[HN Gopher] Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop env...
___________________________________________________________________
Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for
Asahi Linux
Author : jlpcsl
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-05-16 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (social.treehouse.systems)
(TXT) w3m dump (social.treehouse.systems)
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I've been running KDE Neon on a NUC for years as a secondary
| desktop PC, and it's pretty great overall. It's customizable,
| performance is good and it looks nice.
|
| The only things I really miss are deeper issues, like non-
| existing to terrible SMB support and lack of decent remote
| desktop solution (I've tried all the options, they're all
| functional at best).
|
| With Proton having solved the gaming issue, I'm sure I would have
| loved switching my primary box over to Linux with KDE if it were
| not for those two remaining thorns.
| kps wrote:
| It would be nice if this led to Qt/KDE exposing the 'Mac mode'
| toggle that makes the GUI key the default for GUI shortcuts. As
| someone who lives in the terminal and needs control keys left
| alone, the Windows style drives me nuts. (KDE shortcuts are at
| least configurable, but it would be nice not to have to do them
| all one by one.)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| KDE is so great <3. It's everything Mac and Windows should have
| been. I also donate to it monthly because I feel it's software
| really worth paying for.
|
| On the contrary, I despise Gnome 3. Gnome 2 wasn't bad but in 3
| everything rubs me the wrong way. It's like they went out of
| their way to design something that wouldn't suit me :) The
| mimimalism, the thick "touch-style" window decorations, the
| "always an extra click" hamburger menus. The "You're holding it
| wrong" attitude. Basically all the issues that come with Apple-
| style opinionated design. And mentioned in the source article
| too. Nevertheless I'm glad other people do like it. That's the
| good thing about FOSS, there's something for everyone.
|
| I had the same feeling about recent macOS versions so I'm really
| happy I moved to KDE (on FreeBSD). Having choice and
| configurability again is amazing.
|
| This is really the power of FOSS and calls for a unified desktop
| would seriously undermine that. One size does not fit all.
| melx wrote:
| I'm giving a KDE a go as I finally convinced the wifey (non-
| technical human) to use "the Linux" daily. I haven't used KDE
| myself for past decade so should be fun.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Is there a good tiled window manager for KDE such as Pop Shell
| for Gnome? That's the only thing keeping me back on gnome.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are
| also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.
|
| https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth
|
| https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite
| rickstanley wrote:
| To use the tiling tool you can press `Win/Super + t`, I
| believe that is the default stroke.
| dizhn wrote:
| Bismuth works for now but is effectively abandoned.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And so is krohnkite (as far as I've heard)
|
| But thew new tiling tool is very nice. And it will
| probably be augmented in the future.
|
| There will be a bit of a pause in feature releases for
| KDE now though, as they are working on Qt 6 compatibility
| which will take longer than usual.
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| I can vouch for Bismuth being pretty good. I need a 3
| column tiling for my ultra wide and it works well for that.
|
| Hotkeys allow for easy switching on and off and between
| tile styles. Still intend to try native tiling soon.
| adrium wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| I have been using KDE as my only DE for over ten years,
| including some years for work. Previously used Windows and
| currently, I have been forced to use Mac for about 4 years.
|
| Window management in Mac is an outright disrespect for power
| users and built-in applications for Win are just not up to
| speed. In KDE, I just use most apps from KDE universe and most
| of them are a perfect fit.
|
| KDE managed to take the good from Mac and Win and even improve
| upon it - and if you don't like it, you can most likely easily
| change it in the System Settings panel or application
| preferences. With Kubuntu, everything (hardware) has mostly
| worked out of the box and upgrading since Kubuntu 7.04 has been
| working pretty flawlessly.
|
| When they release new features, it is evident that they care
| about users. The theming is consistent, elegant and yet heavily
| configurable. Plasma and Kwin support you in the way that YOU
| want to work and does not force some workflow upon the users. I
| can control my Hue bulbs from the desktop and interact with my
| phone (through KDE Connect) bidirectionally.
|
| The only missing thing was auto dark mode and I created
| https://github.com/adrium/knightadjuster for it. Even without
| reading much documentation, I could accomplish what I wanted
| simply by experimenting with qdbusviewer.
|
| Thank you KDE developers - thank you KDE community! Keep up the
| good work and thanks for caring about users!
| gumballindie wrote:
| Yeah i need to start donating too. Gave kde 3 a chance and
| wasnt disappointed. If you want a good looking, privacy
| friendly (no ads or data harvesting) and stable de then kde is
| a good option. Only thing i dislike is their choice of qml for
| widgets. Also i think it has good potential for some form of
| monetisation so that kde positions itself as a strong
| competitor against windows and macos.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Have you tried gnome 42 or later? I actually went from macos to
| gnome and while there are some differences some of them seemed
| reasonable given the contributors capacity and all the forms
| they're trying to support. (I use it on a tablet PC, so the
| minimalism comes with enabling larger hit targets for buttons,
| decent multitouch support)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah I did but I was actually very unhappy with macOS (I
| think it's been steadily going downhill since 10.4 Tiger and
| I finally left it a few versions ago). And like I mentioned,
| the big window decorations on Gnome were annoying for me as I
| don't use touch at all. If there was a way to simply set them
| to be smaller (and change the hamburger menus to real menus)
| it would have been fine, but it offers none of that.
|
| Also there's some other things where I have my own opinions.
| For example, I like my virtual desktops laid out in a grid,
| not a row. Then I remap the numeric keypad to be a desktop
| switcher (I don't like keystroke combos, I use dedicated keys
| for almost everything). I have all my apps on specific
| desktops (and different browser windows on many!) so I know
| what is where. KDE allows me to configure all that right out
| of the box and it persists after a reboot. On Gnome I need so
| many plugins that I run into conflicts and version
| compatibility issues. It was not workable like that.
|
| Also, KDE has some great ideas like the "Activities" which
| was a great expansion to my workflow. It's basically several
| desktop environments in one.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I use Gnome 44 on my Surface Go with Fedora 38 and it will
| stop responding to touch input until I plug in a keyboard and
| press <Esc> and then it's good until I log out or reboot.
| It's basically unusable and infuriating. There are few open
| issues on the gnome-shell Gitlab that seem to be related but
| languishing.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| While KDE certainly has a lot in its favor (as listed in the
| post, "batteries included" factor, configurability, dev team
| responsiveness), I've never been able to make it work for me.
| Even after pouring hours into customizing it, it still feels
| "off" somehow, and I don't think I could fix that without getting
| waist-deep in a custom fork.
|
| It would be nice if there were more DEs that shared those
| positive traits with KDE, but reality isn't so kind.
| teunispeters wrote:
| I've tried multiple and now stick with KDE for two reasons: 1. it
| gets out of the way when needing to do something (a lot better
| than some of the alternatives) - for instance games, 3D tools or
| the like. 2. It recovers from a restart, often back to normal
| use. It's nowhere near as consistent as the gold standard
| (MacOSX) - but it works. Gnome 2 worked - more or less - although
| the terminal restore was kludgy it still worked. Nothing else
| since has.
|
| Given I need to restart from time to time and restoring my
| desktop can be somewhere between minutes (if I knew where
| everything was) and hours (if I have to go through a bunch of
| files to figure out what all was running)... so yeah. KDE for the
| win. (among other reasons the intel AX210+ wireless chips are
| still rather dodgy with suspend/resume on a laptop, so tend to
| crash hard within an hour of a suspend).
| mazu1 wrote:
| KDE is by far my favorite computing environment, but its default
| settings slow its adoption, I believe. For example, the default
| task switcher is overly complicated, and even worse, in some
| distributions, an actual extra package has to be installed to
| just get a useful and basic switcher. I believe, more than
| anything else, if KDE wants to get more users, it should urgently
| work to make its default settings less surprising to new users,
| despite its ability to wow with neat (but not necessarily useful)
| user interface effects.
| pshirshov wrote:
| With all its ugliness, Plasma is the only environment which works
| acceptable for multi-head wayland setups with fractional scaling.
| rektide wrote:
| > _Meanwhile on GNOME the situation is you can 't control the
| keyboard brightness out of the box, because they decided all
| laptops with a keyboard backlight must surely have dedicated keys
| for that purpose and therefore there's no need for a slider nor
| configurable keybinds and..._
|
| I wrote then lost a gnome hotkey plugin to help with this, as the
| desktop display my parents were using had a menu system they
| hated/couldnt manage to use.
|
| It's wild that Gnome has such a narrow lo-fi user as their only
| target persona, but they probably make a vast amount of their
| earned income selling to such users.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Gnome sells something? Other than t-shirts? I can't imagine
| they have 'vast income', they're a non-profit[1]... presumably
| if they did, Nautilus would work better...
|
| 1: https://foundation.gnome.org/
| klooney wrote:
| Red Hat and SUSE (Maybe not anymore?) pay for a lot of the
| developer time.
| rektide wrote:
| Gnome is the default desktop of Red Hat, whose target
| audience is definitely business. There hopefully are some
| breakdowns somewhere of where they get funding from. But I
| expect Red Hat gives them a bunch of money.
|
| Whether their income is "vast" or not, my statement was
| specifically about the relative proportions of where it comes
| from. I definitely expect them to have an overall fairly mild
| budget. But where it comes from, I think, has largely shaped
| their current strategy, which is to target extreme end users
| with little customizability.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| That makes sense, I guess I'd say that they have hewed
| closer to macOS in terms of not allowing for much
| customization, which clearly alienates many users. I'd be
| more willing to toe their line if it all worked better,
| though.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Default gnome 3 doesn't make any sense. It's obvious
| they're making it horrible on purpose. I wonder why I
| have to install extensions for the most basic stuff.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer
| questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last
| summer and decided to spend it on Kate (KDE advanced text editor)
| and the experience was great! I had never approached KDE or Qt
| development before, and never even done actual C++ development
| (just some small course exercises). The devs were great at
| coaching on their IRC channel and in the GitLab issues.
|
| The maintainer even made a blogspot at some point to explain my
| contributions: https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-
| new-featur...
|
| Globally KDE is a fantastic experience, whether from a user's or
| a developer's perspective.
| dvh wrote:
| I personally don't like DE (desktop environments). I don't want
| my PC to be doing something or managing something on my desktop
| besides switching and moving/resizing windows. WM (window
| managers) are smaller, faster, less brittle and don't require
| grand visionary changes every 2 years.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The problem I ran into with minimal WM setups is keeping the
| farm of various daemons required for various bits of
| functionality all happy and healthy took more thought and
| effort than I cared to put forth. It wasn't uncommon for some
| random thing to break after updating which got tiresome.
| winrid wrote:
| I found it interesting when I checked Gnome and KDE orgs on
| github that by far most KDE repos are C++ and most Gnome repos
| are C (some Vala).
|
| It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the
| software.
| rcoveson wrote:
| > It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the
| software.
|
| In which direction? I've used both recently and while I prefer
| the design decisions of KDE/plasma over those made by GNOME3 in
| almost every case, I definitely noticed more bugs in KDE. I had
| frozen copies of my mouse cursor left behind when I moved
| between monitors quickly, for example. Frankly it's hard to
| imagine seeing that kind of instantly obvious bug in a stable
| GNOME build.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I really like KDE and think it's some of the best free software
| out there, in function and in spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it
| despite the dark years of KDE 4, which was an absolute disaster
| and only appeared worse in contrast to the amazing 3.5.
|
| I'm not a KDE developer but I greatly appreciate the development
| process. I've made a few minor changes in KDE and it was very
| easy to get a development environment set up, and then process
| for getting those PRs approved was easy.
|
| Better yet, that showed me that it's relatively easy to use your
| own builds of KDE on top of an otherwise complete system. I use
| Debian as my daily driver but sometimes I want new KDE features
| that won't hit the Debian repos for a while so I build those KDE
| components myself and use them. I wouldn't recommend that to new
| users but it's very viable if you understand how your system
| works.
| shmerl wrote:
| KDE is highly recommended.
| lucasyvas wrote:
| I have to say that it took until Valve adopted KDE for the Steam
| Deck for me to really take it seriously - I have just always used
| a GNOME distro.
|
| KDE has pretty ugly default window theming IMO. Like, quite
| grotesque. But the GNOME project is overall quite preposterous.
| It's a main-stream-but-hipster GUI environment where their
| philosophy does not match how any user wants to use it, hence all
| the (basically) mandatory extensions. Yes, I want window controls
| and a dock!
|
| KDE has way too much customization I think, but at least it has
| accepted a more sane philosophy. I was thinking of trying the
| Fedora KDE spin next. I feel that the other shoe has dropped
| recently - I could honestly see GNOME getting dropped. Cosmic did
| it and nearly every major distro has a KDE spin.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I've been using default GNOME for ages and I'm happy with it. I
| use the keyboard very heavily so I've never been bothered with
| the window controls. Saying KDE has too much customization is
| putting it mildly, the thing feels like an Airbus cockpit.
| There's unironically half a dozen menus to change themes alone.
| Like Windows it feels like you're on three versions of the
| system at the same time ranging 15 years back.
|
| Say what you want about ripping stuff out but GNOME has what I
| also appreciate about macs, it has a coherent design language.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| In my eyes the biggest problem with GNOME's theming is the
| egregious padding everywhere in Adwaita. Installing a theme
| with cut down padding makes it much more reasonable and in my
| opinion puts it among the best looking DEs.
|
| Agreed on GNOME's lack of functionality though...
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >KDE has way too much customization I think
|
| My biggest issue with KDE themeing (or just linux ricing in
| general) is just the massive amount of possibilities and no
| guard rails. All it takes is changing one color and you end up
| with some godawful ugly setup.
|
| I was messing with a live Manjaro USB on one of my annual "Is
| desktop linux there yet" expeditions and found the best success
| in just picking one of the top-downloaded themes in the store
| and maybe tweaking one thing from it, like the folder colors.
|
| Much as I'd love a perfect and elegant personally-customized
| theme, I don't have the skills to do it, and I'd rather just
| have something that's 99% there.
| mazu1 wrote:
| What is "linux ricing"?
| DrBazza wrote:
| Theming your Linux desktop to look totally different. See
| r/unixporn
| olliej wrote:
| I'm guessing it's a reference to the fairly racist label of
| a "ricer" or "rice rocket" for modified Japanese sports
| cars :-/
| lmm wrote:
| Nothing racist about it, it's derived from the practice
| of putting cheap sake in in the hope that it would work
| like MW50 injection (it doesn't).
| prmoustache wrote:
| I must be the only user that like the gnome defaults then.
|
| Only thing I need to configure is focus over mouse (no
| extension needed) and I like to have the top bar transparent
| (extension needed but I can live without it, it is cosmetic and
| I haven't installed it on all my machines).
| [deleted]
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's an interesting pattern where particularly device
| applications that don't use one of the "big distros" end up
| picking KDE Plasma over the alternatives, e.g.
|
| - Steam Deck: Desktop mode is KDE Plasma
|
| - PinePhone and PinePhone Pro: KDE Plasma Mobile
|
| - Asahi: KDE Plasma
|
| One may speculate what distros would do if it wasn't for inertia
| and compatibility.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| No need to speculate. Every Linux distro I have looked at
| recently allows the user to install loads of different desktop
| environments. KDE and Gnome are just the big ones. I use
| Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome 3 that looks more like Gnome 2) on
| Linux Mint on my laptop, XFCE on an old netbook also with Mint.
|
| Just pick whatever DE you prefer.
| fgonzag wrote:
| Why compatibility? Or inertia for that matter? Switching DEs in
| Linux is generally as easy as installing a package and
| switching the DE at login, and you can use any app compiled for
| a certain toolkit in any other DE. The default choice is
| usually done for either pragmatic or preferential reasons
| (Developer preference, easy of upstream collaboration,
| flexibility, stability, bug fix schedule)
| sho_hn wrote:
| Compatibility e.g. with user support docs they have, or
| installed bases. It's not easy for distros to decide to
| switch defaults.
|
| That's why what new systems choose is interesting.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Or inertia for that matter? _
|
| Humans, including devs and distro builders, are creatures of
| habit. They tend to stick to using whatever they already
| know.
| ACV001 wrote:
| KDE is indeed very good. I tried adopting it in the past multiple
| times then reverting, but with the latest version is so much
| better than the others.
| davidy123 wrote:
| I tried KDE a few times over the years, but it always felt a bit
| off. However, six months ago I tried it again, and really like
| it. As others say, it has a lot of useful customization. What
| worries me more is the switch to Wayland, when essential apps
| like synergy/barrier don't work well there yet.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-16 23:01 UTC)