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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree here.

Linux is great on laptops. A bug can happen anywhere. And macOS is way too locked down for many people. Of course Linux is great for servers too but why stop there? I really love KDE as a desktop. It's just more free and configurable than either Windows or Mac. I don't like being stuck with the choices made by the developer. For this reason I don't use gnome either but it's good that it exists for those who do subscribe to the opinionated software concept. That's the biggest strength of Linux. It can be whatever you want it to be.

PS using FreeBSD as my daily driver desktop myself :) But not on a laptop but on a NUC.

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I have to agree with you.

Linux on laptops is great, especially ThinkPad's and machines older than a a few generations. I just started using gnome after being a loyal xfce user for years and it's refreshing with all it's integration (with lots of extensions for customization).

If you think gnome is good, wait till you see KDE

I really like KDE, but there's always something that annoys me enough I move away. I try most new major releases (GNOME too), then jump back to XFCE.

For example, does it use the same keyring as the rest of the applications yet? Does the WiFi menu still select an entry different than the one you click?

Well, if you use gnome/GTK apps, of course it uses gnome-keyring.

If you use Qt apps, it will use KDE's keyring. This is simply caused by the lack of standardisation in such elements of Linux desktop environments.

I tend to use mostly Qt apps, because they look the most 'native' on KDE and have the best integration. They also have the same philosophy (the more user choice and settings the better) which I subscribe to, so I naturally gravitate towards them.

And no the wifi applet always worked correctly for me (I don't use wifi on my main desktop but on laptops it works fine for me)

There's also things I don't like with KDE but there's almost always an option to change it. Whereas with Gnome there is almost never any such option, it could be there is an extension that does it but having too many extensions tends to drag you into a quagmire of version dependencies making it really hard to upgrade.

The one thing I really don't like about KWin is that the virtual desktops of each display can't be switched independently like with i3 for example. They're all stuck together. But this is a minor inconvenience compared to all the things I dislike about Gnome.

Of course YMMV and that is why we have Linux <3

FTR, kwallet implements the FDO Secrets API so gnome apps should be able to use it as well unless they somehow hardcode GKR.

This wasn't true last time I checked, but it looks like it was a fairly recent merge.

https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kwallet/-/merge_requests/1...

Consider me excited.

Yeah after they see KDE they'll really think gnome is good.

What's so bad about KDE?

I think both Gnome and KDE are pretty good but Gnome's design decisions and philosophy don't match my preferences.

> Of course Linux is great for servers too but why stop there?

UNIX philosophy - do one thing and do it right?:)

That philosophy pertained to userspace tools, not the OS as a whole. And the waters have been muddied a lot (think systemd which does a lot of things and is still embraced for servers and desktop alike).

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