I disagree. KDE 6 is really good, and each point upgrade to 6 delivers an improvement.
Feels like my work box, except it isn't constantly showing me ads and pegging 2 cores with an anti-malware process of some kind.
I suppose some power users like that they can really do everything with it.
There is a middle ground between GNOME's minimalist wasteland and KDE's kitchen sink. And yet for some reason, the patch to add smart copy/paste to Konsole, like most modern terminals have and default to, has been stuck for years waiting for approval from the design team just to add a checkbox hidden in the settings.
I haven't daily driven KDE to see what it's truly like, but from a distance it doesn't seem to be doing anything revolutionary or truly new, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
I wrote in my OP that 'even on Linux, the changes happening are stuff like bugfixes and reducing jank; small incremental improvements that have already been done, but are just getting their final round of polish'. The comment I was responding to claimed disagree, and said that KDE does get improvements. I wanted to clarify what improvements those are, since I can't see why they would disagree with my original comment in the only improvements in KDE are 'stuff like bugfixes and reducing jank; small incremental improvements that have already been done, but are just getting their final round of polish'.
> We could do well with change on the desktop,
Sure, there's Apple Continuity, but looks like it was released 2014 (KDE Connect - 2013) and it's tightly locked to the Apple ecosystem. And yes, the 2013 version doesn't have the same feature parity or stability as the current one, but that's ok because we're not discussing bugfixes or polish.
It's innovative enough that GSConnect is the Gnome implementation of the KDE Connect.
I'm also pretty sure the basic feature set you're mentioning, like clipboard and file sharing, using your phone to control your desktop, was part of the 1.0 release. Are there any features in KDE Connect that are new-ish?
That said, props to KDE for actually making a feature that hadn't been done before. But if KDE Connect is the most recent example of genuine improvements in the desktop experience that aren't just fixes, that goes to show that nobody's actually doing anything significant (in a good way) to the desktop experience.
I used xfce for pretty much my entire life because yes, there's been very little meaningful improvement to the DE experience in 25 years. Modern KDE finally convinced me to switch, and it does feel like a much more mature, refined experience than the shit show that was past KDE. It's also stable and fast. You should give it a spin!
2: i3, hyprland or KDE meta-t or another good tiling window manager
This subthread started with you disagreeing with me, saying that KDE continually gets better with each point upgrade. Then I asked you what new features KDE has implemented that already in some other OS or DE, and that aren't polish and bugfixes, since one of my points in the OP was that Linux largely isn't improving through new features, but just through polish and bugfixes.
You pointed out tiling as a new feature, which I pointed out isn't a new feature at all (unless I'm just wildly off base). KDE might do it well, but it polishing and fixing a feature, or reimplementing a feature which already exists in another DE, or some combination of those two, is not making something new (maybe their tiling is really good and actually revolutionary, but then you should tell me that, and not just tell me to try it out!).
I'm not interested in trying out tiling, even if it's good. I've known about it for a while, so I don't understand why you're telling me I'm one of today's lucky 10000. I literally wrote that it isn't a new feature to me. I have no idea why you're telling me to try it out. I'm very happy using fairly plain Cinnamon. I'm interested in knowing whether or not KDE has implemented features that aren't already in some other OS or DE, and that aren't polish and bugfixes. That's why I asked that question.
This whole thread is me saying tiling is really good and a significant update.
But that’s not the only thing that KDE does that’s revolutionary and hard to find. I’ve written a whole blog on this, but to say a little here:
- full panel and widget customization with alternatives. Some panel designs are very space efficient and high-information, which you can’t find on Gnome, Windows or MacOS
- krunner, which lets you search everything all at once. Granted Apple has spotlight, but krunner is very good.
- activities, which is like virtual desktops on steroids. You can have completely different desktop configurations if you want, and switch between them.