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Comment by cykros | Hacker News Reader

I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.

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Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.

It has felt quite good to be a KDE long-timer watching all this unfold.

I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.

Bad compilation options, and/or bad driver/firmware interactions.

I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?

If everything else fails, there is still https://www.trinitydesktop.org btw.

KDE lost some corporate support when SUSE changed their default to GNOME in about 2005(?). I think it sees some use in the automotive world but aside from that it's all volunteer work.

I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.

I’m sorry, but the release of Plasma, around the same time IIRC, was not without controversy.

KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid

It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.

But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy."

Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.

Indeed, this is the dirty secret and shame of our industry that doesn't get acknowledged enough. We are so prone to group-think and follow-the-thought-leaders that as my parents would have said, "would you follow them off a cliff?" the answer as an industry is a clear "yes." We rarely seem to learn from the lessons of the past either.

IIRC the true story behind that dark period is that Microsoft was making vague murmurings about suing everyone for cloning Windows XP, so everyone felt they had to run away from that.

The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)

I have to admit, I really, really liked Unity. The HUD feature (which let you 'search' in menus for any command) was really useful to me.

Still around, still works, and still in active development on mobile -- that version is in Debian now.

People don't like when I say this, but it's just another piece of evidence that mobile phones ruined everything.

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