Fedora Linux 40

Doing pretty good on Sway but it's obviously not for everyone. I keep thinking of trying to get into a more conventional desktop to have the experience & KDE has been very high on the list; seemed sensible straight, straightforward, and customizable, groovy.

There's a bunch of security issues that got raised in https://security.opensuse.org/2024/04/02/kde6-dbus-polkit.ht... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39968384, and thankfully it sounds like many of them will be getting fixed. But one takeaway that is seared into my soul is that KDE is more-or-less tunneling their own protocols over DBus. And that's just so radically uncool, so non-cooperative/non-participatory/non-FreeDesktop thing to do. The other small shocks I can get over/will be improved, but it's really wild to me that the normal means of controlling & talking to software just doesn't work like it should on KDE.

I'd assumed KDE had done the right thing at some point, after walking away from their pretty capable/interesting DCOP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_communication_protocol machine-interfaces. It seems like a really great project, really nice & direct UI, and was top of my list to try out. But after seeing the DBus spec roundly ignored & custom encoded data being sent around, I see KDE as an island unto itself that I have little desire to swim to. I can't imagine leaving the FreeDesktop archipelago.

GNOME 46 also brought massive improvements to Nautilus (the file browser) performance. It used to feel a bit laggy even when navigating between small directories but now it feels snappier and a big directory full of thumbnails for photos and videos loads much quicker and things don't seem to jump around while loading. It also loaded a directory with 40k entries in less than a second. Pretty decent I would say.