Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's historic reasons.

KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things).

That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous.

The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons.

Personally, none of this bothers me and it's what I use for my personal computer. KDE is just so close to exactly how I'm used to interacting with computers anyways growing up through the Win95 era. It is so close to the Windows experience you want to have.

View on HN

> KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop

That’s not my recollection. I believe that the non-free license you mention was the major factor, in addition to the fact that KDE was written in C++ at a time when the free software community still preferred to write software primarily in C.

GNOME was written using a free software toolkit, and it was written in C, and it was associated with the FSF.

There were several eras of user and developer consternation. I definitely had the impression that the GP describes in the mid to late 2000s.

I distinctly recall people criticizing C++ programs as "bloated" and slow compared to pure C programs.

It depends. KDE3 under Debian was much faster than Fedora Core with Gnome 2.

C++ is definitely a drawback for a long time. Not because it is 'bloated', but because of how ABI changes were handled. It is all history now.

Nowadays the major problem with KDE is that by the time it is stable a new QT major version gets released and along with that it essentially gets a major rewrite, which takes years to stabilize and once it does a new QT version is released, etc etc etc.

Kde3 was already free when Ubuntu started.

KDE still seems pretty bloated

One person's "bloat" is another person's "batteries included".

KDE Wallet though?

What about it?

Funny, I used to think it was bloat but then I got to use it to store passwords for remote servers accessed with ssh, and now it's a nice 'batteries included' for me, as GP mentioned. It has become so because it is nicely and seamlessly integrated.

Gnome has the same thing, and it's equally as annoying. Also you can just disable it if you really don't want it.

Cinnamon includes all the batteries I've ever needed without feeling bloated

I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.

Are you suggesting that avoiding client-side window decorations in favor of the traditional server-side approach is bad UX?

*It causes bad UX.

I think clunky and bloated both describe KDE actually

They're not arguing with you, they're yes-anding you. Read as "ah a one word opinionated description...let's steelman that. here's my one-word opinionated term: clunky. Here's what smells make me get that vibe. What smells contribute to the bloat one? :)"

Doubling down on short judge-y stacatto contributes to an aggressive "I don't need to tell you" vibe that would be sassy and fun, maybe, if in person. In writing online comments, it just means we need to get a 3rd comment from you before we get to anything I'm interested in (I don't particularly care what your one word description is, I don't know you)

Are you being purposefully controversial (to not say trollish)?

To the exact contrary to what you assert, one of the prominent argument against Gnome that I've been seing times and times again in DE debates, is the "dogmatic" opposition to SSD from the Gnome project.

xfce remains the best GUI for Linux (outside of the tiling WMs which are far superior). No I will never change my mind.

It's not bloated, it just has lots of options. If you like someone else to decide everything for you: buy a Mac or use gnome. But KDE is not for you then. Don't try to make it into something it was never meant to be.

I use Cinnamon. Less bloat, more coherent, still plenty of options

Yeah cinnamon is basically a remake of Gnome 2, from before the devs went batshit crazy and went more opinionated than Apple. It's not bad but I really prefer KDE, also because I think Qt is a much better desktop framework than GTK is.

But what things in KDE do you consider 'bloat'?

If you think that then don't install everything under the sun or choose a better distro. You can just install only Plasma Desktop, Doplhin and the handful of utilities you actually use, you know?

Gnome is a acquired taste, but it is also a lot less work to keep working then KDE or other desktop options.

There are a lot of people that bitch about it, but that is only because it is the most popular one and they think that Linux desktop is a zero sum game. They don't use Gnome most of the time and arguments tend to be parroting somebody else and probably out of date for years or just kinda made up conspiracy theories about Redhat or something.

The whole thing is pretty confused. Gnome being popular doesn't make KDE not be popular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com