noahadavis

Every library is overhead that you need to first understand. There's no "just writing a JS file" or just writing a C++/C#/Java/Python/etc. file.

This comes from different libraries being used for different things. KConfigXT uses XML to generate settings classes. Qt Widgets UI files are also XML based, but that comes from Qt and is separate from KConfigXT. I don't know what uses the metadata JSON files, but I know it's not Qt Widgets or KConfigXT.

Android started off being its own thing, except for the kernel. The Steam Deck is built on desktop Linux tech, so they would have to start over if they wanted to move away from that. That doesn't make their path guaranteed to be the same in the future, but it does make what you describe less likely.

KDE still uses QQC2 and Flickable. However, we do workaround Flickable's deficiencies by filtering mouse wheel input on QQC2 ScrollViews and setting the content X/Y values so that it moves more like a view in Qt Widgets. It's not ideal. I hope one day I or someone else will be able to fix Flickable's behavior upstream.

If KDE and GNOME are stuck, it's not because they can't innovate with their UIs enough with traditional ways of interacting with a computer. In fact, I don't think innovating in a way that doesn't involve new ways to interact (such as VR/AR) is very desirable to most users.

The truth is, most people don't want to install operating systems, even if they're free and easier to install than Windows. The only way to go further is to ship with hardware and for that combination of hardware and software to be in demand. On top of that, when the operating system/desktop environment has reached a decent baseline of general usability like KDE Plasma and GNOME have, the software ecosystem around the OS/DE is more of a limiting factor than the UIs of the OS/DE.

The fact that System 76 sells laptops could actually give their DE a significant advantage over other small DEs if they ship their own DE. It's unlikely to overtake KDE and GNOME since System 76 doesn't sell tons of laptops like Dell or other big hardware companies, but I guess never say never.

I don't expect instant world domination, but I hope the Steam Deck (which will ship KDE Plasma for its desktop mode) will greatly boost the popularity and developer community of KDE. With success, there is a chance at a snowball effect where new users who enjoy the product contribute and bring attention, which brings more new users, etc. All things considered, the share of people using the Steam Deck isn't going to be that big compared to Windows or even MacOS, but it is getting a lot of attention.

One of my friends from the KDE community (which I am also a part of) has written multiple articles about this on his blog. Here's one: https://pointieststick.com/2021/12/09/what-desktop-linux-nee...

> A desktop environment isn't that difficult to make, that's why we have so many.

We actually don't have that many and they actually are pretty difficult to make. Linux has quite a lot of window managers, but not complete desktop environments. The 2 most popular ones require a lot of maintenance. Even GNOME, which has gained a bit of a reputation for dropping features is very large in scope.

And now that we have PipeWire, getting low latency audio is extremely easy too.

> I mean, what are you going to do, use a 3rd party client for Google's services? You're not allowed to - at least not on the same service level.

3rd party Google Drive clients have been the only type of Google Drive client on Linux for a long time.

Probably the only good graphical client is this one and it's actually pretty good: https://www.insynchq.com/

Sorry, but I completely disagree. If what you were saying was true, then physical synths would have the same problems in live performances. I think the problem is not the instrument, but rather how people are used to using the instrument. If you're used to mixing synths for stereo, then your ideas for how to make a synth sound good beyond stereo are much weaker.

Also, there's so much you can do to the sound of a synth and so many powerful synths out there. If you're complaining about the sound being too smooth or simple, you just haven't played around with powerful synths often enough.

You don't see the side-effects of destabilizing a government as potentially disastrous for an economy? Governments and economies can have many different forms, but there are clear cases where destabilizing one will destabilize the other and ultimately lead to mass suffering for a period of time. Imagine what would happen if a government in a place like the Middle East or parts of Africa collapsed. History has shown that a new government often doesn't rise up from the ashes without lots of tears and bloodshed. What do you think happens to people's standards of living? How much of their time and money do you think it will take just to get back what they used to have?

Does making governments less stable really not make economies less stable?

Apparently they are not associated with Andrew Lee anymore. They were sold to Kape (formerly Crossrider) in 2019.

The apps are already individual things that don't depend on each other, except in some cases where KParts are used. A KPart is kind of like an application turned into a library. Usually, this is not something users need to be concerned about. The integrated terminal in the Dolphin file manager is a Konsole KPart. openSUSE (and probably others like Fedora and Ubuntu) actually split Konsole into `konsole` and `konsole-part`, so it's not a problem.

That sounds like an Arch packaging issue, a misunderstanding of what the packages actually do or you're installing a metapackage and not realizing it.

Which group would a DAW and plugins developed by a FOSS community like KDE or GNOME belong to?

Only KDE devs can merge MRs. We review, say that the patch looks good in a comment and then merge.

Affinity Designer also lacks features compared to Inkscape, so paying more (than nothing) does not necessarily get you a better product.

This kind of finger pointing is really not useful or constructive. Who do you think designed the interfaces that the author of the article prefers? Do you think he'd agree that designers —a whole class of professionals with a large diversity in skill and experience—are the fundamental problem? It's like saying that the developers took over in response to an article complaining about buggy software.

It's not related to the part of the article you quoted, in case you don't know. Generally, you can't use anything other than the GTK file picker in GTK apps. If you use flatpaks with XDG portal support or the app implements XDG portal support (e.g., Firefox), then they can use the KDE file picker.

LOC requirements are easy to abuse and LOC != amount of originality

You're correct that KDE's design group isn't organized from the top down. While that might be a problem for a company, I think it's actually a good thing for a community of volunteers because communities need to grow. Everyone has their own lives outside of the work they do for KDE, so it's important that the work load is spread across many people. Anyone can start start designing for KDE, you just need to talk to other KDE designers and submit patches.

I am a fairly new KDE designer who started contributing icons in the spring of 2018 because it was easy and fun.

Probably virtual reality. I tried it for the first time at an art museum a week ago and while I was only floating around an artist's 3D painting-like impression of her home, it still felt pretty magical.

This already exists in desktop environments. Of course, not all desktop environments have the same features. I know KDE Plasma has this. It can't work with all apps though, for the same reasons that MacOS and Windows can't have a feature like this that works with all apps. That is, unless you want to translate keystrokes into other keystrokes on a per app basis.

It won't happen because Linux users like it the way it is. It is consistent, it's just not the way you want it to be. I love middle click paste. It makes sense that it doesn't follow the text cursor because the mouse is separate and this adds extra flexibility. Ctrl+A should select everything and put the cursor at the end.

Actually, in some apps the cursor disappears and in some the cursor goes to the end, but the behavior of what happens when text is selected is always the same.

I put my terminal based music player (cmus) in a Quake-style drop-down terminal (Yakuake). It's easy to access, doesn't add any clutter, works with ReplayGain, and it works with media keys.

I can't send you links, but you can make GUIs using GTK and QML. The QML crate by cyndis is no longer being maintained, but there is a new one by White Oak. Just add "qml" or "gtk-rs" to your project's cargo.toml file.

I've been using KDE neon which actually works very well. The core of it is LTS Ubuntu (currently 16.04), but the Plasma DE gets updates pretty much every day and KDE apps get updated about once a week. Except for one time when my proprietary nvidia driver stopped working after a big update to the DE (now I use the nouveau driver), it has been pretty much flawless in terms of stability.