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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech communities.

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

> there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

Don't know that I agree there.

I actually really like GNOME's workflow on laptop, especially with Pop OS's extensions.

I disliked KDE 3 & 4, however KDE 5 is great. Plasma Desktop is impressive and pleasant to use.

Yep. I’ve been a long time GNOME user and I switched to KDE Plasma when I upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I don’t think I’m looking back.

In the early-2000s like many other people I was attracted to the Crystal[1] theme/icon pack, but it did not take long for it to start looking tacky to me. I feel like KDE never really abandoned this kind of look-and-feel until Plasma was released, which is very clean and pleasant. It has discarded cartoon-ish icons and has sharper lines and colours which are nicer to look at. I am a big fan!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everaldo_Coelho#Crystal

My personal opinion is that KDE is less polished, more bloated (in terms of features and options), and slower than GNOME.

Did you try it recently? That was also the stigma of KDE 4.x. 5 is snappy and bloated is probably the wrong word to featureful. I just can't stand gnome exactly due to the opposite: bare bones, missing features, lack of integration and mainly lack of standardized ux.

Add that Gnome it's painful slow and uses more resources that KDE.

Plasma Desktop uses about the same amount of resources as XFCE.

> more bloated (in terms of features and options)

that might be subjectively correct to a lot of people, but I find that they are usually set to sane defaults and a lot is disabled by default. Also, I would like to emphasis that the choice of disto kinda matters here as they sometimes change defaults.

I think this may have been true in the past, but KDE 5 is nowhere near as bloated as KDE once was. (And they've also made huge strides in consistency and a sane UI experience.)

I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and, after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for its money, which was surprising.

Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because it's a bit too configurable. I'm always afraid of getting asked for help because of someone accidentally messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but that "you can configure everything" core will always probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...

If you use it with every basic extension, like Kubuntu's default setup, then it's really bloated (Akonadi and MySQL is a dependency for KMail), but thankfully it's highly modular and enough fast for my taste.

I’ve not used Kubuntu in years but there was a time when it was consistently running 50% slower than every other KDE orientated distro (and some distros that were DE agnostic too).

I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people’s perception of KDE.

Akonadi supports at least four DB engines. To combat bloat, select the SQLite dependency instead of MariaDB/MySQL.

I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi, but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky notes and feed reader without it.

Good joke.

That was my opinion as well until about 4 month ago when I actually seriously tried an up to date KDE for the first time in years. Turns out I was completely wrong.

> KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

I have nothing against KDE, but come on. Many of us really do prefer GNOME despite its perceived deficiencies. This is just a matter of personal preference.

Nothing against options, but having distros with a default on Gnome just seems wrong, defaults are supposed to be good and complete.

Wish somebody would tell that to the Emacs maintainers.

I'll never understand this. It's like people who swear by xfce. Both are borderline unusable to me, but gnome certainly isn't in that category, despite its bugs.

Which feature(s) exactly do you miss on XFCE that makes it unusable in comparision to GNOME?

Didn't mean to pick on xfce, I haven't used it in a couple years to be fair. But when I did, it just didn't fit my workflow that well. For example, I'm used to pressing command+space and getting system-wide search for all files and apps. This is basically the default behavior on gnome, I just needed to remap the shortcut. I also often move desktops and the "activities" view makes that really simple.

Xfce is stable, lightning fast, and best of all, its users never have to learn a new interface layout every other year.

I find KDE to be pretty ugly.

For instance, margins and paddings seem to be all over the place [1]. At least Gnome gets that part right.

[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Notifications

If you don't like the defaults, there are thousands of 3rd party themes that are directly listed and installable from KDE's theme preference pane.

Do any of them solve the problem?

No.

That page looks kinda out dated, and "contains some ideas how to improve the Plasma notification system". So a lot of that is mocks and not real screenshots.

Yes, this page is full of mockups created years ago.

Agreed. It occupies some weird uncanny valley of design that is hard to pin point.

Absolutely. It feels like they're getting there (VDG is working on it and shown some results), but they're just a few years away.

... it has been feeling like that for the few years I've been following it.

"This page assumes the status quo as of Plasma 5.7". Plasma is now on version 5.20 so the page you linked has some pretty old examples. The KDE folks are working pretty diligently to clean stuff like this up as they find it. Nate Graham's weekly blog documents this and other updates to the project.

https://pointieststick.com/

I personally like KDE and it's Breeze Dark theme a lot.

Small half-joke: Only two words into the front page post I already hit a UX issue! (and a UI inconsistency)

> This week (KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten...)

I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to check on the date, to get an idea of when was "this week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well :-)

Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main page) does indeed change the UI and it now happens to show the date.

Loved the irony...

This all shows that even for people dedicated to it, getting UI/UX right is hard.

Nate is not a web developer and is just using a default wordpress theme.

Totally understandable. The theme developer, however, could have strived for a bit more consistency on its default settings...

KDE, to me, looks like someone designed it to be a touch interface.

Everything is so LARGE and padding between elements is YUGE. The tech is cool and everything seems to work fine, but something about the UI just grates me.

... Did you misspell GNOME here?

Also, KDE is the most customizable DE of them all, and it has the most powerful features of them all (by far). Given that, all these "but it looks kinda bad!" comments sound insane. It's like choosing a push mower over a motorized because you like the finish on the handle.

>KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

IMO, one aspect where Gnome excels is its tight integration of alternative input methods. I remember it being controversial that Gnome blessed ibus over alternative engines, but as a result, setting up CJK input is simple and foolproof. Although I prefer KDE in every other way, I have never managed to get ibus working correctly in that environment.

CJK input magically working easily and reliably in Gnome is the pretty much the only reason I use it over KDE. And setting it up doesn't require following a wiki, using the commandline and/or having to edit obscure config files or messing around with weird GUI settings apps.

I have nothing against KDE by any means (I love it, and also really appreciate their initatives like KDEnlive, etc.), but I don't think I've ever gotten Japanese/Chinese input to work in it before. Maybe once, but then I gave up on finding a sane way to easily cycle between the different input types (eg, WinKey+Space).

I remember finding what worked was quite of a hassle in KDE, but once I chose fcitx over ibus I've had little issues with CJK input.

I think that's very much personal preference. I tried KDE a few months ago and I couldn't stick with it; it is slower than Gnome in a lot of ways, it's (to my eyes) much more cluttered, and has lags at annoying places. For example, I tend to hit the windows key and start typing to launch things, but under KDE there's enough lag before the menu opens that it doesn't catch my first few keypresses.

This. I get periodically frustrated with Gnome and give KDE a go and always end up going back to Gnome within a couple of weeks. I want to like it, I want it to work but Gnome (on my setup) is more responsive and that is more important than all of the other deficiencies of Gnome.

I'm on a 3 year old laptop, and I tried several times to get a keystroke to be dropped after I hit the windows key and I couldn't get it to happen.

I use windows-key and start typing to launch things all the time, and after reading your comment at first I thought I might have developed a habit to pause, but nope. I wonder what the difference is.

My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them. Maybe pro gamers can manage to keep the cursor in every time, but for me I often take 2 or 3 tries to click on something.

> My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them.

This looks like a bug or you changed the default setting, just to be sure in System Setting -> Window Management -> Window Behavior -> is the Window Activation Policy set to click to focus?

Ohhhhh. Of course I changed it to focus follows mouse because that's the One True Way(tm) of managing window focus. So I'm guessing that when the popup loses focus, it disappears. Thanks for solving that mystery. I'll ponder whether it's worth it to make the disappearing have a lag, conditional on the window activation policy.

Stay tuned - it seems KDE's home menu will get a major overhaul.

"This week Plasma also saw a new Kickoff menu that is a complete rewrite, which is also coming with Plasma 5.21. There have also been many bug fixes, performance improvements, and other ongoing UI refinements."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-KWin...

KDE or MATE, really.

The default DE should be "sane and boring". I think the one that best fits this description at the moment is MATE.

Elementary is also working on a way to default most apps to a better file picker:

https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/gs86hj/thumbn...

https://medium.com/elementaryos/a-new-native-file-chooser-19...

I was happy KDE user for very long time - first 3.x, then 4 (even with all those glitches and bugs at the very beginning). Then I had 7-8 years break off Linux and last year decided to install it on my new desktop machine.

Went with Plasma first - did not go well. I simply cannot get comfortable with it and general look and feel is not working for me (I prefer defaults and I avoid much tweaking and any 3rd party customization). I settled on Cinnamon, but it was close tie with GNOME which was actually quite refreshing experience for me.

So, to each his own, but I just do not see KDE as "the sanest" default.

3.x/4.x was the golden age for KDE. I never felt home with Plasma.

I've never understood why so many distros make gnome the default DE. There are much better and friendly ones, some of them forks and some written from scratch.

> https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

> Debunking: lInUx Is JuSt A kErNeL

Ah yes, countering a meme with another meme. Good one.

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