Revisiting KDE
jackevansevo.github.io
jackevansevo.github.io
I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.
Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too.
(define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q") noremap <Space> @q
Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one.
I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.
Great when you want to refactor a name that's used both as a variable and a CONSTANT in one go.
Kubuntu worked flawlessly for 6 years on my laptop (and it's still going).
No idea why that's the case.
Making it less visible would give the impression that EU funds are unappreciated and are allowed to go to waste.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/027705
The 11.5 million EUR funding is the primary driver behind KDE‘s semantic desktop and the infamous file indexer.
Start date 01. January 2006
End date 31. December 2008What are the reasons to use KDE over Gnome, aside from that Android phone integration?
Server-side window decorations
Developers that don't tell you to decide if you want to be a Gnome application or a Linux application
Exposed options make computing discovery possible.
Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system.
This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".
So VERY much this. I don't want an "experience" that's curated and chosen for me. I want to decide for myself how my desktop is going to look, feel, and work. And that is why I use KDE over Gnome, etc. KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.
You make it sound like Gnome assumes you're an "idiot who needs all the options to be hidden away".
You couldn't be more wrong. Gnome assumes you're an normal "idiot", and then removes the options altogether.
They aren't hidden, they're gone.
Oh, KDE is the environment of Steam Deck, in case people forgot about it!
So in reality, potentially, KDE is already more widespread than Gnome
Just asking, don't want to sound like it's a good thing to me: they started dumbing down the interface long time ago (between GTK2 and 3 if memory serves), and now they ruined it completely with the new design.
I understand that GNOME has other goals than I do for my machine, but it's basically the antithesis of the reasons I choose to run Linux in the first place. I think it being the de facto "standard" Linux desktop environment is really hurting the ecosystem.
https://www.osnews.com/story/7344/opinion-why-users-blame-th...
Also, if I remember correctly, the editable path bar was removed in Nautilus and Gnome file picker somewhere around that time.
Have you read KDE's new Human Interface Guidelines? Because that is exactly what they are doing, now.
Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.
I know how to do that! --- Make things easier to learn by reusing design patterns from other applications. Other applications that use good design are a precedent to follow.
Do the heavy lifting for me --- Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software.
Have you actually used KDE? The amount of settings in the "system settings" application is almost overwhelming; it is definitely not a "dumbed-down" experience. The thing you're quoting is just asking devs to keep things a little more focused, not to remove options altogether ("Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.")
Just think a little bit more about this in the context of your example. A user who isn't a Linux enthusiast or sysadmin isn't going to know anything about what /usr/share or /var/lib, etc is supposed to be. And a user who knows everything about that isn't going to need a fancy file manager to perform sysadmin tasks on those folders! They know how to do everything from the command line already.
I can see it being overwhelming for someone used to an iPhone (or Gnome :p), but the KDE approach seems to be to hide advanced options/GUI by default if needed, but make enabling them a simple check box that doesn't suddenly disappear one day.
When Dolphin first came out, it was arguably a 'dumbed down' version of Konqueror, which has even more features and also supported web browsing.
But over time, it became clear that Dolphin did a great job of organizing and simplifying Conqueror's file management functionality without losing power in any way that mattered.
I hope that kind of change is what the new KDE HIG is going for. If so, I think KDE is going to be better than ever.
> Note
> KDE encourages developing and designing for customization, while providing good default settings.
Stupidity is contagious. Some five years ago i had to use Gmail for work and someone from Google had the great idea to use a big "Gmail" icon which did nothing but used around 1/5 of the screen.
Or you go to a website to fill a form (name, address, etc) and there are exactly 3 text inputs on the screen, the rest being unused space.
No.
Because that is exactly what they are doing, now.
That is unfortunate. I'd hate to have to move off of KDE. It's been great up to this point.
(For myself I have cobbled together something that looks roughly like Windows 95 did decades ago, but doing that for others comes with its own problems, so not forcing that on anyone.)
Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.
Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software. [0]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUSE_Linux,_KDE_3_De...
I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.
I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot.
The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
WinAmp -> X11Amp -> XMMS -> Amarok ... -> Clementine -> Strawberry, if you want a current player that looks like Amarok 1.4.
So Gnome devs, seeing the vast majority of bug reports that developers of first and third party apps received were a result of the large number of configurations and extensions and customizations have decided to rein it back.
Doing so means Gnome developers can start with a smaller footprint which they will now expand to add customizations back in a supported manner.
It’s a different approach. The good thing is that with Linux different groups can try different approaches and users can switch relatively painlessly between them.
So far, having gotten a lot more responsibilities with growing older, I’ve found that letting Gnome pick sensible defaults, etc, and not requiring me to spend a lot of time and mental energy configuring stuff has meant that Gnome has been the most productive general use Desktop in my personal life (i3 for work life…).
In comparison, even though there are a lot of bugs in KDE, they will eventually be fixed, given that most customisations are first party.
Great! Use KDE!
I, unfortunately, have a limited amount of time and prefer not waiting for those bugs to eventually be resolved. So I prefer using Gnome, where the limited flexibility is not a problem for me, and the far more consistent and stable Gnome environment is extremely valuable!
So I use Gnome.
That's the great part about Linux.
And I can somehow manage to do that without suggesting that KDE developers need to stop treating their users like a bunch of kids with no jobs living in their mother's basements.
Many in the Linux community seem incapable of doing that second thing, which is the crappy part about Linux.
I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments.
As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc.
It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is that there was experimentation.
Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are:
- 90's-like UX - terminal focused setups (tiling windows managers, etc) - dumbed down tablet-like experience.
Even if you managed to discover something marginally better but radically different, it probably wouldn't catch on because the status quo gets the job done and everybody already understands it. Re-learning how to drive because your car came with a joystick instead of a steering wheel isn't appealing to most people who view their car as a means to an end.
(Also, I don't think there's an intrinsic connection between tiling window managers and terminal-focused setups. The apparent correlation between the two is a coincidence; the sort of people who choose one also often choose the other. GUI file managers and the like work fine under tiling window managers.)
Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features and locking down things.
And more generally, there is no gurantee that the new thing is better than the old one.
Fair enough, but innovation should not necessarily be more complex. See pinch-to-zoom in the first iPhone as an example of a groundbreaking addition that makes things simpler.
All kinds of things like that have been added to desktop environments. Things like hot corners to "Exposé" the windows or show all your virtual desktops, gestures for minimizing all your windows or flipping through them. Dragging windows such that they snap into certain geometries for an assisted manual sort of tiling. Despite all these additions, things which Windows 95 didn't have, the typical desktop environment would still seem reasonably familiar to a time-traveling Windows 95 user because the primary input devices are still keyboard and mouse and therefore desktop environments all work the same way, broadly speaking.
There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006
I think video games are in this same space. Rarely does a game actually innovate or come up with something truly novel anymore. Ultima Online was the most amazing thing I ever saw at the time, but now that I’ve seen a million different MMOs the entire genre feels stale. Have fighting games really advanced much from either a Street Fighter type, Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs Capcom or Smash Brothers style? What about action adventure - is God of War Ragnarok innovating anything? It doesn’t feel that different than playing any number of other games, just maybe more polished. Uncharted is just another take on Tomb Raider at the end of the day. Same thing with movies or television. There just isn’t that much new ground to break.
I've friends and family who always ask me this. My partner tried Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken, and writing in Chinese (her native language) was simply not feasible.
I tried live media of a few random distros, but basic things were always broken (e.g.: touchpad scrolling didn't work, things like that).
> Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken
That sucks. I can say with confidence that this is not the case on openSUSE with KDE. I have fcitx5, fcitx5-chinese-addons and a few other relevant packages installed and it works fine.
OpenSUSE used X11 by default (rather than Wayland), and configuring scaling on X11 has never fully worked for me, so I didn't want to sink time into that. It didn't seem that Wayland was an option.
I admit I didn't have a huge amount of patience or put a lot of time into OpenSUSE; after wasting a lot of time into trying to make input work on Fedora [and failing], we basically went through multiple distros in a weekend and quickly moved on whenever one had obvious issues rather than try and figure out if it was possible to tinker around it.
Do you know if X11 is still the default or Wayland if is well supported? Or any other advise for this scenario?
As for Chinese input, fcitx + google pinyin worked just fine on Manjaro KDE for me. Word prediction isn't very good but it's generally usable. For more details see here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fcitx
System Settings → Hardware → Display and Monitor → Display Configuration → Global scale [125%]
System Settings → Appearance → Fonts → Adjust All Fonts… and raise the size to 16pt.
GNOME goes a little bit overboard sometimes with the simplification but it just feels so much cleaner out of the box.
Instead they have this bland Windows 10 flat look that has no personality.
The familiar Windows 98 gray had saturation, constrast and even a touch if colour (the gray tends a bit towards the red)
The modern KDE look is a diluted flat gray/desaturated cerulean blue which I really do not like. So uninspired, cold, clinical, corporate, clashing with that friendly look they want KDE to represent. It is uncanny, and while the GNOME design team loves to change stuff just for the sake of it, they have more taste and eye that whoever runs the design team at KDE.
Can we have a desktop that doesn't look like a poster that's been left in the sun for too long? Can we have contrast back and more colours than just light gray and light blue?
The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.
Sure, it wasn’t pretty the way modern UIs are pretty, but users don’t need pretty.
Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software.
Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.
Purity is not everything. Usability is.
KDE is architectured such that components can be embedded everywhere (kparts), it's one of its strength and it's also sound. Its own kind or purity.
Also Qt is really good at tabs and pane, I'm happy my WM doesn't concern itself with the content of my windows.
Again, and this time less sarcastically, if embedding is the goal, why can't I embed an email client and only the terminal is an approved extension? Seems awfully limiting.
I've found PCManFM to be just as performant as Dolphin with very large (100k+ file) directories. I stopped using Dolphin because Dolphin can't sort a directory of symlinks correctly (it uses the dates of the target files, rather than the dates of the symlinks, with no apparent way to configure this.)
Dolphin is fast, but I wouldn't call it unique in that regard.
Thunar was fast and powerful as well, and IMHO more intuitive than Dolphin. Unfortunately, it was ruined for me when Xfce adopted Gtk 3.
Before that was ROX Filer, perhaps the fastest I've used. I don't know if it's still maintained.
I think PCMan File Manager (from LXQt) might qualify as well.
Most file managers slow down terribly/crash when asked to display such a directory. Windows can't do it. Gnome can't do it. Dolphin doesn't even break a sweat. It's impressive.
I bet it's technically because Dolphin is using the Qt List View, which lazy-loads its contents instead of being pre-filled with the entire list. At least that's what it feels like.
The others are indeed minimalist. My point was mainly about speed. A lightweight file manager is always a key consideration when I try a new desktop environment.
It will hang and become unresponsive over slow connections. If you try to access a phone filesystem (through KDEConnect) the whole thing will lockup for a minute or two - to the point where you need to force-kill Dolphin to close it (and no visual feedback on what's going on)
I've also had issues with its SSH remote-directory access. Generally the whole thing often goes into these unresponsive lock states as the a lot of operations aren't seemingly handled asynchronously (KDE on Jammy)
* KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works, when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same way.
* Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn't learning to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been personal for almost 50 years now.
* Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh. It's really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is still EXCELLENT)
Korganizer is being rewritten as Kalendar: https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kalendar/
Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new, additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really: current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she's especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.
There was good reason for them to release 4.0 when they did but nobody has figured out how to communicate releases only to those the release is for (this last isn't about KDE, humans in general have the issue)
> There was good reason for them to release 4.0
What were those reasons? To me, it really seems like they rushed it out because the release of Windows Vista and iOS made them feel like they had to release something to seem current and up to date.
If you don't ship it and some point it's gonna die.
That's just how their versioning scheme worked. The exact same thing happened with KDE 2.0 and KDE 3.0, but there was a different audience back then and 4.x took much longer to stabilize (as Qt3 -> Qt4 migration was much heaver that others, including Qt4 -> Qt5), so it became a bigger problem there.
It didn't happen with KDE 5.0 because there was no KDE 5.0 - now you have separate releases with separate versioning schemes of KDE Frameworks, Plasma Desktop and KDE Applications (and many apps were still based on KDELibs4 on initial release anyway and only gradually ported to KF5 afterwards).
The whole point of a distro is to make intelligent choices about the software to include in the distribution and package it up into a coherent system for users to use. Even moreso for distros that claim to focus on stability, where sticking with older versions of packages is the norm.
Is there any particular reason you've now migrated back to KDE?
What I particularly like about Xfce is that it's not very bloated. KDE always seemed quite bloated to me.
Sure, they are cheap, but if you ever try using Xfce (or similarly small DE) for a bit you will quickly realise just how slow other desktop environments (and Windows/OSX) are. Unnecessary animations is another one.
I've seen a similar argument defending "bloated" websites but then whenever a minimal website (e.g., a text-only site) is posted, people are astonished at how snappy it is.
That being said, I last used KDE over 10 years ago and computers have definitely become faster since then.
The only thing that slowed my system down was the file indexer (Baloo); some people have said better now, but I never re-enabled it.
My experience too. I liked KDE 3.5 so of course the devs had to fuck it up by chasing whatever is the user interface fashion of the day.
So I went with xfce which doesn't change much.
Maybe I will try out KDE again sometime.
They fucked up desktop icons. It'd be akin to purchasing a new walkman and the volume buttons don't immediately change volume up and down, instead they're more generalized buttons so you CAN change the volume up and down with them, just not by pushing them and nothing more.
Someone somewhere had an idea and an intent and I didn't give a shit and it represented a fundamental problem in their mental model of what they should be doing, so I left.
It's great that it eventually got salvaged but it should never have happened in the first place.
KDE 4.0 was famously broken at release. It's not even missing features that was the issue, it was highly unstable and not ready for release.
It makes so much sense, I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too.
Google does have an integration feature, for Chrome OS and Android. I suspect they just aren't invested in other platforms.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...
Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons, for instance, have this nice glassy look).
* https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.or...
KDE was buggy, unreliable and annoying when I tried it--admittedly some time ago. And the fetish for naming everything with an initial letter K: kindergarten stuff.
Too much effort on making every last thing customisable and not enough on making it work?
What really bothered me though was the UI. All these lines! Everything has an outline. Every UI element has a heavily highlighted outline. It feels super dated and cluttered. But the last time I daily-drove it, I thought "Hey I embrace the KDE life style. I am finally on the right side of the Linux Desktop according to HN and Reddit. Whenever people sh*t on Gnome, one of the big arguments is that you cannot customize it. So I just customize it, make it mine, lets go!"
Well surprisingly the other themes were almost all equally bad or caused inconsistencies. So I went further down the rabbit hole and installed Kvantum. I found a theme that I liked and happily used it for some time. Until I noticed that the theme altered the functionality of KMail. Namely, when tabbing away from KMail, it would select another Email. Super annoying when you want to keep an Email open in the background as a reference while e.g. doing something in your browser. I raised the issue with the Kvantum dev who redirected me to an issue with KDE. I don't remember all the details but it is an issue in KDE and for them it is a wontfix.
So, for me I basically had a similar experience to others here with Gnome. I try to make it work for me until I hit a wall where the maintainers tell me that my use case is not supported by the desktop. So I went back to Gnome. And you know what. I like Gnome. It works for me. It looks nice and is functional. However I don't want or need to convert other happy KDE'ers which is also not the point of my little comment. I don't want to dunk on KDE. It does a lot of cool things, but I just cannot stand the UI. Isn't it great to have choice?
Kalendar doesn't cut it? https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/
ie, I can complain about the potholes in the street without being the one filling them in.
Complaining about potholes is a great analogy. Repeatedly bringing up the pothole problem at the local swing dancing meetup isn't going to solve anything. You need to actually send your complaints to the transportation office. If they've heard about a particular pothole before then you don't need to bring it up again and keep sending them the same complaints. They already know about it. When they can't fix everything in time then the problem is either bad planning or lack of budget, and louder complaining definitely won't do anything about that.
> They have a right to express their opinion without needing said expression to have the goal of solving world hunger.
Just avoid calling someone to task for expressing an opinion that many others hold. They absolutely have the right to express what they don't like about Gnome.
If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars/todo-lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way.
Well, one can dream :)
You are allowed to run SQLite instead, install package `akonadi-server-sqlite` and edit `~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc`. Unfortunately, `akonadiconsole` does not offer this customisation in the GUI for some reason.
Oh, they didn’t fail per se. They just ran out of the 11.5 million EUR grant money.
I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU/Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart.
The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn't the case.
KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.
On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.
Every criticism of gnome I've seen is just so unspecific and vague that it seems more like group virtue signalling than anything else.
Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.
Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don't do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn't result in that.
Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don't see any "Small Icons" option, only the names of the themes).
None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best "mainstream" DE experience on Linux.
Anyhow, I searched for alternative switchers and found one called "MediumDefault" which works pretty well - medium size icons in the middle of the screen which is pretty much a "sane" setup.
If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.
Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu. Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I found KDE, and it’s my main dev environment now.
If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo phone, I think they’d stand a very good chance of going head-to-head with Apple.
There are the apps, and even with KDE MacOS is still more consistent-looking than Linux sadly.
Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro packing KDE badly? The few times I’ve tried Kubuntu (for example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too.
I’d also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with software rendering would work better (though if you’re going to do that then you’re probably better off with an older DE or WM).
As an aside, I’ve been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.
My comparison is Windows because after KDE 3.5 was dropped from ArchLinux I was just too fed up with all the issues at the time. Around that same time they also started messing with the sound subsystem (switching to PulsAudio) and I couldn't even play mp3's without stuttering under load (this worked fine before). I just needed something that worked and it's been like that ever since, I don't have the motivation anymore to get under the hood and fix things, I just want my computer to work.
I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.
I’ve not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal preference, though the leaner footprint was a big incentive.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day, but it’s often interesting hearing what peoples preferences are.
I agree, every person has a different set of preferences and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and not get in my way, and design is less important. But I still try to make my desktops look good.
"The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3.... Trinity is an independent fork..." (from the "About" page)
Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE applications are top-tier.
There's a project called Trinity, which is essentially KDE 3.
I ended up just nuking it and restarting with Gnome. Gnome turned out to be a lot more restrictive, but the initial setup load was significantly less than KDE. The graphics card / keyboard LEDs just worked straight out of the box.
The new widgets in KDE were pretty cool and very fluid. The desktop state didn't save for me though and any time I rebooted/logged out, everything disappeared from my desktop...
Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it’s not that customizable, and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But… I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers. If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME.
KDE… it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content with generic names like “Web” and “PDF Viewer,” I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
I’ve tried a few different tiling and dynamic window managers. I even tried writing my own one. But in the end I actually do like the form factor of full desktop environment for when I’m doing graphical based work. And having a DE that doesn’t treat me like a n00b is an increasingly hard solution to find these days.
Either you and I are looking at a different "System Settings", or you get overwhelmed easily... The one I'm looking at is neatly organized into descriptive categories on the left, with a search function that searches all categories on the top. If I want to configure my mouse, I search "mouse". The mouse configuration screen has the following options:
Left handed mode
Press left and right buttons for middle-click
Pointer speed
Acceleration profile: Flat or Adaptive
Invert scroll direction
Use `xinput list-props ...` to see the dozens of configuration options that KDE could expose in their mouse settings GUI, but doesn't. I really do wish KDE were actually the way people like you criticize KDE for being.
> I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
How is "Okular" any worse than "mudbrick trapeeze artist" aka "adobe acrobat"? Click on a PDF and Okular opens it. That's how you know, and I think that's how most people open PDFs.
I'm not sure about this. To me Gnome looks like it's a programmer's idea of what beginner-friendly UI looks like but actual non-technical users seem to think it's just confusing and switch back to Windows or MacOS.
About generic names, I'm quite sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft did some research before they called their web browsers Safari and Chrome, or even renamed it from self-descriptive but unique Internet Explorer to Edge.
Kubuntu did this generic names by default option at one point but fortunately there was an option to switch to proper nouns. Having three different apps called Web Browser was a bit odd, and at least to me the generic names give the feeling that the apps themselves are white label knockoff. But to be honest the 'k' everywhere convention feels like cheap house brand too.
It's pretty annoying when you have GNOME apps installed too though, as those don't follow a sensible pattern and you get "Document Viewer (Okular)" next to "View multi-page documents (Document Viewer)" - which is Evince.
“Oh… I thought Konquerer might be a video game, involving Conkers.”
Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on a generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
Gets tragically hilarious when the document viewer program changed between release.
Which is of course the correct strategy in the exploding-growth market of not only Linux Desktop, but desktop computing in general.
...wait a second...
- Okular Document Viewer
So high-end displays like LG Ultrafine 5K, etc. can only be used at native resolution under Gnome. All the others handle it as two displays.
:sad face:
People would just double click the PDF file and it will open in the PDF viewer.. not sure why would you want to know beforehand about what is the PDF viewer name.
> If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME.
These will be low powered computers. KDE's Kwin allows you to disable compositor, which is essential on low powered computers to make things not sluggish, GNOME's mutter doesn't allow that and it will feel very sluggish.
Still, the author gets points from me for using Opensuse Tumbleweed, a highly underrated distro.
So `libfoobar` might be at 1.2 in the arch repos and required by an AUR package but it's only 1.1 in the Manjaro repo which will lead to broken packages.
If you're going to use the AUR, use Arch basically.
Cinnamon is what finally "clicked" for me.
I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.
And then there are the applications
Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they're stored in /usr/share/applications
For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously replacing Audacity with the app name)
StartupWMClass=Audacity
All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal. Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
I've had the opposite experience. Cinnamon was always buggy and crashing, while Mate never crashed.
Of course, I switched to Plasma about 2 years ago, so I am willing to concede that Mate has had an awful two years while Cinnamon has been bugfixed until the bug reports stopped :-)
When I first started using Linux in the early 2000's as a university student KDE was the environment that managed to get me to switch over from Windows. I appreciated just how configurable it was. I would spent hours tweaking my desktop getting everything setup just how I liked it to look. It felt like there was a configuration setting in KDE for just about everything. I remember spending an afternoon procrastinating as a student picking the perfect font for the system clock.
All of that seemed to come at a cost I remember it gradually felt more and more bloated and things became less responsive over time I reached a point where I cared less and less about being able to customize things and more about just having a useable system. I kind of grudgingly used Gnome (in the Gnome 2.6 days) I was never really enamored with it but it "worked".
Gnome 3 lost me as a user completely I just did not mesh with the new paradigm they were going for. I tried out KDE again but this was around the time they were having stability issues and there was some new file indexing system they were using I'm not sure if it was just badly implemented by my distro but it was incredibly resource intensive it would freeze the system for 2 to 3 seconds at a time whenever it kicked it. So I moved on tried out a few other environments like XFCE for a while before settling on Cinnamon.
On a semi-related note does anyone know what happened to Enlightenment? I remember that was the much hyped up desktop environment back in the old Slashdot days I never really hear about it these days.
Yes. It's still alive, but last I checked it was still incredibly buggy.
This might explain why: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
Combined with gtk3 regressions and Ubuntu snap bullshit I’d had enough after ten years.
Moved to mint cinnamon and noticed many little things fixed even the terminal updated, and stayed.
As far as terminal goes, I don't think there's any reason to prefer the DE's terminal over your favorite. I use kitty, and it's great.
On the other hand it had the nice feature in their terminal where it will highlight tabs that have had unseen input. Sheesh.
For example, if one isn't using KDE, there's no configured KDE icon theme, and most applications will default to simply rendering blank icons. So buttons that have just icons are completely blank.
I also just downloaded `plasma-sdk` to try out `cuttlefish`, an application that's designed to preview the icons from the KDE breeze icon theme. But it's totally broken. The menus render some entries with the text having the same colour as the background. The icons are a mix of KDE icons, GTK icons and some black and white ones (so it's not even usable for its main purpose). Scrolling with the mouse wheel has a weird lag (no touchpad, just a mouse). Clicking on the scrollbar doesn't work, nor does dragging the little "thing" inside the scrollbar.
I don't know how many of these issues are related to me using swaywm, and how many or something else, but there's so many I don't even know where to start. If just one thing is broken, and try to figure it out and report upstream. But if almost nothing works, the same attitude doesn't really work.
The whole interoperability between desktop frameworks isn't always _perfect_, but it's worked fairly well for probably 10+ years for me (been using linux since the 90's).
It was slow, things didn't work, and weird. I totally understand that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should invest time into your interface I would say try other things as well.
Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!
Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.
I try KDE each time a major new release hits, but I just can't give up my Sway workflow. Maybe KDE+ Bismuth would do it.
Kubuntu (or, better, KDE on Debian) has always been my OS of choice for desktop use.
Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I hope it continues.
Do Window Rules do what you need? That's what I used to make a certain app's window size/position persist between runs.
Title bar menu: More Actions: Configure Special {Application,Window} Settings: Add Properties
KDE 3 was fine.
KDE 4 was not a worthy successor to KDE 3 and it was a massive setback with regards to customization.
After that I stopped using KDE.
KDE 3 was polished, KDE 4 looked like developer art.
Shouldn't be this way, having switchable graphics is not exactly a new tech.
I give it a try next year.
I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)
However, I'd prefer something which weighs application names over some other metadata.
The same thing happens when there's any mention of an electron app, or Windows, or software having the temerity to not reveal its source. These issues turn so many HN commenters into echolalics.
This guideline should be extended to cover this kind of repetitive and pointless content:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Assuming that the guideline writers really mean the justification stated here: more than 50% of the comments in this kind of thread are so often canonical examples of 'too common to be interesting', so the guideline should apply to this kind of standard trigger issue.
Ha yes, definitely your fault for expecting Linux desktop stuff to work seamlessly!
It seems like if trends continue, Electron will be pretty much the only way new software gets on Linux and as a platform, Electron sucks compared to KDE or Gnome.
We just need a name for the project.
> The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.
everything before the "Add-ons available under Commercial Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3" separator is available under LGPLv3, and that covers very likely 100% of what is used in KDE
Personally I used to be a die hard mac user, but then I realized most of the time I just use vscode, firefox and terminal, which could be done on any platform (I chose linux and never looked back).