KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users.

2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it.

I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KDE and Gnome being either too similar or not similar enough and they are confused.

I agree that it would be great to have it as a first-class citizen in more distros, but I guess the maintenance burden is not negligible. I'm glad Fedora promoted it though.

Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure.

IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second.

Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users.

Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when they need to run some random command-line tool. Plain stock Ubuntu.

And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.

It is surprisingly elegant and polished now. There’s a couple rough edges - the settings menu needing the apply button on every change like a form is weirdly ancient, and notifications are a bit noisy, but overall I could see myself ditching macOS for it.

Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.

There’s a reason for that: KDE has more irregular release schedule than GNOME. KDE folks are working on that, so expect situation to change.

Just enough eye candy to make it feel pleasant, and yet also very fast and responsive on even a potato of a computer.

Anyhow, happy anniversary from a long-time KDE user!

   nix-shell -p prismlauncher

    winget install KDE.Dolphin

What makes Linux great is also its biggest handicap, in my opinion, when it comes to User Experience: the fragmentation of UI frameworks and libraries.

I imagine having this control between Qt, GTK and other UI libraries and electron-type-apps os difficult if not impossible.

I’m not sure how they do it, i suspect it’s mostly a manual grind for configuring the most common shortcuts and apps, but there might be some idea there that can be reused for the eMacs setup.

And Control-W will always erase word no matter the application?

This is actually a major reason I use KDE: I can, with some effort, change keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicting with terminal Control keys. It doesn't solve the textbox problem, though.

(I don't use Emacs bindings, but Control-W erase word came in the ‘new’ TTY driver in BSD2 in 1983 — predating Windows 1.0, incidentally — likely copying TOPS-20.)

- https://github.com/bpozdena/OneDriveGUI

Gaming works great on Linux, arguably better than on Windows. Show stoppers are mostly aggressive anti-cheat or DRM stuff so multiplayer can still suck but for anyone doing single player it is amazing. I have a windows installation I can dual boot into but I haven't in like half a year, I prefer gaming on Linux.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon has a traditional Desktop close to Windows. I highly recommend checking it out.

I used to run complicated setups back in the days, with black/flux/openbox or even enlightenment (16), but now I don't really have the interest or time for tweaking DEs.

KDE has sane defaults and looks and feels like Windows UI from the best era. It just works.

GNOME is like a tool that was designed to fit the average user so if you are not the average user (like you know the joke where the average person has 1 testicle) then you have to mold yourself to fit into GNOME (or try to hack it with unsuported extensions that might make it more tolerable) in KDE you have nobs to tweak it to fit you smoothly (like for example with one checkbox I can make the Left Alt to be a Ctrl button so i do not bend my hand and fingers to use my many Ctrl+keys shortcuts).

IMO use GNOME only if you are the typical GNOME user, that prefer to bend themselves over and not to adapt the tool to fit . Avoid KDE if too many options cause you some anxiety or buffer overflow.

Just to give you an opposite perspective...I was a long time Kubuntu / KDE Neon user (almost 10 years) and shifted to Gnome couple of years back (Ubuntu 22.04), now running 24.04. It's been very stable and out of the way. I am not sure why people are complaining about UI, for me it's barely visible on my two screens. All open-source and proprietary apps I use run well and without glitch. It took me an hour to get used to the "Gnome" way when I shifted.

Gnome is more opinionated. There are fewer options overall, the core apps are generally much simpler, and it assumes a specific way of interacting with your computer. You can change this with extensions, but if you are dead set on a specific workflow and need to venture beyond a small set of widely-used and well-supported extensions then it may feel like you're swimming upstream.

I personally prefer Gnome because I don't mind trying out new workflows and it ended up being a good fit. But I understand why many "hacker types" would prefer KDE, and (assuming they've ironed out stability and release scheduling issues) I agree with other comments that KDE would make for a better default experience, especially for people coming from Windows.

Thankfully, both exist and you can try them and see what works for you!

Last time I used KDE as my main desktop was v3.x, I switched away once v4.0 was released (at launch it was slow, unstable, and lacked many features). But it seems KDE 6 is likely to fit my personality more than recent Gnome versions.

Imagine asking for tech support as a newbie, and giving your laptop model and OS and version is still not enough info.

But,

> When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones,

At least this is changing, although not true "desktop linux," students are mostly given Chromebooks, and grow up on google docs/g workspace so that early familiarity with Windows + Office is dissapearing.

It's not going to be a good thing long term though, I already see it with employees where I work (I'm in IT). We have plenty of younger employees that don't even have computers at home if they aren't gamers. They are familiar with iOS/iPad OS only. Windows + Office is a mystical black box, and file management/file systems are a foreign concept.

That, IMO, makes Linux desktop adoption that much more difficult. At least Windows->Linux you can take a lot of basic concepts with you. MobileOS->Not mobile OS is much more difficult.