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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE

Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday.

Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor players in the space. Those tend to end up incomplete and ill-performing, and there are already lots of them. I hope the existing ones thrive, but I don't think having more f them would do much good.

But anything as good as the big two, but with a different focus? Let's see it!

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If this DE has low resource usage and working freedesktop screensaver protocol implementation and idleness implementation but doesn't force me on their toolbar and window manage I'll take it immediately.

Lxqt is the closest to allowing that because it wraps standard tools when possible, but this wrapping of standard tools also means that those tools don't really work.

For example, I use slock for screenlocking, but there is actually no working third party freedesktop screensaver implementation that doesn't tie you into their DE.

Xsecurelock seems to have hacks for it, but it can't even do something as simple as just showing an image without breaking with the wrong window compositor.

>more DEs is fine and good

I tend to disagree here. I recently switched back to MacOS after years of running both. The DEs on Linux are just one generation behind. Things have gotten better, but macOS and to an extend Windows are ahead.

Linux DEs would be well advised to onboard more graphics and UI experts to make them more user-friendly and stable. Desktop metaphors have more or less stabilized and it's counter-productive to have 5 takes on the Linux-side alone.

> user-friendly

The entire problem starts and ends with this term. It is ambiguous, personal, localized, fluid and case-dependent.

What is friendly to one user, is insulting to another. What is friendly to me at 10:00 in the morning is frustrating when I have a presentation in two minutes. What is friendly to an American pensioned welder, is insulting to an Iranian accountant.

It's interesting how people want so different things. I can't stand windows for 5 minutes before it's user interface starts to really annoy me. And mac looks great but all the Linux technology underneath is from the Stone Age.

Just to explain why I love Linux so much - when I'm in Gnome, I'm not bothered by any alerts or notifications or popups or sounds or ads or anything! It's a silent, stable, good looking desktop that runs my programs and doesn't get in my way at all. It's amazing! I truly love it.

If the majority of companies that rely on Linux use it as a server for some kind of service(s), desktop environments or even graphics are not a priority. That's not to say that such use-cases don't exist. But the focus is, generally, not on outshining another OS or platform through the user interface or graphics.

I don't disagree, which is why I use KDE, as it is trivial to get it to look and behave like macOS and do so stably. Probably why many KDE distro that aren't following KDE's defaults use it too (Garuda Linux, XeroLinux, FerenOS)

I think Linux DEs are fine, it's just that the default config / on-boarding rarely asks what the user wants and what they need.

More distro/DEs need to incorporate UX/Desktop Layout Switcher, like Ubuntu Budgie, Zorin OS (Gnome, XFCE), Manjaro (Gnome, there are plans to do KDE as well in the forum?), and FerenOS. It'll solve the issues of personal preference in UX, as people could just one-click choose what feels/looks the best for them.

I personally don't mind taking a few hours setting up the UX I want with Fedora KDE, but I doubt most others do.

A DE is pointless without the apps that run on Linux.

And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc.

UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive.

> And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc.

Ideally, that's what the freedesktop.org specifications help with. You build against the specs and interfaces, and the code should work across DEs that implement specs from freedesktop.org. In my (albeit limited) experience of writing against freedesktop.org specs, it works pretty well.

> UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive.

Very few developers actually attempt to do this, on any platform— virtually none, as far as I can tell. It's slightly more common on macOS for developers to actually try to emulate or reuse the design language and look-and-feel of the base system. But on every platform, it's extremely common for GUI apps to just throw the design language and other details of platforms they run on completely out the window. It's the M.O. for the most popular cross-platform toolkit right now (Electron). For every app that maintains multiple UIs, there are at least ten that do that, maybe a hundred!

Besides, COSMIC doesn't use a new graphical toolkit. It uses GTK+, just like GNOME.

A lot of developers are very concerned about UI/UX. Linux just makes it impossible for them to do so.

But even without them caring for UI/UX, the proliferation of DEs, even with common UI toolkits in the Linux world means they spend a lot of time and energy working on bugs that are not true bugs but are artifacts of a UI theme that the developer did not consider while developing their app.

For example, it's almost certain that the unified tooltip in COSMIC will lead to bugs complaining about how users are unable to drag the window by clicking on the chrome. In this case it would be fairly easy for a dev to close the bug because this is such a prominent and obvious difference in COSMIC. But there will certainly be other UI differences that will not be as easy to pin down to being the result of COSMIC's UI changes, and will not be as easy for devs to close.

This is only true if they use another toolkit. If they choose GTK or Qt it's fine.

Edit: it's GTK so no problem

Many app developers have complained that even within Gnome, apps developed using GTK get a very high number of bugs that are caused by unique customizations that the user may have installed and no one else does. These bugs, despite being significant in number, consume an even more outsized amount of resources and energy because they are very difficult to reproduce.

System76 is only adding to that mess.

"Significant in number" is a funny way of writing statistically insignificant.

I think devs can use Gtk if they're developing for Linux or don't mind using pyGtk for multi-platform, use Qt or Flutter otherwise if they're going multi-platform, make sure everything follows freedesktop specifications, and then just pack it to Flatpak, test it for Gnome and KDE... then just tell everyone whose DE doesn't support it to just deal with it.

Heck, many apps are web-based and uses electron anyways, and those are generally multiplatform anyways.

I think if whatever app they make/port worrks via Flatpak, it should work on all/most modern distro.

> more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded.

Or if they're interoperable. For instance, icewm doesn't have a screensaver of its own, but it just uses xscreensaver so it's fine.

Yeah a new DE would be welcome. I hope this will be less opinionated and barebones than gnome. That just needs too many add-ons to be useful.

I use KDE now which does provide a lot of choice but I'd love something that has tiling built in. And yeah I know there's add-ons for KDE that do that :)

Any recommendations for good tiling managers for KDE?

There is krohnkite but I recently read development was halted and there was a new more favourable one. I've bookmarked it somewhere but I'll check!

Edit: this is the one: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

There's also kwin-tiling https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

Not sure which is best tbh. I have yet to try them

You can also use i3wm as tiling window manager. It replaces KDE‘s default window manager. I had good experiences with that.

Guide: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage...

True but you lose a lot of integration that is really nice to have. This why I never chose this option even though I use i3 on more barebones systems.

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