What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.
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.
They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.
(And, threatening to move back to something like openbox, because gnome is too simple and degraded, is extra hilarious)
> consistent
Ah yes, very consistent with two entirely different sets of window borders (GTK3 and Adwaita).
I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that to use QT you are still stuck with either C++ or Python, whereas there are a ton of gnome apps being written in JS and Rust now.
Where's Vala?
Meanwhile, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?
... most Qt apps use QML / QtQuick which is based on ES7 ?
It's bad and I hate it, but at least it's not surprising.
I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?
I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.
I look it up, stumble on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4, 7 years old issue -- I can already tell this is gonna be a joy; scroll down some, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4#note_1..., and audibly groan.
> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!
But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.
And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.
I'm moving to KDE, thank you very much.
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!"
It is apparently not important enough for anyone to actually work on it. But maybe it is for you?
If you understand the risks, you can do it yourself.
I don't think that's true. Other than with ZFS-native encryption, which I grant has been less reliable, it's been rock solid for a very long time. And I've run >1PB of postgres databases on it professionally, so I feel fairly comfortable in that assertion.
> There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.
The default Ubuntu installer at least used to support ZFS, which is the point.
Also, you are not the typical user installing the OS from the default installer. I am not saying ZFS is bad, but not including it in the default installer is no big deal.
However.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=btrfs+data+loss&ia=web - first 2 results about data loss or corruption, especially on power loss
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ext4+data+loss&ia=web - first 2 results about data loss or corruption/truncation on power loss or OS crash
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=xfs+data+loss&ia=web - first result about data loss when losing power
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=zfs+data+loss&ia=web - First result is someone claiming data loss after setting sync=disabled on a single disk over usb with slog+l2arc on the same disk, and scrub turns up 50k errors; i.e. they did everything they could to hold it wrong, and in the end their disk physically failed, which I really don't think is a ZFS problem. Second result is a stack overflow thread discussing why ZFS doesn't fail the usual ways. Third result is official docs. If I go down the rest of the first page of duckduckgo results, it's mostly discussions of how ZFS protects against data loss, with the one exception of https://forum.level1techs.com/t/solved-zfs-monthlong-changes... ... which looks bad until you realize the use didn't mount a filesystem, and once they found it they recovered their data just fine.
So no, based on random web searches I conclude that ZFS remains head and shoulders above every other option.
---
Edit: If I search for "zfs Linux data loss hacker news", I get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181 which appears to contain zero stories of losing data on ZFS, although there's a bunch of stories about BTRFS doing so. Most of the remaining results are news stories about a single bug from 2023 and one story about ZFS's native encryption having problems (which I grant is a footgun).
I currently think ZFS is quite robust, but who knows never hurts to learn more..
ZFS on Linux is not, so much so that Oracle the company that owns it refuses to officially support it. It's a fairly well known issue.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/10/zfs_on_linux_data_los...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16797644
https://zfs-discuss.zfsonlinux.narkive.com/8zTNgJHA/i-have-l...
If one knows they want/need a zfs root on their Desktop, then they are likely capable of getting the KDE packages setup through the main Ubuntu installer without needing the Kubuntu installer.
And yes you can do that but I don't use Ubuntu a lot and I hate gnome so obviously I tried setting it up through kubuntu when I wanted to give it a spin.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu anyway due to systemd and snap but these days I'm on FreeBSD as daily driver and very happy with it. It was just when I was last deciding on an OS that I tried it. Also tried arch and manjaro and a few others but I didn't feel at home there either.
This is an inaccurate description. GNOME is a copy of (the worst parts of) Windows 8 and Mac OS, not just Mac OS.
But seriously, GNOME isn't that bad, and there are people who genuinely enjoy it over KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great.
However, I do agree that KDE is probably a saner default than GNOME, if the goal is to make the transition from Windows to Linux easier. GNOME is (probably) less buggy than KDE, simply due to having less features overall, but the UX is going to be completely alien and off-putting to most casual users.
I hope in the future KDE overtakes GNOME to become the "standard linux" experience.
Some people consider Cinnamon to be a GNOME 2 spiritual successor while still using a lot of GNOME 3 stuff under the hood. https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/
It's not perfect, of course, and it may not be to your liking, but that's just personal preference. I don't particularly care for KDE, but I don't go around spouting vitriol about it for no good reason.
So you can make KDE the default but you’re going to be forced to ship a smattering of gnome/gtk apps anyway with different ui/ux and looks.
On the other hand, you can easily ship a GNOME desktop without even shipping qt libraries at all.
My only dependents of GTK are Qalculate, Chromium and Firefox. I do not use the GTK version of Qalculate (but the Arch package includes it anyway) and I would never count modern web browsers as having a significant dependency on any UI toolkit. Am I missing out on a high quality Linux desktop experience?
Even GIMP, the one GTK app I would never expect to be surpassed by a KDE app, is being outdone by Krita these days.
As I wrote above, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?
Then there are the "quality" apps that have always been on the Qt / KDE side of the fence: Kdenlive, FreeCAD, Krita, Scribus, qBittorrent, Qt Creator, Dolphin... And that's free software. It is a slam dunk for Qt on the commercial side.
It gutted itself because quite frankly it was anemic at best. I was a heavy KDE 3 user back then and I vastly preferred it compared to gnome 2, but as a long time linux user I also recognize that ALL desktop linux solutions were pretty rough back them. This "gutting" was certainly painful and questionable but what we have today, KDE 6 (it also went trough painful changes in KDE 4) and GNOME 49 are leagues ahead of what we had back them and I honestly think it's important for both of these DE to remain distinct.
> And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
It feels nothing like MacOS because it doesn't have 40 years of macintosh baggage in it, resulting in it being much more approachable for PC/windows users. I dare say GNOME earns it's distinction of being neither mac or windows, but it's own thing. It is very usable and approachable across beginners and advanced users, but lacks that depth you encounter in the competition.
Don't worry, they will tell you."
It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.
GNOME is polarizing with its feature minimalism and non-traditional desktop, and many people therefore are unhappy it's the default choice in all the big distros.
This was back around the time Gnome 3 came out.
Oh and when I switched to Plasma two years ago, a GNOME user I used to be friends with came out of the woodwork to tell me how shit KDE is
keep your anecdotal stereotypes to yourself bud. Maybe the real anecdote is that the people you know are unpleasant?
notably, I'm not in contact with the people I've told this story about, anymore.
Considering Gnome 3 released like three years after that it makes sense that he you would have discouraged you from using KDE.
It took KDE many years to recover from that. Of course using Gnome 3 instead is a bit extreme. Even broken KDE 4 was probably preferable to that. He should have recommended Xfce or something.
KDE these days is pretty amazing and for sure worth checking out. Though I sometimes still mourn the greatness that was KDE 3.5 even to this day and I am rocking Cinnamon these days.
That is not an excuse to talk shit about a FOSS project. You can say that "you found it buggy and don't recommend using it, but try it out if you want to".
But you seem to have other experiences, I can't say anything about that.
> It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.
You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem.
Also, parent comment wasn't "shitting on" GNOME. They were criticizing the design, the first time user experience, and the decisions of downstream projects on which software to center. You are kinda shitting on other users though, IMO, by reframing valid criticisms of GNOME in terms of personal attacks.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221004085739/https://twitter.c...
Discussing in semi-private forums if other projects have enough resources to implement certain features is not rooting for other projects to fail. But good that you could dig up a quote from 3 years ago!
"You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem."
I don't understand what you mean here.
And I only hate it for being the default option. I believe it hasn't gotten its position based on technical merit or user preference but because Ubuntu is pushing it at such, plus I also hate Ubuntu and the company behind it.
Like if people genuinely like Gnome, I don't understand it but that is fine, we are all different. I would just love to see more fair play.
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 migrated my non-technical mom from windows to Ubuntu in 2005 and my daily support questions on how to do this and that went to once a few weeks. Gnome 2 and Firefox was very simple. The OpenOffice stability was also great when Microsoft switched to ribbon.
Eventually I got her on a Mac and she hasn’t asked a question since. She keeps buying new ones ever since.
The impression might, of course, be mistaken.
I get it, but it's unfortunately not true.
The amount of folks I've seen complain about their Windows pirate copy of Photoshop CS6 not working on Linux so they will go to Mac over the years has been quite silly.
I usually tell them “if you have to use Adobe, then move on. If you don’t care that much, there are plenty of free/affordable programs with feature parity (or better) for Linux against CS6.” I mean it’s pretty old!
Uhhhh it does?
https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png
https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-sta...
https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew...
https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho...
I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.
It has been over 10 years since I stopped being a KDE fanboy and became just a regular fan, but I remember that during my flame-war era, many features from KDE would often appear in Mac OS and Windows and their most popular applications (such as iTunes).
These days I don't care so much, I use KDE and I'm too old to switch.
Especially that start menu with the tiles on windows is very different (and horrible because the default doesn't look like that screenshot, it's filled with ads, news and other crap)
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.
KDE is a much more sensible default for the highly technical person who is likely to install Linux themselves. There are other great options if you want something more locked down and noob proof. KDE really is the most relevant choice for default for most distros atm.
On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.
A mitigation for advanced modes is to have a big bright red "get me the hell out of this to a normal state" button. Making it easy for a human to get back to the normal steady-state reduces the risk of an advanced mode and gently encourages exploration and experimentation, if it is always trivial to get back to what you're used to. This means that configuration changes can't ever be fully destructive though, which requires quite a bit of design and engineering.
And she is in fact a grandma.
Problem solved: Installed the latest Slackware stable (with yours truly as root for essential maintenance) equipped with the latest KDE 3.x environment. Had no complaints.
In fact I don't understand why people are rooting for Linux on the desktop. I personally don't even want that to happen because it would quickly become so dumbed down and commercialised that it would become the same trash that is windows and mac. Because normal users just want to pay someone to take care of things for them and that someone will want to make ever more money. Meaning app stores, services, lock-in, advertising and such crap. So what you get is basically like ChromeOS. Easy mode for users, totally locked in to their warm and fuzzy walled garden, total corporate surveillance and completely evil to power users like you and me.
I'm very happy if the majority of consumers stays away because their wants and needs are completely opposite to ours. All the things that make Linux great will not apply to whatever they will use.
Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.
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.
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.