[HN Gopher] Revisiting KDE
___________________________________________________________________
Revisiting KDE
Author : rc00
Score : 171 points
Date : 2023-01-15 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jackevansevo.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (jackevansevo.github.io)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Whereas on KDE applets typically quickly allow me to to perform
| the required action without having to dive into the full
| settings.
|
| Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to
| use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be
| precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and
| fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don't
| do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn't
| result in that.
|
| Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I
| use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which
| frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to
| switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don't see any
| "Small Icons" option, only the names of the themes).
|
| None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best
| "mainstream" DE experience on Linux.
| HN_is_for_gemes wrote:
| [dead]
| tmtvl wrote:
| _Looking back I 'm not sure the Oxygen theme has aged
| particularly well_
|
| Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version
| called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default
| Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect
| when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find
| absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons,
| for instance, have this nice glassy look).
|
| * https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.or...
| __float wrote:
| "Nice glossy look" is very Vista-era: it's has fallen out of
| fashion since then.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Who cares about fashion? If something looks good, it looks
| good, even if it's not fashionable. It's like saying the
| style of a nice Gothic cathedral has fallen out of fashion,
| it still looks better than a concrete and glass box.
| eointierney wrote:
| Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to
| scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly
| remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has
| provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of
| unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as
| beautiful as you wish it to be.
|
| And then there are the applications
| IshKebab wrote:
| > I think this is partially my fault for using Flatpak
| applications and expecting the desktop integration be 100%
| seamless.
|
| Ha yes, definitely your fault for expecting Linux desktop stuff
| to work seamlessly!
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished
| DE. It's a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I
| try KDE now I'm still disappointed, it doesn't take much to get
| the first crashes and bugs...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| XFCE is very customizable.
|
| There's a project called Trinity, which is essentially KDE 3.
|
| https://www.trinitydesktop.org
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've been running KDE 4 and 5 on a variety of different
| hardware since the day KDE 4 reached v4.0. Granted the first
| few releases of 4 were a little bumpy (as had been thoroughly
| discussed on the internet at the time) but it's been super
| stable for me ever since.
|
| Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro
| packing KDE badly? The few times I've tried Kubuntu (for
| example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it
| flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too.
|
| I'd also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily
| driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I
| wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with
| software rendering would work better (though if you're going to
| do that then you're probably better off with an older DE or
| WM).
|
| As an aside, I've been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my
| personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Nah, I have the same story. I spent a lot of that time
| distro-hopping and tried all sorts of combinations of
| hardware, different distributions, etc (for reasons unrelated
| to the KDE fiasco). KDE4 was extremely buggy on all of them,
| including the later KDE4 verions (and even earlier 5 IIRC).
| After reading comments like yours, I re-tried it several
| times (maybe 10 in total) and was always left disappointed.
| Maybe it's time to revisit once more (OTOH how many times do
| you touch the stove before learning not to do that anymore?)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not GP, but I was also KDE3 user who ran away after the KDE4
| (in my eyes) fiasco. I never went back because customizing
| and learning to use a desktop environment is an investment on
| my side, and if the DE doesn't respect that and doesn't
| understand why I use it, I will not waste my time with it.
| But hearing the praise in this thread, maybe I should give
| KDE another chance?
|
| I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too
| many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce
| and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Interesting that you mentioned GNOME because it was only a
| couple of years later that GNOME 3 was released and that
| was a far more significant change to the UX than KDE 3 to
| 4. Around that time there seemed to be a lot of changes to
| the FOSS DE landscape.
|
| I've not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a
| good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred
| that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal
| preference, though the leaner footprint was a big
| incentive.
|
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically
| boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day,
| but it's often interesting hearing what peoples preferences
| are.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I wasn't using Gnome before that so the changes didn't
| affect me much... :) Iirc I switched to xfce very quickly
| too.
|
| I agree, every person has a different set of preferences
| and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and
| not get in my way, and design is less important. But I
| still try to make my desktops look good.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| GNOME 3 and KDE 4 both committing usability seppuku at
| around the same time was really odd. Both these disasters
| were immediately preceded by the release of the first
| iPhone. I think maybe iOS broke the devs, made the KDE
| and GNOME devs feel inadequate so they started flailing
| around and hurt themselves in an attempt to reinvent
| things and prove to themselves that they could reinvent
| like Apple can.
| dmead wrote:
| I agree. It seems kde 4 was the reason it was really dropped
| from most of the major distros.
| jimbosis wrote:
| You may already be aware of the Trinity Desktop Environment,
| and if not:
|
| "The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop
| Environment (KDE) version 3.... Trinity is an independent
| fork..." (from the "About" page)
|
| https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php
|
| https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
| thom wrote:
| Logging in the morning, opening a website, a word doc and a
| spreadsheet in tabs in Konqueror, editing stuff over SSH in
| Kate. It genuinely felt like KDE was trying something new back
| then, creating a more object oriented desktop. I don't know how
| much of that survives but it was exciting at the time.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Try https://trinitydesktop.org/ then?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| KDE 5 is much better than KDE 4 was, but I agree that KDE still
| hasn't reacquired the heights they had in the 3.5 days. Things
| are still less configurable than they used to be. And Plasma is
| _still_ buggy for me, whenever I try to use Plasma I end up
| having to manually restart plasma-shell several times a month
| because it crashes and KDE doesn 't manage to start it again,
| leaving me with no task bar until I restart it manually...
|
| Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE
| applications are top-tier.
| oweiler wrote:
| For me KDE 3.5 was the epitome of Linux on the Desktop, KDE 4
| felt like a huge step backwards when introduced (may not be
| true anymore).
| jraph wrote:
| Agree, and KDE 5 is KDE 3.5, modern for me. Latest version of
| KDE 4 were already pretty good.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit
| of computing in the Windows 9x era.
|
| Exposed options make computing discovery possible.
|
| Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens
| a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system.
|
| This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone
| wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".
| drooopy wrote:
| "KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the
| spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era."
|
| I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer
| KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| That is what attracted me to KDE. However, in recent years
| there design philosophy has become more aligned with Windows
| and mobile. It seems more difficult to create skeuomorphic
| themes, now. The trend seems to be for dizzying, translucent,
| psychedelic themes, where figuring out what I can and cannot
| interact with is like a point and click adventure game, only
| without the joy. But this seems to be in line with KDE's new
| stated design goals: Make it easy to focus on
| what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the
| primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use
| color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or
| optional functions only when needed. Make complex tasks
| simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which
| your users can naturally feel empowered by your software. [0]
|
| To me, this feels like dumbing down, and this is disappointing
| for a powerful desktop. A desktop PC is such a vast and
| powerful utility that it's interface should be reasonably
| complex, like the cockpit of an airliner. I'm working with 14
| to 30 inch screens, I don't need the same UI as a 5" phone.
| Instead, we are following Musk's lead and hiding everything
| behind an Android-like system, with burger menus, disappearing
| UI elements, brightly coloured icons, and bouncy window
| animations. And even though KDE is still infinitely
| customizable, the vast majority of themes out there follow this
| trend. If anyone knows of a good skeuomorphic theme that still
| works, I'd love to see it.
|
| [0] https://develop.kde.org/hig/
| mindcrime wrote:
| _This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone
| wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience"._
|
| So VERY much this. I don't want an "experience" that's curated
| and chosen _for_ me. _I_ want to decide for myself how my
| desktop is going to look, feel, and work. And that is why I use
| KDE over Gnome, etc. KDE doesn 't assume I'm an idiot who needs
| all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options
| hidden away, yadda, yadda.
|
| You make it sound like Gnome assumes you're an "idiot who
| needs all the options to be hidden away".
|
| You couldn't be more wrong. Gnome assumes you're an normal
| "idiot", and then removes the options altogether.
|
| They aren't hidden, they're gone.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Fair enough. I haven't touched Gnome in like 15+ years, so
| I'm not real familiar with the state of that system.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Most users don't care but yes it's nice for the market to
| have something like this.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| IME they very much do care, they're simply not aware that a
| constantly changing user interface is not just something
| you have to deal with, like death or taxes. Every time I
| play tech support for friends and family it's the same
| story about how everything looks different yet again and
| how they can't find that thing that was right here just
| recently.
|
| (For myself I have cobbled together something that looks
| roughly like Windows 95 did decades ago, but doing that for
| others comes with its own problems, so not forcing that on
| anyone.)
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| _KDE doesn 't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options
| hidden away, yadda, yadda._
|
| Have you read KDE's new Human Interface Guidelines? Because
| that is exactly what they are doing, now.
| Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize
| elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing
| to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal
| additional information or optional functions only when
| needed. I know how to do that! --- Make things easier
| to learn by reusing design patterns from other applications.
| Other applications that use good design are a precedent to
| follow. Do the heavy lifting for me --- Make complex
| tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in
| which your users can naturally feel empowered by your
| software.
|
| It looks like they are moving more and more toward a
| iphone/android like, dumbed-down experience.
| https://develop.kde.org/hig/
| hulitu wrote:
| > Use spacing to keep things organized
|
| Stupidity is contagious. Some five years ago i had to use
| Gmail for work and someone from Google had the great idea
| to use a big "Gmail" icon which did nothing but used around
| 1/5 of the screen.
|
| Or you go to a website to fill a form (name, address, etc)
| and there are exactly 3 text inputs on the screen, the rest
| being unused space.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Have you read KDE 's new Human Interface Guidelines?_
|
| No.
|
| _Because that is exactly what they are doing, now._
|
| That is unfortunate. I'd hate to have to move off of KDE.
| It's been great up to this point.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I can't find it now, but Dolphin used to have a rather
| demoralizing web page that listed user stereotypes
| (something like _" Joe is a corporate developer"_, _" Bob
| is an artist..."_, _" Fred is an enthusiast..."_ and
| basically amounted to _if you 've been a linux enthusiast
| since you were a teenager, we don't want to hear your
| feedback_. I can't find it now, I hope they deleted it. I
| know creating such stereotypes is or was common practice in
| corporate software design, but it's vile.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| it's personally why I don't like KDE. I have no nostalgia for
| the old school windows desktop and it feels like something
| designed by a Soviet Design bureau combined with an airplane
| cockpit. There's always three different menus to change the
| same thing and buttons everywhere.
|
| GNOME goes a little bit overboard sometimes with the
| simplification but it just feels so much cleaner out of the
| box.
| sph wrote:
| Yes and no. I would use KDE if either they went full Windows
| 98 in their style, or modern slick like GNOME.
|
| Instead they have this bland Windows 10 flat look that has no
| personality.
|
| The familiar Windows 98 gray had saturation, constrast and
| even a touch if colour (the gray tends a bit towards the red)
|
| The modern KDE look is a diluted flat gray/desaturated
| cerulean blue which I really do not like. So uninspired,
| cold, clinical, corporate, clashing with that friendly look
| they want KDE to represent. It is uncanny, and while the
| GNOME design team loves to change stuff just for the sake of
| it, they have more taste and eye that whoever runs the design
| team at KDE.
|
| Can we have a desktop that doesn't look like a poster that's
| been left in the sun for too long? Can we have contrast back
| and more colours than just light gray and light blue?
| Zababa wrote:
| Exactly my feelings, altough it would be with Windows 2000 and
| XP since I wasn't born before. The file explorer, dolphin, is a
| good example of that, and a pleasure to use.
| kace91 wrote:
| > KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the
| spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era.
|
| I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop
| environments.
|
| As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had
| compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when
| closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc.
|
| It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is
| that there was experimentation.
|
| Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are:
|
| - 90's-like UX - terminal focused setups (tiling windows
| managers, etc) - dumbed down tablet-like experience.
| WharfWhoretress wrote:
| KDE has the same exploding windows and other window effects.
| kace91 wrote:
| My point was not that those effects from 20 years ago are
| unavailable, it's that I have not seen current similarly
| experimental projects that expand what we think of as a
| desktop.
|
| There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as
| groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| > I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in
| desktop environments.
|
| Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things
| easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features
| and locking down things.
|
| And more generally, there is no gurantee that the new thing
| is better than the old one.
| kace91 wrote:
| > Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things
| easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features
| and locking down things.
|
| Fair enough, but innovation should not necessarily be more
| complex. See pinch-to-zoom in the first iPhone as an
| example of a groundbreaking addition that makes things
| simpler.
| skykooler wrote:
| I switched back to KDE a few days ago, after having used
| GNOME for about a decade. One thing that made me really happy
| is that wobbly windows are an option again! (There's a plugin
| for GNOME 3 to enable them but it has unusable graphical
| issues on all computers I've tested it on.) It's nice to be
| able to reenable some of those effects that got me to try
| Linux out in the first place.
| nikanj wrote:
| I wonder what desktop Linux would look like today if Qt licensing
| issues in the 1990s didn't stop KDE from getting widespread
| support from Debian.
| drooopy wrote:
| Whatever happened to the 1.x revival project or whatever it was
| called? I am very fond of the aesthetics of the 1.x and 2.x
| series as it reminds me of classic Windows and MacOS. Is there a
| way to replicate the look and feel of 1.x and 2.x on modern KDE?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| My wish for KDE is that they move some of their quirks used, for
| example, to launch GTK3/GTK4 applications so they start in the
| right size, or XWayland itself, somewhere scriptable. Right now,
| if something doesn't quite work, you need to fix it in C++ and
| recompile the whole plasma-desktop, which is not very tinker-
| friendly.
|
| Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I
| hope it continues.
| Daunk wrote:
| KDE is what kept me away from Linux for a long time. I think
| everything they make "looks bad" (layout, design, graphics etc.)
| and I feel like they're just pushing out half-finished features.
| It's really a desktop about quantity over quality.
|
| Cinnamon is what finally "clicked" for me.
|
| I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _Kool_ article, but it was far shorter than I expected. Would
| have loved to hear the author 's POV on touchpad and gestures.
|
| Still, the author gets points from me for using Opensuse
| Tumbleweed, a highly underrated distro.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Tumbleweed is a great distro, and seems to be getting more
| popular recently.
| 63 wrote:
| I used to use OpenSuse Tumbleweed but ended up switching to
| Manjaro for the AUR. Currently in the process of moving to Arch
| after all the problems I've had with poorly documented Manjaro
| updates that break half my system.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Isn't breakage a risk using AUR on any arch-based distro?
| deadbunny wrote:
| Using the AUR on Manjaro is a risk because they hold
| packages in the Manjaro repos back compared to Arch.
|
| So `libfoobar` might be at 1.2 in the arch repos and
| required by an AUR package but it's only 1.1 in the Manjaro
| repo which will lead to broken packages.
|
| If you're going to use the AUR, use Arch basically.
| 63 wrote:
| The specific issues I had weren't related to the aur, they
| were oversights from Manjaro. I'm okay with things breaking
| when it's my fault.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| was anyone else thinking kernel density estimation?
| Kenji wrote:
| [dead]
| c0l0 wrote:
| I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days. I tried
| sticking with the desktop after the 4.0 release (there were SO
| MANY changes and grand new ideas under the hood!), but lost
| patience soon after the 4.2 release - it just wasn't ready for
| day-to-day use; all the rough edges made me bleed every day. So I
| made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a
| decade.
|
| Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new,
| additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really:
| current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all
| may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to
| KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she's
| especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.
| bluGill wrote:
| KDE did everything they could to tell people that it wasn't
| ready for general until 4.3, but never figured out how to get
| people to listen. Distros insisted on installing it by default.
|
| There was good reason for them to release 4.0 when they did but
| nobody has figured out how to communicate releases only to
| those the release is for (this last isn't about KDE, humans in
| general have the issue)
| LarryMullins wrote:
| They should have called it 3.999 instead of 4.0, or "4.0
| BETA", or "4.0 (for developers only!)" or anything like that.
| Anything other than giving it a new major version number
| without a disclaimer that it wasn't ready for prime-time.
| When you give something a new major version number, distro
| packagers will either update to it or they'll be subjected to
| endless questions from users asking them why the package is
| outdated.
|
| > _There was good reason for them to release 4.0_
|
| What were those reasons? To me, it really seems like they
| rushed it out because the release of Windows Vista and iOS
| made them feel like they had to release _something_ to seem
| current and up to date.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| The reason is that KDE is mostly developed by volunteers.
| Many of whom had branches that have been developed and
| ready for several years but not released. They were losing
| interest. KDE had to move the train to keep those
| volunteers around.
|
| If you don't ship it and some point it's gonna die.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days [...]
| So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more
| than a decade.
|
| My experience too. I liked KDE 3.5 so of course the devs had to
| fuck it up by chasing whatever is the user interface fashion of
| the day.
|
| So I went with xfce which doesn't change much.
|
| Maybe I will try out KDE again sometime.
| ablob wrote:
| May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were? It is
| difficult to understand the whys without knowing about the
| usage-pattern was broken. I'm genuinely curious.
| oriolid wrote:
| IIRC KDE4 wasn't as much breaking existing usage patterns
| but pushing intrusive things like desktop widgets and
| generally trying to lock me into tightly integrated system.
| I remember it was really easy to create a desktop note by
| accident and somehow really difficult to delete one.
| KDE3.5, or Xfce for that matter, felt more like something
| that is good for launching apps, managing desktop and some
| generic utilities. The clumsy UI design didn't also help.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| > May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were?
| It is difficult to understand the whys without knowing
| about the usage-pattern was broken. I'm genuinely curious.
|
| KDE 4.0 was famously broken at release. It's not even
| missing features that was the issue, it was highly unstable
| and not ready for release.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I was in this group and the major thing that annoyed me was
| the reinvention of the Amarok music player, destroying my
| favorite music player ever overnight.
| oriolid wrote:
| Now that you remind me, the Amarok update was terrible.
| For some time I used to run a self-built version of 1.4
| and I see there is now a fork called Clementine and a few
| clone projects. For me streaming services have mostly
| replaced local music files.
| LtWorf wrote:
| KDE4 was pre-pre-pre-pre-release quality. It crashed all
| the time, it greatly increased hardware requirements, and
| they were trying to push the whole "semantic desktop" thing
| that was a complete failure and was basically nepomuk
| running at 100% to "index files" (that would never be
| found).
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Trinity (forked from 3.5) is still around:
| https://trinitydesktop.org/
| turbobooster wrote:
| Not a fan of the confusing QT license
| jcelerier wrote:
| what's confusing with this?
| https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html
|
| everything before the "Add-ons available under Commercial
| Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3" separator is
| available under LGPLv3, and that covers very likely 100% of
| what is used in KDE
| LtWorf wrote:
| over 20 years ago qt was not free software. People on the
| internet keep parroting this information that they've read in
| a comment... and so on. The original comment was true and was
| decades ago.
| rascul wrote:
| There is a KDE Free Qt Foundation to help make sure Qt stays
| free for KDE users.
|
| > The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company,
| Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will
| continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt
| Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition
| under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right
| to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open
| source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-
| out, a merger or bankruptcy.
|
| https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| oh how I love KDE and how I wish I could actually use it. But all
| the time, every year, I return to MacOS.
| vlod wrote:
| Any specific reason?
|
| Personally I used to be a die hard mac user, but then I
| realized most of the time I just use vscode, firefox and
| terminal, which could be done on any platform (I chose linux
| and never looked back).
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| that is what I wish I knew. If I knew, I could help "solve"
| it. but somehow it is just so hard.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| My favorite KDE versions were KDE 1 and KDE 2.
|
| KDE 3 was fine.
|
| KDE 4 was not a worthy successor to KDE 3 and it was a massive
| setback with regards to customization.
|
| After that I stopped using KDE.
|
| KDE 3 was polished, KDE 4 looked like developer art.
|
| https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/desktop.png
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| You should try a modern KDE 5 it's polished and it's as good as
| the end of V3 era.
| indymike wrote:
| I've been on KDE since coming back home to Linux a few years ago.
| A few thoughts:
|
| * KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since
| the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also
| intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts
| and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from
| one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works,
| when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same
| way.
|
| * Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn't learning
| to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been
| personal for almost 50 years now.
|
| * Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh.
| It's really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and
| jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is
| still EXCELLENT)
| willnonya wrote:
| I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never
| understood is the success of gnome.
|
| KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken
| workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many
| distros never made sense to me.
| chungy wrote:
| GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology
| design, making each application they ship feel like part of a
| greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by
| developers each with their own ideas of how to design an
| application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like),
| GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look
| and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made
| by the same people (despite the actual development story). It
| permeates everything from user interface design to what
| libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use
| SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some
| using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL;
| that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.)
|
| On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious
| development money behind making GNOME check all the
| accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's
| the only environment outside of Windows that can match the
| accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing
| uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension
| KDE. After that, it's been inertia.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| For me it was very good out of the box Wayland support which
| made me use GNOME for a long time.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't
| existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt
| licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
| chungy wrote:
| GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around
| 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember
| three Debian stable releases that run it by default.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I am personally very perplexed with KDE.
|
| Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it's not that customizable,
| and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But...
| I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much
| more familiar to people who aren't as good at computers. If I was
| building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I
| would use GNOME.
|
| KDE... it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System
| Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app
| have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content
| with generic names like "Web" and "PDF Viewer," I'm just supposed
| to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _System Settings can be mentally overwhelming_
|
| Either you and I are looking at a different "System Settings",
| or you get overwhelmed easily... The one I'm looking at is
| neatly organized into descriptive categories on the left, with
| a search function that searches all categories on the top. If I
| want to configure my mouse, I search "mouse". The mouse
| configuration screen has the following options:
| Left handed mode Press left and right buttons for
| middle-click Pointer speed Acceleration
| profile: Flat or Adaptive Invert scroll direction
|
| Far from overwhelming, I would say this is the bare minimum. I
| wish there was more. Why can I only choose between two
| acceleration profiles in this GUI? Why can't I tweak it? From
| the way you describe KDE, I should be able to tweak it. 90% of
| the configuration options KDE surfaces in the GUIs would have
| been standard fair for casual 'normie' computer users 15 years
| ago; it barely qualifies as a power user DE.
|
| Use `xinput list-props ...` to see the dozens of configuration
| options that KDE could expose in their mouse settings GUI, but
| doesn't. I really do wish KDE were _actually_ the way people
| like you criticize KDE for being.
|
| > _I'm just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?_
|
| How is "Okular" any worse than "mudbrick trapeeze artist" aka
| "adobe acrobat"? Click on a PDF and Okular opens it. That's how
| you know, and I think that's how most people open PDFs.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| With every OS racing to the bottom in terms of customisation
| and the genera dumbing of things down, I am immensely grateful
| that there are still some desktop environments out there who
| are willing to offer flexibility.
|
| I've tried a few different tiling and dynamic window managers.
| I even tried writing my own one. But in the end I actually do
| like the form factor of full desktop environment for when I'm
| doing graphical based work. And having a DE that doesn't treat
| me like a n00b is an increasingly hard solution to find these
| days.
| jlpcsl wrote:
| This are my feelings as well. Also race to the bottom for
| proprietary OSes includes much worse things such as them
| increasingly becoming what I would call spyware. The trands
| in closed OSes are terrible.
| unsafecast wrote:
| If I have two PDF viewers, should both be called "PDF viewer"?
| Gnome seems to love hiding the actual names (the gnome document
| viewer is actually called evince).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| View it this way. If I'm a new user to Linux, KDE tends to
| come with far more apps than GNOME, with names that are often
| so opaque every app is a mystery. And not in a good way.
|
| "Oh... I thought Konquerer might be a video game, involving
| Conkers."
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| You nailed it: GNOME targets new users. KDE doesn't. The
| advantage of having unique names is that you can actually
| talk about them, and that includes finding documentation
| and solving problems via a search engine.
|
| Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on a
| generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > GNOME targets new users.
|
| Which is of course the correct strategy in the exploding-
| growth market of not only Linux Desktop, but desktop
| computing in general.
|
| ...wait a second...
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on
| a generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
|
| Gets tragically hilarious when the document viewer
| program changed between release.
| LtWorf wrote:
| If only in the menu there was a description of what it
| does, written perhaps just under the name... oh... wait!
| THERE IS!
| [deleted]
| unsafecast wrote:
| What about having it listed with the actual name, but when
| you're viewing it in the program launcher you have a hint
| in gray? Something like this:
|
| - Okular _Document Viewer_
| RussianCow wrote:
| This is roughly how it works now. Also, searching matches
| on its description.
| unsafecast wrote:
| Sounds good! I don't use either anymore so I wouldn't
| know.
| oriolid wrote:
| > is much more familiar to people who aren't as good at
| computers
|
| I'm not sure about this. To me Gnome looks like it's a
| programmer's idea of what beginner-friendly UI looks like but
| actual non-technical users seem to think it's just confusing
| and switch back to Windows or MacOS.
|
| About generic names, I'm quite sure that Apple, Google and
| Microsoft did some research before they called their web
| browsers Safari and Chrome, or even renamed it from self-
| descriptive but unique Internet Explorer to Edge.
|
| Kubuntu did this generic names by default option at one point
| but fortunately there was an option to switch to proper nouns.
| Having three different apps called Web Browser was a bit odd,
| and at least to me the generic names give the feeling that the
| apps themselves are white label knockoff. But to be honest the
| 'k' everywhere convention feels like cheap house brand too.
| easton wrote:
| I have noticed in recent versions of KDE they put what the app
| actually is under the name, and the search seems to search
| those descriptions (like "Kate: text editor"). Still should
| probably consider renaming them by default, but without context
| on macOS I don't know how you'd know "Safari" is the web
| browser.
| tssva wrote:
| I'm among those that don't like Gnome the desktop or project,
| but I do agree regarding the use of generic names vs having to
| know that Dolphin for some reason is the name of the file
| manager.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Gnome is the only Linux environment I know of (including DEs
| like KDE, window managers like Openbox and compositors like
| Sway) that support the TILED attribute (present in the
| monitor's EDID).
|
| So high-end displays like LG Ultrafine 5K, etc. can only be
| used at native resolution under Gnome. All the others handle it
| as two displays.
|
| :sad face:
| college_physics wrote:
| KDE has a well articulated vision about how open source personal
| computing should look like. E.g., I like their growing collection
| of android apps [0] (KDE Connect in particular). Hopefully they
| can attract more resources to speed up executing on that vision.
|
| [0] https://apps.kde.org/platforms/android/
| chungy wrote:
| KDE Connect is indeed amazing, definitely a "killer feature"
| (albeit one not exclusive to the KDE desktop -- I run GNOME and
| still integrate with my phone via KDE Connect).
|
| It makes so much sense, I don't know why Google or anyone else
| hasn't attempted anything like it too.
| criddell wrote:
| Is there any possibility that KDE and Gnome will ever merge?
| dehrmann wrote:
| This is a bit like asking if Windows and MacOS will ever merge.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| Why would they? They have no shared code (as far as I know),
| and significantly different philosophies.
| criddell wrote:
| To defrag the Linux demographic. If the two camps worked
| together on a future WM using all the things they've learned,
| maybe something great would come about. Having a single
| desktop for developers to target if they want to reach Linux
| users would be nice as well.
|
| It seems like if trends continue, Electron will be pretty
| much the only way new software gets on Linux and as a
| platform, Electron sucks compared to KDE or Gnome.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| More likely a merger would ruin things for users of bot
| GNOME and KDE.
|
| > _Having a single desktop for developers to target if they
| want to reach Linux users would be nice as well._
|
| This would be pointless, the vast majority of applications
| on linux don't care what DE they're run under. You can run
| Gnome applications under KDE, KDE applications under Gnome,
| just about any random GUI application under any window
| manager you wrote up last weekend which the developer of
| that application never even heard of.
|
| I don't understand what you're on about with Electron.
| Electron applications run under any DE or WM. Electron is a
| framework for creating GUI applications, it's not a desktop
| environment. They're orthogonal. I think you might be
| confusing KDE with Qt, Gnome with GTK, these things are not
| the same. An application that uses GTK is not a "Gnome
| application" unless it's affiliated with the Gnome project.
| An application using Qt is not a "KDE application" unless
| it's affiliated with KDE. Most GTK and Qt applications are
| independent, _not_ affiliated with either KDE or Gnome. But
| even when they are affiliated with one or the other, you
| can still use them in the other.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I also would never want this. They are completely different
| products that appeal to different people. It's like asking if
| MacOS and Windows will ever merge. No, they won't, and they
| shouldn't (antitrust aside).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Extremely unlikely. They're built on entirely different UI
| stacks so in a "merge" the codebase for one half or the other
| is going to have to be binned, and besides that they have very
| different and largely incompatible approaches in terms of UI/UX
| design.
| pluijzer wrote:
| I see this as very unlikely as kde and gnome have very
| different design philosophies. Also KDE used Qt and Gnome GTK,
| merging the code bases would be problematic.
| moistly wrote:
| I jumped to macOS 20-odd years ago, mostly out of frustration
| with the build quality of Windows laptops and the endless PITA
| experience of Windows itself. Figured the resale value of Apple
| laptops made it a minimal risk.
|
| Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu.
| Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I
| found KDE, and it's my main dev environment now.
|
| If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of
| Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo
| phone, I think they'd stand a very good chance of going head-to-
| head with Apple.
| izoow wrote:
| KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux
| full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don't get
| enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they've
| ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a
| joy to use.
|
| I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that
| the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe
| I should give it a chance someday.
| hajile wrote:
| Kate has the best VI command emulator out there bar none and
| got a lot more usable for a lot of stuff when it added LSP
| support.
|
| Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too.
|
| https://www.kdevelop.org/
| bergheim wrote:
| Really? Bar none? Better than evil?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Hard to imagine that's possible, since evil is already
| better than vim.
| nequo wrote:
| What makes Evil better than Vim in your experience?
| sph wrote:
| One feature I really liked when I used evil, which wasn't
| present in vim, was search/replace with `s/` replicated
| the case in the replacement string. So `s/one/two/` would
| replace `One` with `Two`.
|
| Great when you want to refactor a name that's used both
| as a variable and a CONSTANT in one go.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Better configuration language. For instance
| (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q")
|
| vs noremap <Space> @q
|
| I know it's subjective and some people will say the later
| is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the
| first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it
| does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I
| know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the
| way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim
| just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap,
| nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap,
| onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you
| probably can't tell which.
|
| Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming
| things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things.
| Considering both these editors now come with powerful
| completion features that make it easy to type long symbol
| names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one.
|
| I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years.
| When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode
| it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left
| wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I second that. I almost switched from vim to Kate. I do use
| the undecorated/non-IDE Kate version called "KWrite" which is
| the only no nonsense totally usable basic GUI editor with a
| vim mode. I can quickly write my notes and edit them the vim
| way and have a regular copy paste experience in the same
| time. Love it.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| As much as I want to like KDE and agree with some of its
| principles (such as its all-too-uncommon lack of fear of proper
| menubars) I have a hard time using it long term because even
| after years of effort going into polishing it, it still has that
| distinct "designed by programmers" feel to it with awkward UI
| layout and whitespace distribution and quirky idiosyncrasies
| smattered throughout. I get why it has ardent fans but I don't
| think it's for everybody.
| cpach wrote:
| Are there any FOSS desktop environments that executes better in
| those areas?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Just about anything GTK-based. GNOME takes minimalism too far
| but is undeniably polished, but Cinnamon and XFCE get much
| closer to a balance between good UI/UX and configurability.
| eliaspro wrote:
| On the calendar front, Kalendar [1] has picked up KOrganizer's
| tab and is doing a great job at it:
|
| [1] https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/
| 0xZy4d wrote:
| [flagged]
| anotherevan wrote:
| Have been a long time KDE user from the 3.x days through to 2019
| when a long standing itch to try a tiling window manager moved me
| to Awesomewm. I still use Dolphin, Konsole and a few other bits
| though.
|
| I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early
| times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a
| first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before
| that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)
| suby wrote:
| Regarding the blurry icons in alt tab, I think this is a general
| problem on Linux and not KDE specific. I had the same issue with
| certain icons in Cinnamon, and the following steps fixed it for
| me:
|
| Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they're stored in
| /usr/share/applications
|
| For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously
| replacing Audacity with the app name)
|
| StartupWMClass=Audacity
| bergheim wrote:
| I LOVED KDE 3.5. Holy smokes that was a good experience for me
| growing up. 4 made me switch, and years later, I tried KDE 5
| (last year). And eh, I really tried for two weeks. That was super
| annoying, and coming back to i3 just felt like finally getting
| air.
|
| It was slow, things didn't work, and weird. I totally understand
| that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it
| is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should
| invest time into your interface I would say try other things as
| well.
|
| Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!
| linuxhansl wrote:
| KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now.
| Just works.
|
| Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences
| the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably
| Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.
| tommica wrote:
| I went with KDE from gnome shell, and it just works so nicely -
| would have stayed with gnome-shell, but it had some weird
| glitches in regards of screen freezing, while mouse moves, but
| with KDE life is so much smoother.
|
| If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.
| nisa wrote:
| I really like KDE but one thing that saddens me is the state of
| the office stuff - like KMail, KOrganizer, Desktop Search etc.pp
| - there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic
| Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? And the Backend launches a
| full MySQL at the moment - I hope someday all of this will be
| streamlined get's an UI update and a fast database i.e.
| https://github.com/cozodb/cozo and the features will come back.
| Also KMail needs some usability improvements...
|
| If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars/todo-
| lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and
| research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way.
|
| Well, one can dream :)
| agumonkey wrote:
| I went away from KDE because of this constant fluctuation phase,
| plasma felt never finished, always new ideas but never clicking
| (unlike eos). Maybe it's time to also revisit. I agree that Kate,
| kdev etc are great.
| Derbasti wrote:
| I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty,
| unique in its ability to display large directories without
| slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in
| general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher,
| launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but
| everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on
| Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer
| Okular with its fantastic annotation tools.
|
| The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which
| is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is
| relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that
| steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.
| popol12 wrote:
| Dolphin is the best. I love how it integrates a terminal that
| follows you through folders. Best of both worlds: GUI and CLI
| together
| sph wrote:
| Why not add an email client panel as well?
|
| Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no
| reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window
| manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like
| you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by
| inflexible software.
|
| Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap
| disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their
| concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have
| Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window
| manager, not by Emacs itself.
| massysett wrote:
| ? Aren't Emacs frames (the C-x 5 2 variety) managed by the
| window manager already?
| amluto wrote:
| Every now and then I see a picture of a UI circa 2000, and I
| mostly miss that era. Controls were organized. Everything
| clickable looked clickable. There were clear conventions.
| Controls did not obscure content.
|
| Sure, it wasn't pretty the way modern UIs are pretty, but users
| don't need pretty.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique
| in its ability to display large directories without slowing
| down and uniquely flexible and powerful._
|
| I've found PCManFM to be just as performant as Dolphin with
| very large (100k+ file) directories. I stopped using Dolphin
| because Dolphin can't sort a directory of symlinks correctly
| (it uses the dates of the target files, rather than the dates
| of the symlinks, with no apparent way to configure this.)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Tried it recently to kick the tires on fedora and wayland as
| well. Pretty good and better than before but still so goddamn
| cluttered. Wish most stuff was plugins that I could remove.
|
| All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal.
| Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up
| on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave
| up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
|
| I've had the opposite experience. Cinnamon was always buggy and
| crashing, while Mate never crashed.
|
| Of course, I switched to Plasma about 2 years ago, so I am
| willing to concede that Mate has had an awful two years while
| Cinnamon has been bugfixed until the bug reports stopped :-)
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| I've been using Cinnamon for years now on Fedora. No issues
| with crashes on my end. I like it as far as I'm concerned it
| is a solid piece of software, it works and it does what I
| want I don't need to touch anything to have it working the
| way I prefer. It may not be the fanciest or have all the
| bells a whistles but it is what I like.
|
| When I first started using Linux in the early 2000's as a
| university student KDE was the environment that managed to
| get me to switch over from Windows. I appreciated just how
| configurable it was. I would spent hours tweaking my desktop
| getting everything setup just how I liked it to look. It felt
| like there was a configuration setting in KDE for just about
| everything. I remember spending an afternoon procrastinating
| as a student picking the perfect font for the system clock.
|
| All of that seemed to come at a cost I remember it gradually
| felt more and more bloated and things became less responsive
| over time I reached a point where I cared less and less about
| being able to customize things and more about just having a
| useable system. I kind of grudgingly used Gnome (in the Gnome
| 2.6 days) I was never really enamored with it but it
| "worked".
|
| Gnome 3 lost me as a user completely I just did not mesh with
| the new paradigm they were going for. I tried out KDE again
| but this was around the time they were having stability
| issues and there was some new file indexing system they were
| using I'm not sure if it was just badly implemented by my
| distro but it was incredibly resource intensive it would
| freeze the system for 2 to 3 seconds at a time whenever it
| kicked it. So I moved on tried out a few other environments
| like XFCE for a while before settling on Cinnamon.
|
| On a semi-related note does anyone know what happened to
| Enlightenment? I remember that was the much hyped up desktop
| environment back in the old Slashdot days I never really hear
| about it these days.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| * * *
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