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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

> A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user – what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.

Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.

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Yeah, this may be a case of "this project is really important to me so it must be really important to the users, too".

That was my thought exactly. I don’t even remember last time I looked at the desktop because I always have some app open full screen.

I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets

"Desktop" here means "desktop environment" aka the whole shell, not just the literal desktop part of the desktop metaphor.

To be fair i think in KDE terms, the desktop refers to the whole experience: the panels, the notifications, the menus, the decorations, the file manager, etc. Also to be fair i think widgets are still mostly focused on the actual desktop part of the "desktop environment"

Sorry to be annoying, i do think the idea in general is bad, i just think i have a better idea of what the devs are thinking if i consider the idea where the entire desktop environment as a whole reacts to how you use it instead of making every single nanoscale decision user-configurable (KDE) or deciding you know better than the user, your way or the highway (Gnome). I don't think they mean the actual like desktop view specifically, or building a dashboard

KDE does a lot more than launching apps and window management. Mounting storage devices, settings, widgets for managing a whole lot of stuff (power, printers, networks...), managing remote file systems, a huge integrated set of apps (from PDF reader to file manager), managing switching displays....

This is a proposal to be discussed. KDE activities are a useful feature few people use because its different and a pain to set up so something that might benefit from a but of automation. Given KDE's approach it will be configurable and optional. The people behind i seem to be drawing on past work on looking at what users actually liked.

I still remember opening Firefox one day to test something (I primarily use Vivaldi), and since it had recently updated itself, it showed its "what's new" page, with the big words "Thank you for loving Firefox!".

Eww.

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