on older hardware).

Maybe someone here can explain what is the best way to play videos on slower (from a perspective of the developers who probably have 500 W graphic cards, because "who doesn't"?) machines. I have, more or less, accepted that I still can't expect that from Linuxes:

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/619/

Just one data point but compare the RAM usages in this comparison: http://archive.fo/eB8If

I think I read somewhere that kde has improved even more since tha.

> rules for auto color change top bars

Is this specific to KDE? This sounds like a really nice feature for when I’ve got tons of windows floating around. I’m a big fan of obvious tells so you can get your bearings at a glance.

KDE was always brilliant in functionality, but unprofessional looking. I've settled on Mate, but it could use some more KDE-style functionality.

What distro do you use for kde5?

Funny, I'm thinking the opposite about Gnome. That, much thanks to Canonical, it is finally getting much needed optimizations for better performance. I'd agree more with you 3-4 years ago than today. I'm also happy they finally stopped holding back Nautilus just because of the desktop icons... They should have just used a Gnome extension like now for that all along. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the performance of Ubuntu 19.04 and have enjoyed working with it since the beta. With the OpenWeather and Dash to Dock extensions, I find myself pretty much set with a nice looking desktop.

It's nice that you give credit liberally, but most of the performance work you mention was done by Endless and Red Hat desktop teams.

Most if this reads more like a "What new in Gnome". Well I don't like Gnome. If I don't plan on using Gnome, it because very hard to tell if I can use most of the new Ubuntu feature, or if they are essentially Gnome features.

I can understand that GNOME wanted to migrate off of C for the non-core things, so they cut down features. Now if you need something you can write a plugin in JS.

It has advantages, and of course disadvantages too. (The expressiveness of the plugin API is naturally lacking compared to possibilities of built-in features, but with time that can/will change.)

Right now the main disadvantage is that GNOME Shell is single-threaded, and handles not only those JS extensions, but also essential tasks like window compositing. This means that a misbehaving extension can freeze the whole desktop, which is especially bad on Wayland where that includes the mouse cursor and input processing.

I still prefer GNOME for the rest of its UX, but if you ask me, the next rewrite can't happen too soon.

Edit: I noticed that some of the new improvements seem to be addressing just this, so what I'm saying may be out of date in regards to the latest version.

From a UX perspective I haven't really seen much of an issue with KDE/Gnome in the past 15-20 years. The problem to me has been consistency (this app uses GTK so it behaves like this or you have to install it this way because it uses apt instead of rpm), administration, and support for apps/games you want to run. The few dealbreakers (GPU, Wifi, trackpad, power management support) weren't related to "the desktop" outside of multi-monitor or hidpi support. I had a few non-technical people use Linux in the early 2000s and loved it. My public library at the time was running Linux for their Book Catalog (on much older hardware than Windows would support). In general Linux Desktops were all reimplementations of Window's UI concepts (Desktop, Launcher Menu, Task Bar, Status Bar, etc).

It seems like Gnome's game plan was to intentionally remove a bunch of stuff for the sake of simplification. Then Linux Desktops actually started innovating (macOS style app launcher, fast search to launch, ditching status bar and desktop). Windows seems to have made their own UX missteps as well.

I love modern KDE. I've been running Kubuntu for the last year or so and just adore it.

Do you have specific examples?

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