The fact that there are still apps where the hamburger menu cannot be used properly without a mouse caused me to switch to KDE. Having certain menus accessible via Alt + Letter shortcuts is an accessibility requirement for me.
>learning from mistakes
pick one, and only one. They are the most stubborn bunch in existence.
This won't help anything. GNOME Foundation doesn't really have anything to do with the development of GNOME or GTK. The Foundation is just the financial entity that does fundraising and owns the hosting. Actual development is decided by developers, i.e. the volunteers who show up to maintain it.
>Overall I truly believe they did a disservice to the whole Linux Desktop and the community over the last 15 years.
Speak for yourself please, personally I've enjoyed GNOME for the last 15 years. There's no need to make these kind of normative statements.
[1] I hope... , ...for all I care, Overall I truly believe....
>but it's nice that you can have your opinion, while mine is considered void.
It's perfectly fine to not like GNOME but wishing for them to be destroyed is a hostile and destructive opinion. If you don't want negative reactions then please try to recognize when that happens and just don't say those things. I don't wish that your preferred desktop get destroyed, is it too much to ask for you to stop wishing that upon me?
I mean, come on. Of course there is a repeating pattern if you insist on saying nasty things and then you find people always get upset at you. What did you expect would happen?
You need to work on your reading comprehension because you're twisting everyone's words in your comments, not just mine.
Gnome was right to take a uniform design, the same way KDE did. Gnome applications look weird on KDE, the same way KDE apps look weird on Gnome, but that's such a non-issue. Every Gnome application has an alternative in almost any other widget style.
The "damage" they have done seems to mostly be people who don't like Gnome being agitated by Gnome's success, forcing them to use Gnome applications because their ecosystem of choice doesn't have a native alternative. If Gnome were as bad as some people think, it would've already shrunk to irrelevance to the point the complains would go away.
I suppose Unity was a bit of a waste now that it's been mostly abandoned for standard Gnome these days. Then again, Canonical has a history of starting forks and alternatives and releasing them early, eventually ending up replaced by competitor projects that learned from their mistakes.
The fact KDE's design hasn't inspired much in terms of forks seems like negative signal to me. Very few people who want to implement things their own way seem to be using KDE as a basis. I don't know if that's because KDE is more difficult to work with or if KDE people just aren't the ones that like to experiment with their own vision, but nobody forking the project is not necessarily a good sign.
That said, KDE did just finish a complete redesign, with a Gnome-like desktop switcher, a Gnome-style (or rather, macOS-style) dock, altered default behaviour for mouse clicks, touchpad taps, and the way scrollbars work. Perhaps it'll inspire the next generation of tinkerers now that the redesign is out.
That said you seem to misunderstand the gnome "workflow" if you think the new KDE features are copies or similar to the gnome workflow™. I give you that they are visually similar but most of the concepts you described were shaped by xerox.
- KIO
- KParts
- KHTML
Emphasis on chose KDE, not forked KDE. I agree with people who say that KDE has gone to great lengths to be customizable enough that you can mostly set it up the way you want without forks, extensions, or even registry editors.
I can't speak to how difficult Valve found it to work with KDE, but it says a lot that they still chose it overall. It's not often we get such a clear positive signal from a company that invests so heavily in user experience.
I guess people perceive it as fuckshittery because there's no advertising or marketing team to help assuage the missing features. Comparatively, Microsoft Windows struggles to maintain any less than a dozen GUI frameworks despite being a centrally managed product sold by one company. When you look at it that way, it's kinda miraculous that Linux ends up having it's cake and eating it too.
For desktop apps, there has been Windows Forms, WPF, WinRT, UWP, and now WinUI. You could even argue that MAUI is the latest.
Sounds like a lot! And it is.
That said, it is more of a naming and communication problem than a technology one.
Things like Qt and GTK have undergone similar or even worse disruption but it does not seem as bad because of the naming.
Take WinUi. It is really the exact same GUI API as UWP. Mostly a namespace change. And UWP was just an attempt to bring the WinRT API to more platforms. The Open Source UNO Project allows you to use WinUI cross-platform.
And even in MAUI, it uses WinUI on Windows.
Really, the C# GUI API for desktop apps has not changed since 2012 ( Windows 8 ).
And the core UI concept is XAML with bindings and MVVM. Those were all introduced with WPF way back in 2006. While WinUI and WPF are not the same API, they are not so different from a dev perspective ( use not architecture ).
And of course WPF is still supported. In fact, Windows Forms is not only fully supported but gets updates now and then. Windows Forms was released in 2002. You can start a new app in Visual Studio today on the latest .NET that uses the same GUI framework as an app in 2002! That is actually some pretty damn impressive UI framework stability when you think about it.
Now detractors may be screaming. What about Silverlight? Or Xamarin Forms, or Blazor? Or Web Forms?
Well, I am not going to make this longer going through web frameworks. I hope we can all agree there has been a lot of churn there on every stack. That said, Web Forms, introduced in 2001 are still supported! ( on .NET Full Framework ).
And on mobile, Xamarin Forms is just the old name for MAUI. This also uses XAML, so it has a lot in common with everything from WPF to WinUI.
Anyway, I wish it was all better too. But it is not as bad as it seems. Mostly, Microsoft just sucks at naming and messaging.
KDE OTOH tried to combine every GUI into a single place, making it usable to any user.
Mac OS? RiscOS? Be? Die-hard Unix with Motif? KDE1 (and more 2 and 3) allowed that into widgets/window decorations and much more.
But I prefer stuff like IceWM+XFE if I had to choose a desktop like environment.
No desktop icons, the menu has shortcut entries and a subdir navigator allowing you to open anything with either the file-manager or xdg-open. It has a virtual desktop switcher, a task switcher, a systay and a clock.