I haven't touched KDE in maybe 15 years. I just always defaulted to Gnome when I'm on Linux desktop. But this looks more macOS like. Just curious, is there any reason I should try KDE today?
From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
Oblivious if you are fine with GNOME, this is also fine. We have some different vision on how a open source desktop should look and behave but we do share a dream to someday be a good replacement for Windows for a large part of the population (not nerds).
The overwhelming majority of the people I know who use KDE also try to not change too much from the default settings, but the settings we change are all different.
It's similar with the bells and whistles in Plasma; I probably use a single-digit percentage of them, but they are probably different set from what other users use. I am grateful for those who maintain these features, because I'm sure both that developing would be easier with fewer features and there is probably nobody who uses all of them.
For example, I hate having to jump through hoops to disable tabs in Firefox. Which means using a janky extensions that usually is able to split the tab into a new window. Doesn't always work. I also have to go and manually tweak the browser chrome to hide the tab bar.
The way I see it, tabs and whatnot are a window manager's job. I don't want to have several levels of window management, each being handled differently by a separate app.
If you want to provide tabs, go ahead, but please don't force them on me and let me disable them. I'm OK with having to modify some obscure config file if you insist on removing preferences from your UI. Heck, if I could compile firefox with a special feature flag, that would still be better than the current situation.
Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
But I'm a tab user, and would like to hear about other approaches.
Yes, when there are many tabs open, at some point, I can't distinguish them easily anymore, especially on the laptop. But the same happens with tabs. At least I can scroll my mouse wheel to change between them, which didn't use to work with tabs.
My coping mechanism is saving the tabs I want to keep for later as bookmarks. Getting back to them has the same kind of probability as when I used to use tabs. But the win of this approach is that I don't have open webpages hanging around eating resources.
I've also found that there are basically two ways I use my computer:
1. I'm just randomly browsing, and I am going to open a zillion tabs (say while browsing HN) but then I'll read them and close them sequentially. No jumping from one to another, so the tabs being small is not an issue.
2. Having several windows open that I all need while working. In this case, I'll set them up in some tiling setup, usually an editor / terminal where I work on one side of the screen, and multiple browser windows in tabbed mode on the other. I then jump back and forth between the two sides. If I need to access a specific browser window that's not visible and there are too many open to know where to click (which does happen, but rarely) I'll just use the jump to window function of rofi in fzf mode where I type in a part of its name and press enter. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. Since i3 doesn't have an included "go back to previous window", I had to hack this on my own [0]. This could also be implemented by using window marks, though I've never tried that.
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[0] https://github.com/vladvasiliu/i3helper
Other alternatives exist, but I thought it was fun to build my own.
Ah right, I remember reading that and noting that they always seem to playing catch up with KDE Plasma’s features. I doubt I have this update yes, but someday my work’s IT will thrust it upon us.
I was just very curious and was hoping that someone like yourself responded to my question. You have peeked my interest and I will try and play with KDE in the near future. Thanks!
This is one of the thing that (surprisingly, to me) I miss on other operating systems. Yakuake manages to be featureful, stay out of my way, and integrate perfectly with the default terminal emulator for my environment all at the same time.
I'd come to take the availability of such a dropdown terminal for granted on Linux, but it turns out that most dropdown terminal solutions are quite clunky, slow, or not well integrated compared to good ol' Yakuake.
If there are any Yakuake or Konsole contributors browsing the thread: thank you for your work!
But this week I decided to try out the latest KDE plasma release on Debian testing and it's all going quite well so far. I love having the ability to configure things how _I_ want them to be, while adhering to a more traditional desktop experience.
The easiest way to try out the latest KDE release is to download Neon (https://neon.kde.org), flash it to a thumb drive, and boot it up.
The DE is a personal preference thing. It's nobody's job to convince you to try anything.
It's up to you to decide to try it if you're curious.
Since you haven't tried KDE in 15 years, you've probably missed a lot.
There are also countless KDE Reviews online and on YouTube.
KDE has been a joy and is now my DE of choice.
These days I prefer KDE, and I accept quirky behavior like losing a widget panel from external monitor 1 if you unplug external monitor 2, because I know it will come back after reboot/relogin. In exchange for that, I get different wallpapers for each monitor, custom/extra panels, several alternatives for application menus and taskbars, lots of widgets, and a few small QOL perks I can't remember right now.
If KDE becomes too quirky, I can always go back to Gnome, but right now I'm happy with KDE.
Sure, if you always want each application to be full-screen. Otherwise you can't get anything done.
Gnome these days is the my-way-or-the-highway kind of uncle.
They're actively hostile to user theming, for example, and keep removing features simply because they don't think users need them, like desktop icons.
Their file browser is horrible to use. Their image viewer is anaemic.
They keep finding new ways to dumb their applications down, to make things less "confusing" for the users, I suppose.
They adopted MacOS-style headerbars, but ignored Apple's solution to the lack of functionality that brings ~ their Menu Bar.
More info:
https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...