Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux | Hacker News Reader

Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux

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146 pointsjlpcsl89 comments

KDE is so great <3. It's everything Mac and Windows should have been. I also donate to it monthly because I feel it's software really worth paying for.

On the contrary, I despise Gnome 3. Gnome 2 wasn't bad but in 3 everything rubs me the wrong way. It's like they went out of their way to design something that wouldn't suit me :) The mimimalism, the thick "touch-style" window decorations, the "always an extra click" hamburger menus. The "You're holding it wrong" attitude. Basically all the issues that come with Apple-style opinionated design. And mentioned in the source article too. Nevertheless I'm glad other people do like it. That's the good thing about FOSS, there's something for everyone.

I had the same feeling about recent macOS versions so I'm really happy I moved to KDE (on FreeBSD). Having choice and configurability again is amazing.

This is really the power of FOSS and calls for a unified desktop would seriously undermine that. One size does not fit all.

Yeah i need to start donating too. Gave kde 3 a chance and wasnt disappointed. If you want a good looking, privacy friendly (no ads or data harvesting) and stable de then kde is a good option. Only thing i dislike is their choice of qml for widgets. Also i think it has good potential for some form of monetisation so that kde positions itself as a strong competitor against windows and macos.

I'm giving a KDE a go as I finally convinced the wifey (non-technical human) to use "the Linux" daily. I haven't used KDE myself for past decade so should be fun.

Is there a good tiled window manager for KDE such as Pop Shell for Gnome? That's the only thing keeping me back on gnome.

Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite

To use the tiling tool you can press `Win/Super + t`, I believe that is the default stroke.

Bismuth works for now but is effectively abandoned.

And so is krohnkite (as far as I've heard)

But thew new tiling tool is very nice. And it will probably be augmented in the future.

There will be a bit of a pause in feature releases for KDE now though, as they are working on Qt 6 compatibility which will take longer than usual.

I can vouch for Bismuth being pretty good. I need a 3 column tiling for my ultra wide and it works well for that.

Hotkeys allow for easy switching on and off and between tile styles. Still intend to try native tiling soon.

I've been using Plasma for over a year and did not notice that, wow.

Now if only I could make it behave like i3 with regards to a few things... time for research

Have you tried gnome 42 or later? I actually went from macos to gnome and while there are some differences some of them seemed reasonable given the contributors capacity and all the forms they're trying to support. (I use it on a tablet PC, so the minimalism comes with enabling larger hit targets for buttons, decent multitouch support)

Yeah I did but I was actually very unhappy with macOS (I think it's been steadily going downhill since 10.4 Tiger and I finally left it a few versions ago). And like I mentioned, the big window decorations on Gnome were annoying for me as I don't use touch at all. If there was a way to simply set them to be smaller (and change the hamburger menus to real menus) it would have been fine, but it offers none of that.

Also there's some other things where I have my own opinions. For example, I like my virtual desktops laid out in a grid, not a row. Then I remap the numeric keypad to be a desktop switcher (I don't like keystroke combos, I use dedicated keys for almost everything). I have all my apps on specific desktops (and different browser windows on many!) so I know what is where. KDE allows me to configure all that right out of the box and it persists after a reboot. On Gnome I need so many plugins that I run into conflicts and version compatibility issues. It was not workable like that.

Also, KDE has some great ideas like the "Activities" which was a great expansion to my workflow. It's basically several desktop environments in one.

I use Gnome 44 on my Surface Go with Fedora 38 and it will stop responding to touch input until I plug in a keyboard and press <Esc> and then it's good until I log out or reboot. It's basically unusable and infuriating. There are few open issues on the gnome-shell Gitlab that seem to be related but languishing.

Yeah, pretty sure I know exactly the issue you're talking about. Tablet support isn't perfect and you still need a separate keyboard, and yet I'm tolerably happy with it all.

It's a little strange isn't it that a tablet specific DE doesn't really work well with tablets.

I wouldn't consider it tablet-specific. More that it has an aspiration to support tablets, like the early days of windows 8.

Why would it be tablet specific?

It’s a minimalist DE which is very handy to control both on desktop, and especially on laptop (via swipe left-right on touchpad), and takes only a single line. Selecting the app you use from its overview is personally my favorite way to interact with my computer.

Exactly this.

I have been using KDE as my only DE for over ten years, including some years for work. Previously used Windows and currently, I have been forced to use Mac for about 4 years.

Window management in Mac is an outright disrespect for power users and built-in applications for Win are just not up to speed. In KDE, I just use most apps from KDE universe and most of them are a perfect fit.

KDE managed to take the good from Mac and Win and even improve upon it - and if you don't like it, you can most likely easily change it in the System Settings panel or application preferences. With Kubuntu, everything (hardware) has mostly worked out of the box and upgrading since Kubuntu 7.04 has been working pretty flawlessly.

When they release new features, it is evident that they care about users. The theming is consistent, elegant and yet heavily configurable. Plasma and Kwin support you in the way that YOU want to work and does not force some workflow upon the users. I can control my Hue bulbs from the desktop and interact with my phone (through KDE Connect) bidirectionally.

The only missing thing was auto dark mode and I created https://github.com/adrium/knightadjuster for it. Even without reading much documentation, I could accomplish what I wanted simply by experimenting with qdbusviewer.

Thank you KDE developers - thank you KDE community! Keep up the good work and thanks for caring about users!

Thanks for making knightadjuster. I wasn't aware of it, I generally use mostly dark colours anyway and I turn on dark reader in Firefox manually.

However, this sounds like a great automated option. I just wish it would work with firefox too :)

I don't use KDE personally because it ships with an absurd amount of bloat. And ever since I setup Hyprland I have had no need for anything else.

KDE apps are not included in the plasma by default. Plasma itself is very lightweight.

Sorry, I was referring to the bundle that Asahi Linux is using. I had a bad time trying to uninstall each package one-by-one and decided to just start with a minimal install instead.

Same on FreeBSD. It comes with the basics. Some apps like Krita or Kdenlive are pretty heavy but also incredibly powerful. So I have opted to install them but they are not in the base package.

I think some small apps like Konsole, Kate, Dolphin and KWallet come in the default install but you can't really do without them.

It does have some visual bloat when you compare it to modern tiling wms, though.

True but it's much more than a WM. Especially a tiling one which are designed to be super basic :)

I never used KDE but I have to say that I love my Ubuntu UI (Gnome forty something), and many people that I installed Ubuntu to replace Windows also love it, so is a net positive in my experience.

But then you have those terrible Snaps.

Ubuntu is not vanilla gnome at all. It's very heavily modified.

I felt the same way initially. I -hated- Gnome 3 and the developers who ruined it, as Gnome 2 was so sweet.

Eventually, I discovered extensions, and user themes, and it made the whole experience not just usable but even better. Dash to panel and tray icons are essential, and make Gnome pretty nice. Or that could be the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

Without extensions, I wouldn't use Gnome 3. You could make the argument that shouldn't be necessary, and I'd probably agree.

I don't particularly like that Gnome seems at times hostile to extensions, and that they don't work more closely with the extension authors. Half mine seem to break every version upgrade.

I was a Gnome person for a very long time. Every time I tried KDE, I would run into some issue or other and would jump back to Gnome. The UI changes and the “beautiful” design stuff kept adding weight and I soldiered on thinking KDE must be in even worse shape. Gnome being default DE on my district and all… surely it must be better right?

Then, I read a blog post shared here that went something like “The toilet in my house is broken and Gnome File selector can’t show previews” that kind of shook me awake and tried KDE after multiple years since my previous attempt. Uninstalled Gnome the same day and haven’t looked back. I am so glad posts like this get written and hope it convinces more people that KDE of now is very different from KDE of yore

I had an almost identical experience to the parent, though I went KDE a little earlier than the publication of that incredible article, "GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked)" [0]. It's absolutely worth a read, regardless of your chosen DE.

...but after you're done reading it, perhaps you too will change your mind.

[0] https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

Funnily people bash gnome/gtk for the no thumbnails in file picker but nobody bashes kde/QT for no sound or video file preview either.

When I am in kde/kdenlive, sure I get picture thumbnails but I don't have thumnails for videos from my camera nor can I hear the sound files by playing when hovering over the icon.

I'd argue the file picker thing is just a standard-bearer for a whole bunch of different problems. Just look around this comment section, GNOME has more problems than thumbnails. KDE might not solve them all, but I'd argue its proverbial toilet works much better.

I am using both, I have one laptop dedicated to kde to make sure I don't miss out on anything in case both evolve in different directions. I make sure I still use the kde one once in a while...but I still tend to go by preference to the one running Gnome.

So they might have more problems but it doesn't necessarily translate in worse user experience for all users. The file picker was one example but I don't see me use very often a file picker, I am more a drag and dropper these days. It may be because file picker is not that great on Gnome, but I just checked the kde one today...and realized that meh. I'd still rather use dolphin on kde to drag and drop to a particular app than go to open --> file and choose it in the file picker. It seems just more convenient to me.

So KDE seems more flexible, and may fix issues that count for the 0.005% of the population, but the configuration panel feels like an airliner cockpit. Gnome may not care about what annoys 0.005% of user but the experience seems to be more straightforward to many and less choice means less stuff to configure to your liking the day you switch from one computer to another. You'd really have to backing up your .config preciously if you start customizing kde to your liking.

In the end it is great both exist, as well as the alternatives and the standalone window manager. On screens 10" and smaller and on older and slower machines I still prefer using a tiling wm.

Hm of course I backup my .config. After all, this is Unix and most programs have their own settings in the .config folder and many other places. This is not an issue for me.

And I like airliner cockpits <3

> KDE is so great.

Funny, back in 2006ish, KDE development was stalled, and it was a janky, inconsistent mess. Everyone hated it and used Gnome, which had a simpler design and was far more stable and smooth.

Yes it was. It was in fact the reason I initially tried Gnome and didn't even consider KDE when I moved away from Mac.

After spending ages finding extensions to make everything work the way I wanted to an upgrade appeared and some of them broke. I then tried KDE Neon as a live image and I was like wow, this is nice right away. And what's better, I can really make it my own, configure it the way I want to. Without having to install any extensions. That feels so welcoming after using Mac for more than a decade.

However yes in the early '00s it was an inconsistent mess I'm terms of UX. Very similar to early Android in fact. It was why I moved to Mac back then.

A lot can change in that amount of time and apparently has. Also, as you're very likely aware, KDE runs on macOS, though idky anyone would want to do that. It certainly wouldn't draw anyone back from FreeBSD. The best and worst parts of macOS are BSD — best because there is a BSD userland, and worst because it's inexplicably outdated.

KDE3 languished and lost a lot of users because they were so focused on the KDE4 migration. Then KDE4 came out and it was resource heavy and "overly aesthetic" so even more people jumped ship.

Meanwhile, GNOME did the exact same with GNOME3 even harder, but people had in their mind that the community would fix it or that KDE just had to be worse.

KDE kept trucking along; optimizing things, cleaning up and addressing complaints, not ballooning resource usage, etc. So now they're the refined and lighter option, while GNOME is overly opinionated and resource hungry. The only complaint I hear from non-user's today is that it feels old/last gen. But that's the appeal to me, I don't want "new gen" if it means touch oriented interfaces and dictated themes with overly simplistic applications.

I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last summer and decided to spend it on Kate (KDE advanced text editor) and the experience was great! I had never approached KDE or Qt development before, and never even done actual C++ development (just some small course exercises). The devs were great at coaching on their IRC channel and in the GitLab issues.

The maintainer even made a blogspot at some point to explain my contributions: https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-featur...

Globally KDE is a fantastic experience, whether from a user's or a developer's perspective.

There's an interesting pattern where particularly device applications that don't use one of the "big distros" end up picking KDE Plasma over the alternatives, e.g.

- Steam Deck: Desktop mode is KDE Plasma

- PinePhone and PinePhone Pro: KDE Plasma Mobile

- Asahi: KDE Plasma

One may speculate what distros would do if it wasn't for inertia and compatibility.

No need to speculate. Every Linux distro I have looked at recently allows the user to install loads of different desktop environments. KDE and Gnome are just the big ones. I use Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome 3 that looks more like Gnome 2) on Linux Mint on my laptop, XFCE on an old netbook also with Mint.

Just pick whatever DE you prefer.

Sure, but their default is usually GNOME3 these days. And there's always a ton more effort towards making the default work seamlessly.

Kubuntu is notorious for having issues trying to fit the "Ubuntu" way and not quite getting it right. (Font/theme issues, primarily) Fedora's KDE spin is pretty decent, but that's mostly because it is bog standard aside from the logo and RPM/dnf integration. Outside of those two, you're better off using a KDE-primary distro in most cases.

Why compatibility? Or inertia for that matter? Switching DEs in Linux is generally as easy as installing a package and switching the DE at login, and you can use any app compiled for a certain toolkit in any other DE. The default choice is usually done for either pragmatic or preferential reasons (Developer preference, easy of upstream collaboration, flexibility, stability, bug fix schedule)

Compatibility e.g. with user support docs they have, or installed bases. It's not easy for distros to decide to switch defaults.

That's why what new systems choose is interesting.

>Or inertia for that matter?

Humans, including devs and distro builders, are creatures of habit. They tend to stick to using whatever they already know.

> Meanwhile on GNOME the situation is you can't control the keyboard brightness out of the box, because they decided all laptops with a keyboard backlight must surely have dedicated keys for that purpose and therefore there's no need for a slider nor configurable keybinds and...

I wrote then lost a gnome hotkey plugin to help with this, as the desktop display my parents were using had a menu system they hated/couldnt manage to use.

It's wild that Gnome has such a narrow lo-fi user as their only target persona, but they probably make a vast amount of their earned income selling to such users.

Gnome sells something? Other than t-shirts? I can't imagine they have 'vast income', they're a non-profit[1]... presumably if they did, Nautilus would work better...

1: https://foundation.gnome.org/

Red Hat and SUSE (Maybe not anymore?) pay for a lot of the developer time.

Suse is entirely sold on KDE Plasma

Please try to find KDE on this page:

https://documentation.suse.com/sled/15-SP4/

> SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop includes the X.org server, Wayland and the GNOME desktop.

https://documentation.suse.com/sled/15-SP4/html/SLED-all/cha...

Gnome is the default desktop of Red Hat, whose target audience is definitely business. There hopefully are some breakdowns somewhere of where they get funding from. But I expect Red Hat gives them a bunch of money.

Whether their income is "vast" or not, my statement was specifically about the relative proportions of where it comes from. I definitely expect them to have an overall fairly mild budget. But where it comes from, I think, has largely shaped their current strategy, which is to target extreme end users with little customizability.

That makes sense, I guess I'd say that they have hewed closer to macOS in terms of not allowing for much customization, which clearly alienates many users. I'd be more willing to toe their line if it all worked better, though.

Default gnome 3 doesn't make any sense. It's obvious they're making it horrible on purpose. I wonder why I have to install extensions for the most basic stuff.

I have to say that it took until Valve adopted KDE for the Steam Deck for me to really take it seriously - I have just always used a GNOME distro.

KDE has pretty ugly default window theming IMO. Like, quite grotesque. But the GNOME project is overall quite preposterous. It's a main-stream-but-hipster GUI environment where their philosophy does not match how any user wants to use it, hence all the (basically) mandatory extensions. Yes, I want window controls and a dock!

KDE has way too much customization I think, but at least it has accepted a more sane philosophy. I was thinking of trying the Fedora KDE spin next. I feel that the other shoe has dropped recently - I could honestly see GNOME getting dropped. Cosmic did it and nearly every major distro has a KDE spin.

I must be the only user that like the gnome defaults then.

Only thing I need to configure is focus over mouse (no extension needed) and I like to have the top bar transparent (extension needed but I can live without it, it is cosmetic and I haven't installed it on all my machines).

In my eyes the biggest problem with GNOME's theming is the egregious padding everywhere in Adwaita. Installing a theme with cut down padding makes it much more reasonable and in my opinion puts it among the best looking DEs.

Agreed on GNOME's lack of functionality though…

>KDE has way too much customization I think

My biggest issue with KDE themeing (or just linux ricing in general) is just the massive amount of possibilities and no guard rails. All it takes is changing one color and you end up with some godawful ugly setup.

I was messing with a live Manjaro USB on one of my annual "Is desktop linux there yet" expeditions and found the best success in just picking one of the top-downloaded themes in the store and maybe tweaking one thing from it, like the folder colors.

Much as I'd love a perfect and elegant personally-customized theme, I don't have the skills to do it, and I'd rather just have something that's 99% there.

What is "linux ricing"?

I'm guessing it's a reference to the fairly racist label of a "ricer" or "rice rocket" for modified Japanese sports cars :-/

Nothing racist about it, it's derived from the practice of putting cheap sake in in the hope that it would work like MW50 injection (it doesn't).

This is definitely a racist term that was targetting modified japanese cars. It should have been forgotten long ago instead of importing it in the computer world where it doesn't even make sense.

Theming your Linux desktop to look totally different. See r/unixporn

I've been using default GNOME for ages and I'm happy with it. I use the keyboard very heavily so I've never been bothered with the window controls. Saying KDE has too much customization is putting it mildly, the thing feels like an Airbus cockpit. There's unironically half a dozen menus to change themes alone. Like Windows it feels like you're on three versions of the system at the same time ranging 15 years back.

Say what you want about ripping stuff out but GNOME has what I also appreciate about macs, it has a coherent design language.

I really like KDE and think it's some of the best free software out there, in function and in spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it despite the dark years of KDE 4, which was an absolute disaster and only appeared worse in contrast to the amazing 3.5.

I'm not a KDE developer but I greatly appreciate the development process. I've made a few minor changes in KDE and it was very easy to get a development environment set up, and then process for getting those PRs approved was easy.

Better yet, that showed me that it's relatively easy to use your own builds of KDE on top of an otherwise complete system. I use Debian as my daily driver but sometimes I want new KDE features that won't hit the Debian repos for a while so I build those KDE components myself and use them. I wouldn't recommend that to new users but it's very viable if you understand how your system works.

I've been out of touch with the Linux distro ecosystem for a while. My current favorite for a desktop environment is Fedora, and it seems like most major distros default to Gnome these days. They may provide KDE, but KDE seems to be a second thought for them (which later shows in how well-integrated other pieces of the system are).

So, question: is there any major distro that defaults to KDE these days? I think openSUSE used to... but I can't easily tell if it still does, nor if it is "major".

KDE Neon[1] is based on Ubuntu LTS.

[1] https://neon.kde.org/

I am actually a pretty happy GNOME user -- granted, it is due to being able to tweak my experience with GNOME extensions and managing the aspects I care about with dconf settings managed with Home-Manager/Nix.

These are the GNOME extensions I find critical to me enjoying the UI:

- PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows

- Just Perfection[1] for making the appearance even more minimal/removing elements I don't use

I think if the GNOME team removed extension support altogether, I would absolutely switch to KDE. But for now, I get an extremely minimal desktop, and I really like it.

That being said, I typically live in my terminal, so I don't spend much time actually using the tools provided with my desktop environment.

(Just want to vocalize that there is at least one person who enjoys GNOME's approach of visually staying out of my way, but giving me a robust backend when I need it)

[0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/

> PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows

You'll probably see much less support for this, and maybe even death of the project, once COSMIC releases though.

I hope not, but can understand if things went that route. And if COSMIC embodies the "stay out of my way" approach better than GNOME, I'd probably be happy to switch to it.

KDE is by far my favorite computing environment, but its default settings slow its adoption, I believe. For example, the default task switcher is overly complicated, and even worse, in some distributions, an actual extra package has to be installed to just get a useful and basic switcher. I believe, more than anything else, if KDE wants to get more users, it should urgently work to make its default settings less surprising to new users, despite its ability to wow with neat (but not necessarily useful) user interface effects.

The are fixing the default task switcher in plasma 6: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53

It would be nice if this led to Qt/KDE exposing the ‘Mac mode’ toggle that makes the GUI key the default for GUI shortcuts. As someone who lives in the terminal and needs control keys left alone, the Windows style drives me nuts. (KDE shortcuts are at least configurable, but it would be nice not to have to do them all one by one.)

While KDE certainly has a lot in its favor (as listed in the post, "batteries included" factor, configurability, dev team responsiveness), I've never been able to make it work for me. Even after pouring hours into customizing it, it still feels "off" somehow, and I don't think I could fix that without getting waist-deep in a custom fork.

It would be nice if there were more DEs that shared those positive traits with KDE, but reality isn't so kind.

I've tried multiple and now stick with KDE for two reasons: 1. it gets out of the way when needing to do something (a lot better than some of the alternatives) - for instance games, 3D tools or the like. 2. It recovers from a restart, often back to normal use. It's nowhere near as consistent as the gold standard (MacOSX) - but it works. Gnome 2 worked - more or less - although the terminal restore was kludgy it still worked. Nothing else since has.

Given I need to restart from time to time and restoring my desktop can be somewhere between minutes (if I knew where everything was) and hours (if I have to go through a bunch of files to figure out what all was running)... so yeah. KDE for the win. (among other reasons the intel AX210+ wireless chips are still rather dodgy with suspend/resume on a laptop, so tend to crash hard within an hour of a suspend).

I tried KDE a few times over the years, but it always felt a bit off. However, six months ago I tried it again, and really like it. As others say, it has a lot of useful customization. What worries me more is the switch to Wayland, when essential apps like synergy/barrier don't work well there yet.

With all its ugliness, Plasma is the only environment which works acceptable for multi-head wayland setups with fractional scaling.

Adding to the pile of "KDE have been great to work with". Community is friendly and professional. Answers usually work. Lots of attention on user experience and stability.

KDE is indeed very good. I tried adopting it in the past multiple times then reverting, but with the latest version is so much better than the others.

KDE is indeed a nice suite of software. I used it on my workstation for the last several years, and I'm using it now on my gaming PC as well. It seems to have more features than the other DEs I have tried, yet it's fast and stable, and it also feels reasonably modern and beautiful.

I personally don't like DE (desktop environments). I don't want my PC to be doing something or managing something on my desktop besides switching and moving/resizing windows. WM (window managers) are smaller, faster, less brittle and don't require grand visionary changes every 2 years.

The problem I ran into with minimal WM setups is keeping the farm of various daemons required for various bits of functionality all happy and healthy took more thought and effort than I cared to put forth. It wasn't uncommon for some random thing to break after updating which got tiresome.

I found it interesting when I checked Gnome and KDE orgs on github that by far most KDE repos are C++ and most Gnome repos are C (some Vala).

It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software.

> It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software.

In which direction? I’ve used both recently and while I prefer the design decisions of KDE/plasma over those made by GNOME3 in almost every case, I definitely noticed more bugs in KDE. I had frozen copies of my mouse cursor left behind when I moved between monitors quickly, for example. Frankly it’s hard to imagine seeing that kind of instantly obvious bug in a stable GNOME build.

I guess by quality I was thinking size of feature set. It feels more feature complete, I guess? I noticed display bugs in KDE with Wayland earlier this year too but it sounds like that is cleaning up quickly.

Regardless of the DE preference I believe the Gtk/GObject/GLib ecosystem is quite well designed and it's relatively easy to reason around and get into developing with even without using C since there's a ton of available bindings. KDE development is tied to the Qt framework which is essentially C++ only (with Python bindings for the Qt libs). The language is based on pragmatic requirements and I can't see any correlation to the quality of the software.

I've been running KDE Neon on a NUC for years as a secondary desktop PC, and it's pretty great overall. It's customizable, performance is good and it looks nice.

The only things I really miss are deeper issues, like non-existing to terrible SMB support and lack of decent remote desktop solution (I've tried all the options, they're all functional at best).

With Proton having solved the gaming issue, I'm sure I would have loved switching my primary box over to Linux with KDE if it were not for those two remaining thorns.

"But also, I've had very positive experiences interacting with the KDE community. Bugs get fixed, the developers care, I can send out PRs and they get merged."

I'm not an OSS dev, isn't so with Gnome community?

KDE is highly recommended.

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