lunar_rover

NAT also solves the dynamic address issue. With GUA I need to deal with both dynamic prefix and randomised suffix that can be changed by seemingly unrelated things when opening ports to the internet.

From my understanding the goal is to prevent pirates and hackers from modifying the game's binary.

I have no idea why would anyone want to do that on Nintendo Switch though, Switch 1 doesn't have any headroom and Switch 2 OS security hasn't been defeated yet.

> But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent.

Well yes, I do agree with this. Internally it's mostly consistent, at least more so than Windows. Never analysed its UI structures though.

> I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible).

As a platform, ensuring applications running on top of it stay consistent to varying degree is the job of the desktop/OS IMO. To what degree depends on the context, https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/#con... is a great read.

Even games need it, missing input field features has plagued PC games for decades and can be crippling for input method users, Skyrim's console needs mods to support copy and paste. Custom mouse acceleration curves is the reason everyone disabled it, zero acceleration is the easiest way to make different games handle mouse input consistently.

A shame Linux isn't standardised enough.

I second this. To me the styling looks like tags and conveys the opposite meaning.

Metro was created partly to run smooothly on cheap Atom tablets and Windows Phones. Then Microsoft shifted their focus elsewhere and iOS 7/OS X Yosemite happened so they have all the reasons to stay flat.

Updated apps look fine, but the majority aren't. And with that bizarre "Show More Options" nesting in the Windows 11 context menu it almost seemed like Microsoft is no longer capable of upgrading old components in place.

The problem with things from the Linux world is that they never reached the height of commercial desktops to begin with.

If you really enjoy worse Windows XP UX with hamburger menus in recent versions then by all means go ahead, it does function.

California has both vendors and clients that are big enough to warrant immediate compliance. A very measurable chunk of Linux is from corporations, most major advancements are corporate backed in some way.

> Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?

No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.

Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.

> What else do you want?

No alignment issues, menus sorted by professional designers, easier to learn UX like ribbon menus and a lot more.

Feel like the design issues stem from it being shaped by existing power users. Familiarity tend to downplay design issues so stability took priority, even though the UX never should've been stabilised in the first place.

Intel intentionally ripped ECC out of the sweet spot products to charge premium and unfortunately they succeeded.

Pentium G4560 supports ECC, Core i7 10700 doesn't.

> The project don't have much funding to hire a UI/UX designer IMHO.

Well this is the point. I was countering the claim that flat UI doesn't require any design talent to look passable.

The beginners are long time workspace and school users who were requesting features already in the product.

A passable looking modern flat UI has a lot behind it, just like skeuomorphism and anything in between.

Unless something like https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.12.0/spectacle-noti... is what you consider to be passable looking of course.

It's quality issue from my experience. Nobody ever bothered with polishing the defaults and the "option bombardment" is really bad incoherent design instead of having too many things.

I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.

KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.

VSCode needs Electron which is too big IMO. It's also a specialised code editor instead of a general text editor, with features like builtin terminal and traditional menus instead of ribbons.

For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market initially it's likely network effect in action.

Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.

Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.

If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.

"Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS."

Sounds like a recipe for troubles. Web UI is designed to be scalable, why not scale to platform standard sizes automatically?

Window management mostly works fine, but app design is years behind.

KDE Dolphin has a static toolbar like Finder, with its config menu being two lists like some Microsoft toolbars, and the available items list is sorted alphabetically.

The flat view switcher is multiple separate items, named directly after their corresponding view type, one called list, another called icons and so on.

So if you want a Finder style view switcher, you first need to know it exists beforehand because the naming is confusing, then you need to know how many views are available beforehand because they're separate items, and finally you need to hunt them down because the list is alphabetical.

This is pretty much the quality you can expect when using KDE software.

Another example is breadcrumbs, the current folder doesn't have an arrow, so you can't browse deeper with it without perhaps expanding folders, unlike on Windows 7. Side bar favourites also replace the top folder, so if you browse the home folder with it you'll often find yourself suddenly unable to use it.

Canonical and Red Hat have been modernising things for a long time, albeit slowly. Most funds went into server components.

As for the desktop community… Well, it has a severe lack of professionals.

> what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

Management features like application based firewall. Dedicated views in explorer tailored for common file types, automatic view type based on content, plus tile view. Proper title bar customisation. Contextual Ribbon toolbars and to be honest, good menus in general. Have a professional UI designer try KDE and I'm pretty sure they'll have a migraine. Also Win32 in general, Wayland still has a loooong way ahead of it.

Outlook supports having multiple arbitrary email addresses as well as allowing login from only one of them.

The most common use case for mobile data servers is probably pwned cheap/old phones forming DDoS swarms. Pure P2P over internet is very rare on mobile, no sense not blocking ingress from the perspective of ISPs.

Apple is almost purely customer products, they don't have the resources to compete with the giants in this field.

Their image classification happens on-device, in comparison Google Photos does that server side so they already have ML infra.

You need tons of effort, plenty of experience in the field and a single unified direction to get them done well, and unfortunately the Linus Torvalds of Design currently does not exist.

Many underestimate just how much is behind everyday basic UIs.

Even the biggest native Linux desktop projects suffer from this. KDE is typical death by a thousand papercuts, GNOME tried but their amateurism is clearly visible.

Are we reaching the death of UI design? Feel like we're now at the point where being mid-bad makes something one of the best for many.

I miss Windows 7 and OS X.

Vista had the right direction, Windows 7 merely continued on it and it became one of the best operating systems ever.

Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.

I don't think any of them are like Tahoe TBH.

KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.

GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.

GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.

Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.

With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.

Always nice to see progress.

I hope KDE can have more design people working on it. Things like toolbars are often overlooked despite their importance.

It's not going anywhere without funding, unless you believe early KDE 5 circus UI is somehow the best thing ever. And as the others mentioned the nagging popup is once per year.

Both GNOME and KDE are at the state where unmaintained core apps exist the last time I checked. KDE basing itself on Qt offloaded the largest chunk of behind the scenes development from them which is their biggest advantage compared to GNOME.

Wish Pantheon can have more attention, but I digress.