Linus Torvalds switches back to KDE | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds switches back to KDE

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37 pointsrecoiledsnake39 comments

This sounds like a scene from the movie "To Rome with Love" where this normal guy is followed around by reporters and he tells them how he likes to brush his teeth and exactly which kind of toast he ate in the morning.

Not sure why it is interesting to know that Linus (or anybody else) is installing a piece of software to try it out. Perhaps a livestreaming site where people would go "Whoa, did you see the way he opened the browser" would have some popularity too!

He's not just installing something to try it out. He is announcing that he is installing something, and in that way both promoting the software he is installing and de-promoting (?) the software he is switching from.

You could read between the lines that he isn't completely happy with XFCE or he wouldn't be seeking new DE. And overall that was fairly positive "first impressions review" of KDE from Linus.

You mean, something like justin.tv?

Some people need to know that their decisions are followed by famous people, otherwise they feel insecure.

Except he's not a random famous guy. He's the creator of Linux, and a very respected hacker, so it's not that sheepish to be interested in the tools he chooses for his work.

...best Linux DEs I know are:

1. latest Mac OS + ssh-ing into your Linux machine 2. a Windows 7 + ssh-ing into your Linux machine 3. latest Mac OS or Windows 7 + Linux server in the VM

(...now fastening my seatbelt and gettin ready to be downvoted all the way to hell:P )

I upvoted you. Didn't see that comin, huh ?

Because OSX terminal bindings aren't completely insane and broken. (This is a sarcastic comment)

iTerm2

I actually agree with you. Macbook air + iterm2 + linode is a very good combination IMHO. You get a good GUI and a developer friendly linux environment.

I'm curious, but what advantages does that bring?

The advantages of pure Linux are:

- tiling window managers (xmonad, dwm) - only need to learn/administer one OS - works without network connectivity OR doesn't require an overpowered machine to run both OS's in one - plus all the other advantages of Linux, like apt-get being a first class citizen

Perhaps you could explain why you feel this way? That might make it less trollish and make this into a productive conversation. If the only response you can anticipate is downvoting, you're doing it wrong.

...to calm things down, I actually believe using one OS for all your needs can work for most people that have all their skills in one "bucket" ...but not when you're put in the position of doing devops + web development + design (and yeah Adobe software is important and hard/impossible to replace for 90% of people doing pro design - if only for being able to edit and send back edited copies to your colleagues) + desktop app development (either Windows or Mac OS...), because you're going to use 2 OSs no matter what (and it's going to be Mac OS or Windows + a Linux or BSD...) + using some finance shit that REQUIRES Microsoft Office, and when you're already at this point, the only sensible solution, perfomance-wise (and the only one that actually works if you throw in some occasional video editing in the mix with premiere or after-effects...) is putting the Linux in the VM, because you need a "monster" machine to do it the other way around (and a "monster" machine under 2 kgs / 4.5 punds and with good battery life is not available right now...), so here's one winded road that got me here...

And yes, I believe either KDE or XFCE are DEs that can work for me (XMonad is cool but I'm not into tiling WMs...) if I were to only do server-side dev and devops...

Agreed and its what I do with windows. My rationale is that power management works properly, I have to test against windows anyway and all the Linux desktops suck, oh and I need to use office still.

Offtopic but how you are supposed to find interesting G+ comments? There is no way to sort or filter them, and there isn't even threading so you must basically read every one of the 500 comments to see if there was anything interesting in there? What's the point if +1'n stuff if the stuff with lots of +1 doesn't get promoted in anyway?

Google+ comments are annoying don't you think? There's hundreds of them under every popular post, and they add exactly zero useful information. The real name policy appears not to stop people from posting trivial bullshit like "$X FTW" (surprise, surprise). Google demonstrates again (see the youtube trainwreck) that it can't handle comments in a way that furthers interesting discussions while pushing the one-liners and trolls down to the bottom.

Google can't, yes, but who can (genuine question)? Even control-freak Apple can't stop all the noise in App Store reviews (even though they all have to be screened by someone at Apple before appearing online). App Store reviews are literally 98% noise and 2% signal (all buried in 43rd page)...

I'd love to know who has been able to do this. Maybe Yelp? (I don't use Yelp as it's not available in my country, so I don't know).

Reddit, Slashdot, or even just HN all have better systems than what Google is doing. Sure, making something perfect is extremely hard, but even a 80% solution would be great for the G+ and YT users.

"trying out" != "switches". Let's see how long he can stand it.

Very true. XFCE & LXDE are the cleanest DEs by far (among the top five)

From what I've seen, mate (the Gnome 2 fork) looks decent too. After the disaster that was Gnome 3 I've went away from full DEs to a simple but great tiling window manager (awesome, that's the name of it as well as the description). Since 99% of my use cases really involve just a terminal or firefox that's probably as good as it gets for me :) No bloat, just great usability without ever needing the mouse - which is especially great on a laptop since touchpads have always been suboptimal pointing devices.

Although I don't use it day to day, I was rather impressed by Cinnamon (on Mint). It's got the GNOME 3 visual wizziness, without all the usability problems that GNOME 3 suffers from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_%28user_interface%29

The Cinnamon desktop is a Kickstarter worthy effort. I believe it supersedes Linux Mint in its possible impact, because it is potentially usable on any Linux flavor.

Cinnamon is great. I'm actually using a gnome classic DE right now, but i suspect that I'll switch to cinnamon when it becomes more polished.

Indeed. I've tried all desktop environments on Linux.

I have finally settled on a Windows 7 machine with PuTTY and Firefox. That appears to be the best desktop environment for Linux.

Next Hacker News: Lady Gaga switches back to iPhone.

When ubuntu moved to Unity i started using XFCE, but since 12.04 i'm surprised how much Unity has grown on me, i use it every day.

KDE seems over complicated, i have never got on well with it.

I don't know why more people don't just use tiling window managers. It's a bit confusing at first but now I couldn't be happier. I used LXDE for a long time then realised - why don't I just use dwm to open stuff, and actually get a window manager that arranges my windows to maximise screen space usage?

"I don't know why more people don't just use tiling window managers. It's a bit confusing at first [...]"

That pretty much sums it up. I believe it's fair to say that casual users are (often) adverse to dramatical change--and switching from a point-click-and-move to a system that manages it all for you can be a bit crazy.

Well that's a problem with culture, I guess. Once you get used to a decent tiling WM (I'm using herbstluftwm at the moment), they're absolutely fantastic and useful. I think the experience easily competes with OSX, maybe not on ease of use, but definitely on usefulness once there's some investment.

It's like people using GUI applications for things when they really aren't necessary. I'm constantly helping out people who are using, for instance, the GitHub Git client (which is great), because it abstracts away the logic of using a system and creates more issues itself.

We're not really talking about average day-to-day users here, we're talking about technical people (like Linus Torvalds), so the ability to spend time investigating a new paradigm isn't unreasonable.

Tell him its writern in C++ .... He will switch again ;)

Building graphical interfaces in C feels like carving a tree with a knife

Now, building them in C++ feels like carving a tree with a power drill. Better, but still not the right tool

And GTK makes C feel like C++, the bad parts I mean, without the good ones.

I think Android does it in a good way, browsers also made it easier to create nice interfaces, not sure how it works in IOS though.

I will vouch for your comment. I recently tried to knock up a simple GTK+ UI for something and it was utterly painful.

You can write GTK+ in pretty much any language, so if it was painful, you chose the wrong one.

I don't know. Take QT for example, I'm happy to risk blowing my leg off with c++ just because I feel really productive with Qt, it truly is a wonderfully productive library, and the external ecosystem is supportive, whatever complex visualisation I want to draw, I can often find a lib that's happy to draw into a qpixmap - c++ on its own or with boost etc. doesn't leave me feeling as productive.

GTK feels drawn out to me in comparison.

Exactly

Some libraries manage to iron out the difficulties of the language. QT and WxWidgets are examples of that.

GTK (on C) and Windows MFC are examples of how libraries can make it harder on the user.

I tried python and c. Both were horrid.

For writing GTK apps the language Vala seems like a good choice. It's a C# like language whose object system uses glib objects underneath the hood, this makes object-oriented C code (as required by GTK) look like a modern object-oriented language.

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