[HN Gopher] The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
___________________________________________________________________
The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
Author : jrepinc
Score : 678 points
Date : 2024-02-29 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I've always been impressed by the maturity of the KDE project.
|
| Sure, there were ups and downs (KDE4?) but it's not easy to keep
| this upward trajectory and kept improving things in a OSS
| project.
|
| Nowadays KDE is definitely my favourite desktop experience,
| including Windows and macOS (which I feel are getting worse and
| worse every year).
| hobo_mark wrote:
| I accidentally got this, and now it defaults to Wayland which
| completely broke my workflow. That is because, in Wayland, there
| is no API to list what windows are on your desktop! [1]
|
| Managed to get back to X11, for some reason the logoff button
| does not work anymore but at least my monitoring scripts do.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/Kalmat/PyWinCtl/blob/master/README.md#lin...
| adlpz wrote:
| Your comment reminds me so vividly of the time when I _had_
| time and I could invest tens of hours deep in that sort of
| nonsense.
|
| No thank you.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Oh _Gerald_ , do wheel me back into my pleasure dome please,
| I've had quite enough of this silliness.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| For real dude... "my logout button doesn't work"? Crazy! I
| used to love tinkering with linux in college, started with
| Ubuntu 7.04(?) Feisty Fawn. Today I use Linux Mint 22(?) -
| what distro do you use that's hands off?
| adlpz wrote:
| MacOS
| sodality2 wrote:
| I'm in college and still prioritize stability (at least in
| day-to-day use). Which doesn't always work out, because
| yesterday my laptop wouldn't boot...
| okanat wrote:
| Windows 11 with WSL
| sergiotapia wrote:
| My brother uses this as well. It didn't work out well for
| me but it may have just been too soon, I tried to use WSL
| when it came out. Must be much better and seamless now.
| okanat wrote:
| The first WSL was a Linux system call emulator using
| Windows NT kernel's multi identity features. While it is
| an impressive feat of engineering showing off NT's
| strengths, many of the syscalls were missing. The
| programs had to operate on Windows file system which
| likes bulk operations and try and fail kind of a pattern.
| So it was slow.
|
| WSL2 is fantastic. It is a lightweight Hyper V VM so
| programs run at native speed. You can do nested
| virtualization with W11. The file system is ext4 on a
| virtual HD file so, progams optimised for Linux don't
| suffer. It even comes with its own Wayland compositor
| running on top of a high performance GL <-> DX
| translation layer. It comes with systemd support so one
| can run regular systemd services like nix daemon.
| yoavm wrote:
| Many Wayland compositors provide an API to list the windows. I
| don't know about Plasma 6, but in Wayland it's up to the
| compositor to provide such API as far as I know.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Can you recommend one?
| yoavm wrote:
| It really depends on your preferences. I use Sway. getting
| a list of windows is as easy as running `swaymsg -t
| get_tree`.
| Filligree wrote:
| So you need a separate implementation for each compositor?
| Count me out.
| bitwize wrote:
| Most compositors use a common framework like wlroots. Those
| that don't, like kwin, provide their own API support which
| their own tools consume.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| Yep. The only compositors of any significance that do not
| use wlroots are Gnome/Mutter and KWin. I guess Weston is
| also an independent compositor, but I don't think anyone
| actually uses that.
| creatonez wrote:
| Weston is mostly used for car entertainment systems, as a
| replacement for Windows CE.
|
| It, along with the more modern wlroots-based alternative
| Cage, have become the de-facto the Wayland window manager
| for when you don't actually want to display framed
| windows, and just want to fork the codebase and display a
| kiosk instead. These IoT use cases were part of the
| original motivation for Wayland in the first place.
| creatonez wrote:
| Additionally, there is an (experimental) effort by a KDE
| developer to further generalize KWin's functionality by
| ripping out most of what it does into a separate wlroots-
| compatible library - https://github.com/winft/theseus-
| ship
| kaba0 wrote:
| So you need a separate CSS engine for each browser? Count
| me out.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Wayland is like if every single CSS property needed to be
| written with both "-moz-" and "-webkit-" prefixes
| forever, instead of the different CSS engines having any
| standard properties.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| But many Wayland protocols are actually becoming shared.
| For example, Plasma 6 replaced a "-kde-shell" protocol
| with the standardized "layer-shell" protocol.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| > Many Wayland compositors provide an API to list the
| windows.
|
| KWin does as well (workspace.activeWindow,
| workspace.windowList).
| hobo_mark wrote:
| I found no way of calling KWin functions other than piping
| javascript into dbus and parsing the reply via journalctl,
| which... lol?
|
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/706477/is-there-
| a-w...
| jiripospisil wrote:
| Yeah, I think the way you're supposed to do that is you
| install the kwin script which gives you the option to
| "connect" to various signals and then communicate the
| results via dbus to your service / listener (I don't
| think the script itself can host a dbus service which
| would be much simpler). One thing I got from looking at
| this is that KDE's documentation about scripting is
| either absolutely terrible, insufficient, or non
| existing.
| Longhanks wrote:
| How did you "accidentally" manage to get this? It isn't even in
| Arch stable yet?
|
| The only distro shipping it right now seems to be KDE neon,
| whose entire premise is shipping KDE stuff as soon as
| possible...
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Yes.
| oynqr wrote:
| Did you also garbage collect the old generation by
| accident?
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| NixOS unstable has it too I think. It was merged yesterday at
| least.
| csmattryder wrote:
| I used to be a user of Wayland but since Firefox defaulted to
| it and I found that Picture-in-Picture doesn't work, I've since
| dropped back to X.
|
| DuckDucking it, I couldn't find a solution, but I hope someone
| can tell me there is.
|
| Outside of things like this (and finding the _right_ screen
| recording program) I didn 't really notice a difference.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| To my knowledge there currently isn't a solution, but it is
| being worked on/discussed:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-
| protocols/-/m...
| rcxdude wrote:
| That is the state of a lot of things in Wayland. They seem
| to remain that way for a long time, alas.
| paranoidxprod wrote:
| What compositor? I use Hyprland and Firefox/Chromium Picture
| in Picture, and as far as I can tell, works as expected. I
| just hit the PiP button and it pops the video out into a new
| tiled window that I can toggle floating if I want. Just tried
| on a windows machine and, as far as I could tell, it was the
| same.
| tombh wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but Picture-in-Picture has
| worked for years in Wayland Firefox for me. You do have to
| enable it in `about:preferences`, there's a toggle called:
| "Enable picture-in-picture video controls"
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Are you sure it wasn't running under XWayland? Firefox has
| had wayland support turned off by default until just
| recently.
| tombh wrote:
| I'm sure because I have a high DPI screen and the font
| rendering in Xwayland is jarringly noticeable.
| linmob wrote:
| On which Desktop Environment/wayland compositor? I am pretty
| sure Firefox Picture in picture works as intented (tiny
| window, stays on top of things) on GNOME's wayland session,
| and on Plasma 5.27.x I was able to make it work with a few
| KWin rules set by GUI (I would love to share the details, but
| I don't have my Plasma machine with me currently).
| svpk wrote:
| This is the solution as I recall (stolen from reddit post
| cited at bottom):
|
| Step 1: Right click an open Picture-in-Picture window. In the
| context menu, select "More Actions" -> "Configure Special
| Window Settings...". This will populate most of the window
| settings for you.
|
| Step 2: Click "Add Property..." and select "Window title".
| The newly added row's text field should read "Picture-in-
| Picture". Change the dropdown option from "Unimportant" to
| "Exact Match". (All PiP windows in Firefox use this title and
| by making it Exact Match the rule shouldn't affect any other
| Firefox windows.)
|
| Step 3: Click "Add Property..." again and this time select
| "Keep above other windows". The dropdown in the newly added
| row should be set to "Apply Initially". Select the "Yes"
| radio button if it isn't already. (As a note, I think that
| didn't work for me as I have it set to "Force" rather than
| "Apply Initially")
|
| Step 4: Click "OK". That's it. No more manually setting Keep
| Above every time you open a PiP.
|
| Since doing the above it's just worked without issue, though
| it was annoying that it was broken in the first place.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/osjt3p/firefox_wayland.
| ..
| tombh wrote:
| There's an experimental tool `wlrctl`:
| https://git.sr.ht/~brocellous/wlrctl
|
| It's not well documented, but you can do this to get a list of
| your windows: `wlrctl toplevel list`
|
| And this to get the currently focussed window(s): `wlrctl
| toplevel list state:focused`
| roenxi wrote:
| It says a lot about the difficulty of writing great software
| that it has taken around 15 years to get a list windows out
| of Wayland. But it looks like wlroots was a tipping point
| where the ecosystem started to function in a healthy manner.
| mathiasgredal wrote:
| Looks like great changes overall. Sadly they haven't added
| columns to Dolphin, which is my only complaint from switching to
| KDE from macOS.
| saltymug76 wrote:
| Looks like they added an option for split view in dolphin if
| that's what you mean.
| jdright wrote:
| not sure what he means by columns either. but split view on
| dolphin exists for many years already.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Probably the three-column view where you see the parent
| folder, current directory and selected folder's contents
| side by side.
| andrekandre wrote:
| it goes more than 3 columns, its more like drill-down
| view and very handy... its something i miss from macos
| too
|
| https://www.lifewire.com/use-finder-views-on-mac-2260734
| haunter wrote:
| Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can't.
| Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at
| Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish
| much more and feels more mature and robust too.
|
| I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with
| GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the
| different UI. I'd say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98,
| 2000, Xp) was peak design so I'm glad KDE stick to that more or
| less and made it even better and modern.
| Theizestooke wrote:
| I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or
| their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then
| again there's already Thunderbird.
| binkHN wrote:
| So don't use those two programs? KDE is an entire DE and
| ecosystem; I don't see how you can fault it for two programs
| that you don't like.
| sph wrote:
| Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much
| more stable and consistent.
|
| I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too
| many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you
| encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so
| many options. I'm back to GNOME.
|
| KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the
| Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I
| would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have
| been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have
| a taskbar or desktop icons.
|
| GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options
| that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really
| work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
|
| My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the
| completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's
| written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better
| languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until
| the heat death of the universe.
| notarget137 wrote:
| My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and
| more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user
| at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the
| main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely
| have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has
| bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while
| now.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and
| crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as
| 2022.
|
| I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10
| years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
| sph wrote:
| On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE
| 3 or 4 times in the past year.
|
| YMMV
| jlpcsl wrote:
| Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use
| a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not
| that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of
| crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on
| openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
| jchw wrote:
| Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years
| but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter
| crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in
| graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the
| graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about...
| It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in
| Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by
| rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do
| like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me
| into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when
| GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray
| icons/app indicators...
|
| (P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics
| tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry
| for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it
| should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9
| will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
| fullstop wrote:
| I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using
| Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the
| X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-
| shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using
| Wayland.
| vidarh wrote:
| That's because under Wayland there's no separation
| between display server and window manager.
| jchw wrote:
| To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland
| protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you
| can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and
| display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many
| implementations of this, though; the best example is
| probably still Arcan.
|
| That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors,
| including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is
| implemented without separation between the display
| server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still
| mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
| vidarh wrote:
| You're right, of course, and I should've been more
| precise about that given I have looked at doing exactly
| that myself (main thing stopping me: I was able to switch
| to my own X11 window manager within a day - it was
| painful but worked; meanwhile I'd locked up my machine's
| display hard within 5 minutes of running some DRI/GBM
| test code and had to reboot)
|
| I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will
| involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe
| stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol
| (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example
| clients..)
|
| And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol,
| you can layer any X functionality right back in...
| jchw wrote:
| That's because what is restarting, if I understand
| correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is
| effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is
| the compositor... it of course does still do compositing
| under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the
| display server. So you can't restart it without
| disconnecting all of the clients... kind of.
|
| Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor
| are things that should be possible and are being worked
| on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland
| compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've
| been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors
| mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't
| want too much complex stuff going on directly in the
| compositor, and can explain some other architectural
| decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise
| peculiar.
| fullstop wrote:
| That makes sense.
|
| I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am
| using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this.
| I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to
| begin with, though.
| greatquux wrote:
| That's why I'm happy the KDE developers and others have
| acknowledged this is actually a problem and are creating
| solutions for it, unlike many GNOME developers who say
| "it's your fault it crashed!"
| veidr wrote:
| > if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of
| bugs
|
| But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE
| are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately
| 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the
| open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
|
| I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not
| even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop
| environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really
| dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
|
| I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I
| have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup)
| but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and
| for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing
| the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on
| Wayland.
|
| I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] --
| seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it
| does _work_ pretty well so far -- so I am so excited for KDE
| 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on
| my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the
| official packages.
|
| [1]: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/
| kaba0 wrote:
| Well, the applications are not the same as the desktop
| environment. You can install Konsole, Dolphin, etc on gnome
| as well.
| veidr wrote:
| Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I
| have to use GNOME) but probably not super common.
|
| Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE
| and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at
| least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta
| kde-applications-meta sddm").
| saltymug76 wrote:
| That's basically why I stick to KDE. Feels like the natural
| evolution of the pre-vista windows ui.
| 6581 wrote:
| > just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP
|
| They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing,
| Krita is for painting.
| vonjuice wrote:
| Regardless of that, not being able to select multiple layers
| at once (in GIMP) is downright inexcusable.
| HKH2 wrote:
| It's still the only open source image program I know that
| will not only let me print, but also show where the image
| will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it
| up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for
| that reason.
| sho_hn wrote:
| As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has
| made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also
| on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable
| colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're
| very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for
| different tasks, and that they have slightly different
| objectives and mission statements has been great for open
| source content authoring.
| dagw wrote:
| Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but
| today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and
| certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo
| editing tasks.
| EverForever wrote:
| Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is
| the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay
| with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the
| same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with
| applications.
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| I'm almost the opposite. If I had to use Linux with GNOME,
| I'd just use macOS instead.
|
| The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes
| make a comeback we can make peace :)
| realusername wrote:
| GNOME might look a bit macOS-like from far away but it's
| really not when using it. I personally hate macOS but do
| love GNOME.
| l72 wrote:
| I agree, especially when it comes to window management
| and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop
| since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops
| and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and
| everyone hated it! (sound familiar?)
|
| For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a
| macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office.
| I find my productivity on mac os drops with its
| absolutely terrible window management and terrible
| virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a
| UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the
| VM.
|
| Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use
| it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid
| of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1,
| chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and
| important.
|
| But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual
| desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual
| desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that
| task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long
| running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows
| associated with it stay open for that whole duration.
| Only things related to that task are on the virtual
| desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but
| 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox
| window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window
| on desktop 5 and so on.
|
| Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever
| touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
|
| This makes task switching really nice. There is no need
| for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window
| with 50+ tabs open.
|
| One thing I do miss from some of the older window
| managers, is the ability for the window manager to do
| grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application
| implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's great that it works for your workflow. The problem
| is that GNOME is very opinionated in that the workflows
| they enable are the right workflows for everyone, and
| resist any configurability that would actually make it
| usable for the rest of us.
|
| Of course, one can always use a different DE, but there's
| always friction in not going with what the distro you're
| using picked as their default (and tends to support
| better in practice). I think a lot of GNOME hate is
| coming from the users who feel that a DE that does not
| adequately reflect _their_ workflow is being pushed on
| them so aggressively by their distros.
| veidr wrote:
| The desktop cube _is_ back[1] in KDE Plasma 6! :-D
|
| Oh, did you mean the other kind of desktop cube...
|
| [1] https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/cube.webm
| rpgbr wrote:
| Funnily enough, Plasma 6 brings back the cube effect[1].
|
| [1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-
| past-2-weeks-in-...
| anneessens wrote:
| Interesting. For me, Linux would be unusuable if I had to use
| GNOME. What do you like specifically about GNOME compared to
| Plasma or Windows?
| brink wrote:
| I use Gnome (and Sway, depending on which computer I'm on).
| I use Gnome because it works great with wayland, and I just
| need to get work done, and Gnome does a pretty alright job
| of staying out of the way. KDE's integration with Wayland
| feels too clunky for me at this point. Plus I get rendering
| artifacts on the edge of the screen when I use plasma with
| screen scaling.
| anneessens wrote:
| I believe improving Wayland support was one of the major
| goals of Plasma 6. So if it was just the Wayland
| integration putting you off, then maybe consider trying
| Plasma again soon.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Plasma 5s Wayland support has been pretty good since I
| started using it. I started using it back in December.
|
| Gnome just does way too many things I don't want it to do
| and that can't be disabled.
| anneessens wrote:
| I experience some random visual bugs occasionally with
| Wayland, but yes generally it's decent. But I could
| understand if someone would want a more stable
| experience.
|
| Yes, I don't like that about GNOME either.
| Octabrain wrote:
| I like its simplicity and the straight forward workflow it
| provides. Years ago, I used to use KDE and enjoyed it but
| these days, I want something that is functional while being
| vanilla and standard as possible and personally, that's
| what GNOME gives me.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's so straightforward you can't even switch to another
| window without pressing a separate button first!
|
| The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that
| taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.
| Octabrain wrote:
| I don't get your point. I just use two ways:
|
| 1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) ->
| Click on the window I want.
|
| 2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I
| want.
|
| I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a
| personal thing.
| anneessens wrote:
| Fair enough. I guess I have a hard time understanding why
| you wouldn't be interested to make the workflow fit
| better for yourself on a device you spend hours per day
| using.
| Octabrain wrote:
| It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools
| that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I
| don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or
| getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I
| have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful
| and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.
| binkHN wrote:
| I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of
| KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day,
| 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a
| long way to making me happy and productive. And it
| doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.
| anneessens wrote:
| Yes, this exactly. It's a small time investment that
| improves my experience significantly.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Linux would be unusuable if I had to use GNOME.
|
| This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars. GNOME is
| very usable, and if it's not, you don't know how to use a
| computer at all.
| anneessens wrote:
| Well it's not a hyperbole, my productivity would suffer
| immensely if I had to use GNOME. And since GNOME doesn't
| offer much customisation, I couldn't make it work better
| for me, which is why I use Plasma. That doesn't mean I
| hate GNOME or something and I'm glad it exists for the
| people who do like its approach.
| criddell wrote:
| In what ways does Gnome hamper your productivity? Are you
| really using the DE a lot?
|
| Most of my day is spent in applications. I launch an
| application and that's where I'm spending my time. I'm
| not using the desktop environment all that much. I really
| don't find much difference working in Windows, macOS, KDE
| or Gnome or even iPadOS as far as interacting with the
| graphical environment goes.
| anneessens wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. Perhaps not directly with the DE itself,
| but the DE affects how I work.
|
| On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars
| hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and
| maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces
| clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I
| remember correctly.
|
| I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop
| to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally
| works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I
| know.
|
| GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential.
| For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an
| unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system
| tray without quiting the application, which reduces
| visual clutter. I know you can add this with an
| extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.
|
| I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while
| still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's
| equivalent is full screen I believe.
|
| I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the
| ones I can quickly think of.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| > On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I
| remember correctly.
|
| This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but
| the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-
| enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard
| shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.
|
| Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.
|
| As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite
| rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of
| KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a
| dock or system tray back.
| anneessens wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know that shortcut for minimizing. Is there
| a reason the button is hidden by default?
|
| I never really understood how to efficiently use virtual
| desktops or what their benefits are compared to one
| desktop. Would you mind to explain?
|
| Well, I would imagine that is because you generally only
| need extensions on KDE for niche things, while GNOME
| needs extensions for more 'basic' things. Obviously you
| don't need an extension for a system tray if one already
| exists by default.
| int_19h wrote:
| > You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a
| dock or system tray back.
|
| As I recall, those are exactly the kinds of extensions
| that get broken by Gnome updates on a regular basis.
| criddell wrote:
| I think I see one difference - I'm not trying to use each
| environment the same. My iPad wants everything to be full
| screen, so that's how I use it (although I have been
| playing with Stage Manager). Windows has good support for
| tiling now, so I use that. On Gnome I lean into the
| workspace stuff. KDE I don't know as well, so I use the
| mouse for just about everything.
|
| I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different
| environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even
| deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if
| Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE,
| and all the other systems were still being developed. But
| then the Electron / web app people would probably still
| try to pave over everything cool and unique on each
| system to run one mediocre app everywhere.
| anneessens wrote:
| I understand that GNOME has a clear way how it wants you
| to use the desktop, but I don't like that way for the
| reasons I described. And it's not just a 'different' way,
| I feel like I lose functionality and flexibility in a lot
| of regards. Although, I guess it's hard to say for sure
| since I never used GNOME for an extended period of time.
| criddell wrote:
| That's the beauty of different systems. You always lose
| functionality no matter which way you switch. A Windows
| user might miss PowerShell + COM on Linux. A Linux user
| would miss having access to the filesystem on iOS. An iOS
| user misses the ubiquitous URL scheme for sharing code
| and data when they switch to Windows or Linux. I _still_
| miss Rexx and the object-oriented workplace shell of OS
| /2.
|
| I'm sure if you gave GNOME an extended trial, you would
| adapt and find some things you actually prefer.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| It is hyperbole, because you could use it. You would have
| to be incompetent to not be able to use it.
|
| Having lower productivity does not mean something is
| "unusable." It is, in fact, still usable. You just don't
| like it.
|
| Maybe learn what unusable and hyperbole mean.
| anneessens wrote:
| It's unusable enough for me that I would rather switch
| back to Windows than keep using GNOME. And I really don't
| like Windows.
|
| What does this discussion gain from you being pedantic?
| Everyone with common sense knew what I meant.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Because
|
| > This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars.
|
| You not liking something is not the same as it not being
| "usable." You simply don't like it as much.
|
| Your comment would be a lot less interesting if it were
| written without hyperbole. It would simply be "I don't
| like GNOME as much as KDE." And no one would really care
| about that, it wouldn't be a notable comment.
| anneessens wrote:
| You're the only one who takes this 'war' seriously. The
| rest of us here are adults who can appreciate all desktop
| environments, even if we don't personally like to use
| them.
|
| Go annoy someone else.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| My entire point is that both desktops can be appreciated
| for what they are. I can use KDE or GNOME, I just prefer
| GNOME. I would never call KDE unusable, because it works
| just fine for those who like it.
|
| People who go around saying they "can't use GNOME"
| because it's "not customizable" without ever even trying
| would be the ones that are not appreciating all desktops,
| like an adult.
| anneessens wrote:
| No one here said that GNOME shouldn't be appreciated.
| Just because I said GNOME is unusable for me personally
| doesn't mean I can't appreciate it.
|
| I have tried GNOME before, thanks for your assumption, so
| I know for a fact it's less customisable than Plasma. But
| less customisation doesn't equal less value anyways, so I
| don't even know what your point is.
| l72 wrote:
| Isn't it great, that unlike Windows or Mac, we have a
| choice! We don't have to try to create something for the
| lowest common denominator of user, and we can find
| something that works really well for us, individually.
| anneessens wrote:
| I absolutely agree with that. I was just curious to know
| what he doesn't like.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > except that with Windows I have no restrictions with
| applications.
|
| what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets,
| and ignores your previous customizations with every os
| update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy
| hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a
| thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that
| license as an individual user.
|
| dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-
| only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during
| initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms
| cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
|
| plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each
| update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup,
| more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the
| browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
|
| windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux
| dual boot setup.
|
| after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i
| couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS
| shit.
|
| tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to
| EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is
| just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in
| the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
| hannofcart wrote:
| I moved from Gnome to KDE recently.
|
| There is likely no desktop environment that's more
| customisable while at the same time being full batteries
| included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome,
| XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
|
| If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most
| probably replicate that in KDE.
| graemep wrote:
| Can you explain that? How is the workflow like Windows?
|
| All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults
| (good for newbies) in the initial look.
|
| KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at
| least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all
| applications, highly customisable (I currently use window
| tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use,
| window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner
| to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers
| from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely
| with everything else.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I honestly love the variety of options, everyone can find
| something suitable for themselves!
|
| Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on
| older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it
| mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I
| also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike
| a lot of folks hah.
| juujian wrote:
| That maybe be true if Windows (and maybe KDE) 10-15 years
| ago, I don't think that's true anymore today. KDE has really
| grown into itself.
| amykhar wrote:
| KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short
| while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so
| much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and
| KDE.
| tcbawo wrote:
| > wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro
|
| I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the
| desktop more than it has. "Just reinstall" is too often the
| solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours
| of someone's time. This can be catastrophic for a non-
| technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more
| like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server
| layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I'm
| unaware of it.
| georgyo wrote:
| It's not "the solution", it is a solution.
|
| It is the easiest solution, requires no research or
| technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft
| from the hours of customizing.
|
| The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall
| every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working
| optimally.
|
| > I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user
| extension on top of a rock solid base server layer.
|
| I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer,
| but let's not open that can of worms.
|
| Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps,
| including the desktop environment are containers.
|
| Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try
| Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
| qwertox wrote:
| > I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server
| layer, but let's not open that can of worms.
|
| Yes, the package manager is definitely not a part of the
| desktop.
| tcbawo wrote:
| I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very
| promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared
| base system should make troubleshooting significantly
| easier -- possibly an exponential reduction in the
| possible installed permutations. Thanks for the
| suggestion!
| CoolCold wrote:
| Some say Windows + WSL2 is the most stable ABI/API for the
| year of Linux on desktop.
|
| While its a joke, every joke contains some portion of a
| joke.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| I thought the joke was the reverse? The most stable ABI
| for Linux is Win32 (via Wine of course).
| cfiggers wrote:
| That's what I use. I love it!
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Switching desktop environments on Linux is absolutely
| trivial and doesn't require a reinstall though (at least in
| my experience of switching from GNOME to KDE on Ubuntu,
| which took a couple of minutes to pull down the KDE
| packages and then logging out and picking Plasma from a
| dropdown in the login screen - and if I feel like it I can
| switch back to GNOME anytime).
| askonomm wrote:
| Trivial to who? A seasoned Linux nerd? Maybe. A regular,
| non-tech person? Nope. And that is why there is no year
| of the linux desktop. And if you expect a regular, non-
| tech person to be able to master the terminal and type in
| commands you're delusional.
| markles wrote:
| You can install it through the Software Manager. At least
| on Mint that's how it is. Click, install, and I believe
| it tells you to logout and back in.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| I wouldn't expect a non-tech person to even understand
| the difference between an operating system and a desktop
| environment and why you can switch the latter while
| keeping the former. Nor would I expect them to care.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Trivial in the sense of googling "how to install KDE on
| Ubuntu", picking a result that looks somewhat recent, and
| following those steps. It ends up being a handful
| terminal commands which shouldn't be too hard for anybody
| who has used a keyboard before. That's how I did it at
| least. There might be more UI centric options.
|
| Also, trying to chase the elusive 'casual user' is what
| caused all the GNOME UX mess in the first place I guess.
| I'm not an 'archetypical' Linux nerd, I hate wasting time
| with fixing stuff that should "just work", but I'm also
| expecting a computer to be a professional tool which I
| can customize to my needs (within reason at least).
| crq-yml wrote:
| Windows is not better at this. Plenty of troubleshooting
| advice says "Now open the registry editor and..." or "Now
| open this .ini file and..." or "Now open cmd in admin
| mode and..."
|
| The ease of the GUI ends when a serious system-level
| issue arises. This has never not been the case, it's just
| a matter of how much the documentation expects you to
| know what's going on, and how much that impacts the
| first-run experience. If the first-run is good enough,
| "reinstall" becomes the go-to fix.
| jraph wrote:
| It's not trivial. Just installing KDE packages on a GNOME
| install will work and is quite easy, but will lead to
| some mix / subtle setting issues, it's less clean than
| just a brand new install.
|
| Installing and running KDE will mess up GTK settings in
| GNOME for instance. You might end up with the Breeze GTK
| theme in the GNOME session. Which works, but this is most
| likely not wanted (even though GNOME looks great with the
| Breeze theme).
|
| I'd not advise regular users to do this without a
| warning.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I haven't seen this on my Linux laptop, but TBH some UI
| elements in GNOME look so weird in Ubuntu 24 that I'm not
| sure if it's broken or intended (but already did before
| installing KDE).
| betaby wrote:
| "Just reinstall" is a solution in Windows world even more
| often.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| That's just not true at all. The reason Linux hasn't
| penetrated the desktop is because it's not installed by
| default. Even if _that_ isn 't the reason, the GPs
| preference for reinstalling is certainly not. Switching DEs
| doesn't require reinstalling the OS, it requires searching
| your distros app store for KDE, and then logging out and
| selecting "KDE" when you log in again.
|
| You could even switch between them each time you log in,
| depending on your mood that day.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| No, Linux has poor isolation between the base system and
| application and third-pardty software and poor backwards
| compatibility (FreeBSD is slightly better in that
| respect). The only OSS Posix system that getting it right
| seems to be Haiku.
| stonogo wrote:
| If that's the case, I'm grateful for it. Why does every
| tool have to target every person? Maybe it's fine not to
| dominate every market.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's funny that you say that, since that was the solution
| to Windows issues for... decades? Not sure if that's still
| the case, as I haven't touched it in forever.
|
| Regardless, not sure where you've gotten that impression of
| Linux. The only times I've reinstalled is when I've gotten
| a new laptop, and in those cases I just copy my home
| directory over to the new laptop and everything just works.
|
| The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they
| wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical; I
| don't think anyone even remotely knowledgeable would
| recommend a reinstall in that case. Just a trip to the
| package manager app and a restart.
|
| I think there are quite a few reasons why the Linux desktop
| isn't more common, but "need to reinstall to fix issues"
| certainly isn't one of them.
| nunodonato wrote:
| why wipe out the hard drive, tho? You can usually just switch
| DEs just fine, this isn't windows :) long gone are the days
| where we would have 10 different DEs/WMs installed
| doubled112 wrote:
| Wiping and reloading my systems is likely faster than
| cleaning up thoroughly, but I have backups and some
| automation.
| asoneth wrote:
| I borked an installation because it had two desktop
| environments, and even when it works there always seem to
| be more odd issues than with a clean install.
|
| If you have the time to debug these and straighten them
| out, it's fine, but given how simple a clean install is
| these days that's often the easier path.
| curt15 wrote:
| Will package managers remove all traces of the old DE? Back
| in the day, `apt remove kde-desktop` would not reliably
| reverse the effects of `apt install kde-desktop`.
| kaba0 wrote:
| The only good package manager can do it: Nix :D
| topaz0 wrote:
| > remove all traces
|
| You can certainly remove packages that were installed as
| dependencies, even if `apt remove` doesn't do this by
| default. I think it's `apt autoremove` or `apt purge`
| (although I haven't used apt in a long time). All of the
| package managers I've used have a way to do this.
|
| On the other hand, for the average user I don't know why
| you'd bother. It's not like it's interfering with other
| stuff you want to do, unless you are extremely tight on
| hard drive space.
| okanat wrote:
| apt doesn't remove the settings in your home directory.
| So you need to nuke them and reconfigure the entire
| desktop and switching DEs definitely break stuff due to
| file type handling and default apps. With Xorg there were
| other things like styles that got permanently broken
| unless you hunt for every file that has been changed.
| maxloh wrote:
| I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record,
| GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees
| or volunteers) designing their UI.
|
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Do they test with end users thoroughly, like Microsoft and
| Apple did back in the 80's and 90's?
| netdur wrote:
| Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE,
| was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of
| desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability
| studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight
| where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were
| part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to
| enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop
| environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider
| audience.
| sho_hn wrote:
| FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts
| involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the
| OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was
| run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of
| user studies, produced research docs, and so on.
|
| The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit
| itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g.
| LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as
| a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people
| cite now.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable
| for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the
| problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome
| 2, like cinnamon and mate.
|
| Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for
| the sake of it.
|
| But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's
| not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from
| commercial motives to make their own choices.
| alxlaz wrote:
| They do, but their resources are fairly limited so the
| methodology is abysmal. See https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-
| dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change... for an example. They
| don't so much test with end users as gather anecdotes (and
| then largely ignore test results that contradict their
| existing design guidelines anyway).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful. Huge window
| handles that make no sense on a desktop without touch,
| unnecessary extra clicks by hiding things in hamburger menus.
| Again something handy on a mobile, not a desktop. Almost no
| customisation.
|
| It might satisfy hipster designers but not users.
| kroltan wrote:
| Yep, I much prefer KDE's default binding of meta+LMB/RMB
| anywhere on a window to move and resize it, rather than
| ginormous title bars.
|
| Might not be "professional" but it sure is more productive.
| PcChip wrote:
| I change it to alt, and then also install Alt Drag on
| windows devices, so I can do that everywhere!
| PKop wrote:
| And you can easily make KDE title bars even smaller by
| changing the title text size, and use global menu and
| hide title bar in maximized windows. Massively better use
| of screen real estate than GNOME. Imo much more
| "professional" and productive vs GNOME's cartoonish touch
| screen UI.
| kroltan wrote:
| Heh, I made my own window borders (yay for
| customizability!), which are slightly chonky but still
| half of GNOME's.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/XcZvanv.png
|
| (Burnt yellow is my current system accent color, the
| borders adapt to the setting)
| c0l0 wrote:
| I recently bought a low-end ASUS Tablet PC with a rather
| nice 13" OLED screen (Vivobook Slate 13 T3300), and
| exorcised Windows 11 S from inside it the moment I got it.
| I then installed the latest Fedora on it, and chose the
| GNOME spin, because of the supposed touch UI readiness.
|
| I must say, I am not impressed by the UX of the whole
| setup... which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the
| perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices
| specifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is
| all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
|
| Looking forward to trying Plasma Mobile; maybe it can
| improve on the status quo.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the
| perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices
| speifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this
| is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
|
| It was the fad of that time, when Microsoft also
| introduced Windows 8 and the "Modern UI" Metro.
|
| But at least they came to their senses, also because no
| devs bothered to adopt it :) and they still didn't manage
| to sell any Windows tablets.
| fullstop wrote:
| > they still didn't manage to sell any Windows tablets.
|
| That was such a branding problem for Microsoft. Microsoft
| supplied so many Surface tablets to the NFL and the
| commentators kept calling them iPads.
| smolder wrote:
| > they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI
| to cater to those devices specifically around a decade
| ago - and for what?
|
| There was a recent article on here that explained GNOME
| 2.x was windows-like enough that there was fear Microsoft
| would come after Linux distributions with patent
| lawsuits, hence the departure from that style of UI in
| the next version. KDE on the other hand was made with a
| patent sharing agreement in place.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ah that explains a lot. Especially the feel I've always
| had about it being "change for the sake of change". There
| was a time when I actually tried to use it for real, I
| bought a used Surface Pro 3 and traveled with it, so the
| touch-based UI actually made sense. I wonder if that fear
| was realistic though. Though I have to admit MS at that
| time (under Ballmer) was really hostile to Linux.
|
| Edit: The point made in that article seems to be
| disproven though:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493246 . Even
| Miguel de Icaza said it's nonsense. Can't get more
| authoritative on Gnome than that.
|
| But it was just too weird with the workspaces on the fly,
| the huge window decorations (despite touch I would mainly
| use the pen anyway) and the lack of a real launcher. I
| used it for about 3 months and got rid of it. It just
| rubbed me the wrong way constantly and I really couldn't
| stand the designers' attitude, every time I wanted to
| change something I ended up googling it and finding some
| excuse from the devs on why they wouldn't account for it
| (usually along the lines of "you shouldn't want/need
| that").
|
| What didn't help was that Linux on the Surface Pro 3 was
| a huge PITA also. Often the keyboard wouldn't work after
| having been disconnected, or the pen would stop working,
| or it would turn on in my bag for some weird reason and
| be boiling hot, or it would fail to pick up the ethernet
| of the dock etc. Most of these issues were solved by a
| reboot but I ended up rebooting a lot to solve all these
| stupid random problems and I really got sick of that.
|
| But the "Weirdness" of Gnome 3 didn't help. I have a lot
| of opinions on how stuff must work and tried modifying
| gnome with plugins to make it work that way, and that led
| to a lot of issues when updates came out and the plugins
| weren't updated. Opinionated software just isn't for me.
| I want options. Lots and lots of options :)
|
| Eventually I moved back to a desktop and gave KDE another
| try (the last time was in the KDE 4 period and I didn't
| like it) and it felt like a breath of fresh air.
| Everything I wanted to change about the default UI had an
| option in there somewhere to do it. It felt like the
| developers were reading my mind and pre-empted every wish
| :3 I've always cherished software packages like that.
|
| And it only kept getting better and better with things
| like accent colours in the anniversary update. I use a
| lot of my own theming as well for both my DE and web apps
| and KDE is really great for that. I was actually planning
| to make a real theme myself but it's so configurable now
| that I can really make it pretty much like I want with
| just some configuration clicks.
|
| I donate monthly to KDE now just because I want them to
| continue this great work and philosophy.
| PKop wrote:
| I like to keep the Windows install around on small
| partition as I find at least on Thinkpads the Vantage app
| on Windows often has firmware and bios updates more
| available/earlier than on linux but ymmv. Plus is there
| for random need for windows-only app but maybe not as
| important.
| kaba0 wrote:
| That's like, your opinion.
|
| I do think that on a laptop, GNOME is probably the best
| environment to use, out of any OS.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| True, it is my opinion alone.
|
| And I don't use laptops, only desktops. Good point also
| as I have much more screen real estate available. For
| example I use a 3x3 grid of 9 virtual desktops (with the
| numpad as a quick-switching pad), something that on Gnome
| isn't possible without a whole bunch of addons that break
| with every update :) Because it doesn't allow for virtual
| desktops in a grid matrix by default and I don't think
| it's got direct access hotkeys to them either. I really
| love that I can just configure all that in KDE without
| having any kind of addon or modification (and many other
| things I change too).
|
| I'm just not one of those "just use it like it's
| intended" people. I have my own ideas on how my computer
| should work. But yes not everyone is me.
| maxloh wrote:
| > Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful.
|
| Not really. According to Fitts's Law, it would be easier to
| point your mouse cursor to a larger target.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fitts_Law.svg
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| When someone says a design is harder to use, you don't
| get to say "no it isn't because Fitts' Law". If it's
| harder for someone to use, those are the facts on the
| ground. You need to adjust your theories to fit the
| facts, not try to say the facts aren't true so they fit
| your theories.
| Klonoar wrote:
| They can totally say that, there are plenty of people who
| have experience that would agree with it.
|
| It's not "facts on the ground" when you're literally
| courting diverse opinions. That law just covers the
| average. ;P
| ColonelBlimp wrote:
| I'm a happy Gnome user.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Windows 8 was also designed by professional UI designers...
| mirpa wrote:
| And Windows 11... web content in start menu, unproductive,
| extremely distracting - ugh
| binkHN wrote:
| I think the Windows 11 UI has been augmented by
| professional bean counters...
| vrighter wrote:
| them being professionals does not imply they're doing a good
| job. Lots of dumpster fires, across a broad range of
| industries, were designed by professionals.
| blueflow wrote:
| This really disappoints me because their UI design is the
| main thing that drove me away. Too many non-discoverable
| gestures.
| anhner wrote:
| > Too many non-discoverable gestures.
|
| taking inspiration from MacOS i see
| pavlov wrote:
| KDE's underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a
| successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end
| professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why
| Krita feels more right than GIMP.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application
| frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection
| with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same
| with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly
| competent in their niches in recent years.
|
| KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop,
| something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yes, that's absolutely what makes the difference in the
| end.
|
| But if you're going to build an app for professional
| content creators, it definitely helps to be using the
| framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools
| that they're already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious
| product needs on the framework level for this niche have
| already been solved.
|
| GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It's
| always been more of a research project.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > But if you're going to build an app for professional
| content creators, it definitely helps to be using the
| framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools
| that they're already familiar with.
|
| Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI
| toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that
| makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.
|
| The reason Krita is so successful is because of what
| orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the
| users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the
| KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so
| Krita relies _a ton_ on Qt to the point where if you
| consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite
| the program from scratch. But Krita could have been
| written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever
| other mature GUI framework and it 'd still be as
| successful.
|
| After all keep in mind that many other popular digital
| content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt
| (e.g. Blender which is _way_ more popular than Krita).
|
| [0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's
| the main functionality and everything else can be found
| in many other libraries
| jrepinc wrote:
| You forget about the desktop integration. At the company
| I work for we also selected Qt, why, because it has very
| good integration with many desktops. GTK is terrible in
| this regard (even support for other desktop on GNU/Linux
| apart from GNOME is not the best, let alone other OSes).
| And yes also Qt offers a lot more and is also more
| intuitive to work with and man the documentation it has,
| just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the
| most important but the role of a great toolkit to build
| on is also very important.
| pavlov wrote:
| In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't
| believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as
| successful.
|
| There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they
| are not interchangeable because they end up making
| different design choices. An application like Maya with
| very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose
| weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design
| improvements end up in the framework. A competing
| framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-
| oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector"
| fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows),
| compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional
| scaling (akin to MacOS).
| okanat wrote:
| Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what
| the clients of the software can do here. You can have
| great connections with the users but if the core
| libraries you use doesn't help you to deliver the
| features you promised, they will leave for other
| solutions that actually deliver in shorter time while you
| struggle with GTK. This is exactly what is going on with
| GIMP.
|
| GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really
| hard to create certain workflows outside very simple
| applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C
| library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So
| developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of
| developer time
|
| Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for
| GUI development, comes with a great library and many
| tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is
| overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can
| go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing
| features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.
|
| Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support
| Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking
| down their overall system design, the integration
| suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in
| client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have
| lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low
| level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.
| bogwog wrote:
| > But if you're going to build an app for professional
| content creators, it definitely helps to be using the
| framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools
| that they're already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious
| product needs on the framework level for this niche have
| already been solved.
|
| There are tons of professional and highly successful apps
| for content creators that use custom made (and often
| shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference
| using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what
| sell the product.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| It was such a pity about Amarok :( That whole "2.0" debacle
| put me off the entire KDE ecosystem for years. It's great
| to see them back on track. But there are still no decent
| music libraries / players on Linux.
| jrepinc wrote:
| Strawberry is plenty decent for me
| https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
| worble wrote:
| +1 for strawberry, coming from Windows and foobar2000,
| this is the only music player on Linux really up to the
| task of playing huge music libraries and doing it well.
| brnt wrote:
| Checkout Quod Libet. Better than foobar, which I used
| through wine for ages. It's just about the only GTK app
| on my KDE boxen and I gladly make the exception.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I quite like Cantata. It does everything it needs to do
| and it's stable as a mountain.
| frameset wrote:
| I came back to KDE after more than 15 years away and the
| improvement in Kate is astounding. It has features I would
| never have expected from the basic text editor.
| justinclift wrote:
| > backed by a successful corporation
|
| Are they profitable these days?
|
| That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always
| losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yes, Qt Group is profitable. It's publicly listed and has a
| market cap of around $2 billion. So not very big compared
| to a lot of enterprise software vendors, but could be an
| interesting acquisition target at this price.
|
| For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off
| after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I'm guessing an
| acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead
| where Qt is apparently doing quite well.
| esarbe wrote:
| I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like
| Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and
| for staying out of my way.
|
| The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display
| never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take
| that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Is GIMP even associated with GNOME? The G stands for GNU, not
| GNOME.
| haunter wrote:
| Yes https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
| tristan957 wrote:
| That doesn't actually mean much. See the sibling comment.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp
| folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then
| the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
| asoneth wrote:
| Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME
| Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App".
|
| As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-
| and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image
| Manipulation Program community and developers with services
| like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion,
| and copyright assignment."
|
| However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a
| "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that
| it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any
| GNOME designers/developers working on it.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model
| Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same.
|
| I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME
| and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part
| of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
| rtpg wrote:
| The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows
| trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot
| widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent
| Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot
| widget)
|
| I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches"
| distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more
| than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under
| KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE
| land.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows
| desktop as starting point and has developed it into something
| that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME
| OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually
| the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my
| time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE
| on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was
| finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never
| improving).
|
| PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was
| absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing
| that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design.
| iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even
| use Windows, they use Mac.
|
| But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially
| gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as
| well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could
| rant about it for hours.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > Ubuntu 24
|
| You're running a pre-release?
|
| https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
| pxc wrote:
| > IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows
| desktop as starting point and has developed it into
| something that's now actually better than the Win10/11
| desktop.
|
| In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS,
| and imo significantly improved over the original. The best
| example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect,
| which is fundamentally a take on Expose/Mission Control but
| massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding
| fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less
| appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to
| pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
| keeglin wrote:
| I recently started using a Mac at work and Gnome aping
| MacOS is the only thing that makes sense.
|
| The applications selector, the settings drop-downs...
| spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3.
| These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of
| MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
|
| I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS
| this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse
| work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at
| all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
|
| The pain is very real with Gnome.
|
| It's a very, very poor ape of MacOS.
| zilti wrote:
| > I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no
| headaches" distro
|
| Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and
| shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has
| been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches"
| distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for
| many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has
| been OpenSUSE.
| jlpcsl wrote:
| The one I usually install to normal users who do not know
| computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very
| positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also
| thinking about using oST instead.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| So if I install Tumbleweed I should get this latest KDE
| version very soon?
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Yes, if it's not out already. I'm not currently on
| Tumbleweed for reasons, but I do love that distro.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro_
|
| The original name was _Mandrake_ , precisely because it
| would _magically_ autoconfigure all your hardware and
| software - well before Ubuntu existed.
|
| The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would
| go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a
| system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all
| sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a
| bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really
| compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
|
| The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle
| ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and
| their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d
| cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast
| desktop.
|
| These days it's all much of a muchness really.
| mark_undoio wrote:
| In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2
| and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were
| very entertaining and educational to me, although they
| were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to
| be doing!
|
| Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the
| end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird
| themes and window managers they packaged by default, I
| don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these
| days (even though the UX is probably much better by
| conventional criteria).
| qup wrote:
| Mandrake! I'm the other guy who used it!
|
| In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to
| spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
| kergonath wrote:
| Same! So I guess there are at least 3 of us :)
|
| Memories...
| jtorrents wrote:
| As the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here
| in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had
| problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi
| PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
| qup wrote:
| Same, broadcom wifi issues and 3dfx driver issues for my
| voodoo card but mandrake mostly just worked.
|
| I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and
| get everything working, probably within about a year.
| jtorrents wrote:
| Exactly the same here ;) I also ended using Debian when I
| learned enough.
| toyg wrote:
| It was actually pretty popular here in Europe (I have a
| feeling the core devs were French, but I could be wrong).
| kergonath wrote:
| OpenSuse is fantastic. It's very easy to set up and nice to
| use out of the box. It's also fairly close to the bleeding
| edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy
| with it.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| IMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the
| FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the
| system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my
| taste.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| > Gnome is following Mac trends
|
| I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a
| totally foreign concept for Gnome
|
| Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with
| their design choices
|
| Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
|
| Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form
| factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
|
| Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented:
| https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
|
| I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing
| Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was
| perfect, it's sad..
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yep, GNOME's closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not
| macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features
| in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much
| further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
|
| This applies to Pantheon too, even if it's prettier. There
| unfortunately isn't a Mac-like DE.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Unity is back. An enthusiast resurrected it and now it's an
| official Ubuntu flavour again: https://ubuntuunity.org/
| thesuitonym wrote:
| > The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows
| trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
|
| I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends.
| They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from
| Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
| reddalo wrote:
| I wouldn't say GNOME 3+ is following Mac trends. GNOME 3 has
| been a horrible mess in my opinion, it's unusable for both
| Windows and macOS users.
| eitland wrote:
| Doesn't Gnome has the same application switching as Mac OS
| anymore for example?
| kergonath wrote:
| > The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows
| trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
|
| I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a
| heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work,
| and I don't see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a
| Mac user. I don't like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am
| absolutely not at home in Gnome.
|
| I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because
| the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don't tend to
| compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop
| environment, Gnome is not more "Mac-inspired" than KDE.
| jacooper wrote:
| Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used
| gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's
| following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
| eitland wrote:
| Heh, I think the last few years Windows has copied KDE, not
| the other way around.
|
| I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE
| and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I
| have seen that too).
| aryonoco wrote:
| Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even
| contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back
| then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE
| 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to
| look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as
| intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such
| as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
|
| Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed
| by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Can you link to a description of this intended workflow?
| toyg wrote:
| _> KDE is what GNOME wanted to be_
|
| Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally
| true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had
| a gnarly license.
| moffkalast wrote:
| GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all
| though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is
| adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic
| most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped
| taskbar windows with titles.
| toyg wrote:
| This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to
| differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible
| as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later
| and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they
| went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial
| style of development.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from
| more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat,
| who basically decides everything related to
| systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
| rodgerd wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1#/media/File:GNOME_1.0
| _... is what GNOME 1 looked like.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP
|
| FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if
| they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is
| primarily a digital painting application, which you can also
| use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an
| image editing application which you can also use to do some
| digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each
| application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that
| Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things
| outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger
| there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting
| functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
| lukan wrote:
| "Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking"
|
| What is missing, compared to gimp?
| kuschku wrote:
| Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise
| selection positioning in general.
|
| And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters,
| krita has always visible panels for brushes.
|
| It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality,
| but considering krita's recent expansion into vector
| images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise
| in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad
| kernel.
| int_19h wrote:
| It started during GNOME 2. Remember the whole "spatial
| Nautilus" debacle?
|
| But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were
| configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf
| to do so.
| ufo wrote:
| This GNOME3 bashing feels gratuitous. I like both KDE abd
| GNOME, in their own ways.
| pooper wrote:
| > Now, KDE upstream has relented on using a single-click to open
| files and defaults to double-click instead. Distributions like
| Fedora, Kubuntu, and Manjaro had been changing the upstream
| default anyway, so KDE developer Nate Graham suggested disabling
| the feature. ""Distros are closer to users and clearly the
| feedback they've been getting is that double-click is a better
| default...Let's admit it and switch to double-click by default
| ourselves"".
|
| This is great news.
|
| The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to
| record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think
| this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on
| gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not
| supposed to be recording my whole display?
|
| I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it
| when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| I prefer personally the single click approach. But this being
| KDE you can configure it in your on liking, so no harm done.
| anneessens wrote:
| If you haven't tried single click to open before, I would
| highly recommend it. I used to hate it as well, but going
| through folders and files is so much faster now that I'm used
| to it. And if you think about it, a single click to open
| something is much more consistent UI wise.
| jlpcsl wrote:
| Same here. This is one change that they made that really does
| not make any sense to me. Also with smartphones being so used
| these days and they all have this single click mode of doing
| things, well it would also make more sense to me to keep
| single click for opening in KDE Plasma.
| anneessens wrote:
| Well, I can understand why KDE made it default since it's
| the behaviour everybody else expects now. But it's weird
| that it became standard in the first place.
| loeg wrote:
| Smartphones are a really limited input device in a way that
| desktops are not. IMO it doesn't make a ton of sense to
| mobile-ize all desktop UX to the minimum smartphones are
| capable of.
| cesarb wrote:
| Single click to open is great if what you want is to open the
| folder or file, but what do you use then when you want to
| _select_ the folder or file without opening it? I 've
| resorted to "vaguely dragging a square around the icon" (to
| select a group of icons containing just that single icon) on
| systems with single-click-to-open.
|
| Historically, what you had was single click to select, then
| something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the
| selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down
| lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog
| box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a
| shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
|
| A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-
| press to select; in my experience, both double-click and
| long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've
| seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early,
| causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-
| click action).
| anneessens wrote:
| You can just press CTRL and click the item. And on Plasma
| specifically, there's a box on the corner of the item with
| a '+' you can click which only selects the item.
|
| Well, I don't have my desktop set up to use drop down
| menus, but as far as i remember, it is one click to do the
| action listed, not double click. Unless you mean older
| operating systems?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "Just"...
|
| But yes, I almost always use miller columns to browse the
| file system on OSX. This way any folder is both select
| and opened on a single click.
|
| Miller columns are great and should be implemented
| everywhere. Imagine how good they would be for navigating
| large websites.
| anneessens wrote:
| Yes, 'just'. Do you not always have at least one hand on
| the keyboard?
|
| I'm not familar with Miller columns, but if you're
| changing the behaviour of your file browser, then I'm not
| sure why you're suprised single click might not work as
| intended.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| No I don't. And I think that people who aren't developers
| have workflows where they use the mouse a ton and the
| keyboard less.
|
| Miller columns have been one of the default views in OSX
| Finder for about two decades, opening and selecting at
| the same time is how they are supposed to work. Here's a
| demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7trdpY9MI
|
| I think miller columns was part of KDE file manager for
| some time, before they decided they were too complicated
| for developers.
| anneessens wrote:
| I don't really understand where you would put your hand
| instead. In your lap? Why not have it on the keyboard?
|
| Ok, I see what you mean by Miller columns now. I guess I
| wouldn't consider that image preview on ths side 'opened'
| though. 'Opened' to me would mean launching a dedicated
| image viewer with that file.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I mean, there's a reason why the default in most
| operating systems is a double click. Having to combine
| keyboard and mouse gestures is weird and hard to remember
| for most users.
|
| When using miller columns in Finder, you will open a
| folder at the same time as you're selecting it. Files
| will only preview.
| anneessens wrote:
| Well, that's why Plasma has that box I mentioned, so you
| can select without using the keyboard. But selecting
| multiple files requires you to press CTRL anyways, so I'm
| not sure why it why you think it would be weird to use
| CTRL for just one file.
| davet91 wrote:
| Dolphin has "selection mode" for a while now. I like that
| in combination with single click open.
|
| https://pointieststick.com/2022/08/19/this-week-in-kde-
| dolph...
| bitcraft wrote:
| I had to do a double take regarding the single click "issue"
| because later in the article it is mentioned that scroll bar
| behavior was changed to accommodate users with RSI.
|
| So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer
| a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent
| RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to
| "new user pressure".
|
| At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
| xbar wrote:
| I like that when KDE expresses an opinion in its defaults,
| they are user-malleable.
| drtgh wrote:
| System Settings > Workspace Behaviour > General Behaviour: In
| "Clicking files and folders" then switch the option from
| "Selects them" to "Opens them".
| whalesalad wrote:
| I record lots of dev guides for my dev team using obs. Works
| great for me on Debian 12 with KDE and Wayland. Full screen
| too. Webcam working. External usb mic working.
| wiz21c wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > Users who are comfortable with Plasma 5 are unlikely to feel
| discomfited with Plasma 6
|
| I say yeah !
| Daunk wrote:
| Perhaps one day I'll use Plasma, or one of their KDE apps,
| without having a serious crash or other issues after 5 minutes.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| I really want to use fedora silver blue, but KDE just greets me
| with a black screen and a cursor and nothing try has fixed it.
|
| i'm currently on pop!_os waiting for their new desktop :)
| haunter wrote:
| Are you sure that's KDE? Because Silverblue is using GNOME.
| Kinoite is the KDE version.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| yes it follows me across distros, if use fedora
| workstation, kubuntu or just install it it happens.
| justinclift wrote:
| What's the graphics card (or integrated gpu) you're
| using?
|
| It _kind of_ sounds like something might be going wrong
| there, and stopping things from showing up onscreen
| correctly.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| I have NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile in my laptop.
|
| currently running gnome/Wayland which is functioning
| correctly.
|
| it's a real shame because i love KDE :(
| justinclift wrote:
| k. Nothing weird hardware wise with that then.
|
| Is it using the Nvidia proprietary drivers, or the OSS
| nouveau ones?
|
| If you're using the proprietary ones, which version?
|
| Sorry for the 20 questions, am just trying to figure out
| where it might be going wrong. :)
| vorticalbox wrote:
| 555 554 something around that, I don't remember off the
| top of my head.
|
| I might give nouveau drivers a go.
| justinclift wrote:
| Ahh, it's probably the 545 or 550 drivers then. They
| shouldn't be causing issues either.
|
| The nouveau driver is likely to have performance problems
| (compared to the official one), but if that's not an
| issue then it's worth trying. :)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Breeze is Plasma's default theme and it has been updated for
| Plasma 6, but it's a subtle change -- sort of like repainting a
| room and changing the color from "flat white" to "eggshell
| white". It has some changes to spacing that make it feel a little
| less crowded, and it has >>fewer lines separating UI elements<<.
|
| Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other
| distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so
| much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and
| visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences
| in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade
| of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're
| awful to use.
| alxlaz wrote:
| I wish they'd at least made it thinner. Some of those
| screenshots on the release page [1] (Kate, Kdenlive) look
| awful, the actually useful content (code, clip problem list) is
| squeezed into a corner by UI elements that are mostly empty.
| That thing is ridiculous, the editor window is nearly as tall
| as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines, and the Clip
| Problems window is clipped at an 8-item view.
|
| I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled
| devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general
| standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so
| pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even
| if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the
| window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons
| in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of
| Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are
| more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to
| widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit _and_
| extra scrolling.
|
| This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're
| gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the
| one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as
| pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move
| on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to
| anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I
| suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and
| desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a
| trackpad or a mouse.
|
| 1: https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
| rpgbr wrote:
| It's very easy to remove toolbars (in Settings menu) and menu
| bars (Ctrl+M) on Plasma. I managed to remove all of them in
| certain apps, like Konsole and KWrite, which makes things
| look way better, indeed.
| alxlaz wrote:
| I use a more compact theme (QtCurve, at least with Plasma
| 5.27, I'm not sure if it's going to work with Plasma 6).
| IMHO if I have to disable UI elements to make an
| application usable, that just means they're too big. That's
| not a good design.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| > the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can
| barely display 20 lines
|
| No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall,
| including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around
| 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger
| (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
|
| Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You
| can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I
| don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to
| that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have
| the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file
| tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I
| use keyboard shortcuts for.
|
| I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the
| clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the
| side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it.
| The only real problem is that the window should probably be
| larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like
| you can freely resize it.
|
| Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme
| at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > No it's not 1080p tall?
|
| No, it's nearly :-) as tall as a 1080p screen. It's 810px
| (edit: modulo some scaling?) but you also rarely get the
| full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've
| got a big panel at the bottom of the screen. Hence
| "nearly".
|
| > Finally, the things you mention are not related to the
| theme at all, but instead the layout of individual
| applications.
|
| Widget size, padding and margins are all part of the theme.
| I use QtCurve (which is pretty wasteful, too, though
| nowhere near as bad) and it's far more efficient to use.
|
| A theme that makes better use of available screen space
| would allow one to keep the toolbar around, and make better
| use of search features (yes, the search panel is usually
| not folded out, but if you have to fold it out, search,
| then scroll or fold it back in to read around a search
| results, that's not exactly useful).
|
| If you need to disable UI elements to make an application
| usable, that's not a good design.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| > but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on
| a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the
| bottom of the screen
|
| The panel is around 50px or so at most, by default it
| seems to be 44px. And I indeed think the screenshot is
| scaled, since it looks like it's bigger than on my
| machine.
|
| I checked out QtCurve on my laptop which still runs KDE 5
| (it seems to not be ported to Qt6), and it is indeed a
| bit more compact than Breeze 5. It's definitely a bit
| more on the cramped side in my opinion though, as the
| toolbar buttons have barely any padding at all around
| them. I definitely don't think it's wasteful, at least.
|
| I agree that the toolbar and search pane are a bit hungry
| for vertical space in Breeze, but I also don't think most
| Kate users have the search pane open regularly. Making it
| more suitable for the sidebar (a la VSCode) might be nice
| though, but it seems it already does some limited self-
| rearrangement when horizontally limited (which could look
| better, granted).
|
| It can be seen that Breeze 6 does save a few pixels here
| and there at least, without looking cramped in any way.
|
| As for disabling UI elements, I personally think the
| toolbar in Kate is fundamentally wasteful. The only way
| it might become useful is when you customize it to
| contain actions that you do tend to use regularly.
| drooopy wrote:
| I wish that there was an option to make Plasma look and feel
| exactly like classic KDE 1 and 2 did back in the day.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| > Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other
| distinguishing features between UI elements.
|
| Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did _not_ remove
| separation between elements. However it is now achieved by
| drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing
| every single thing which is extremely ugly.
|
| I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because
| this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses
| marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution
| laptop.
| ognarb wrote:
| Yes and if you want more screenshots I put some on my blog
| about this change https://carlschwan.eu/2023/08/29/frameless-
| view-with-qtwidge...
|
| And there is also some before and after comparison on the
| announcement https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
| creatonez wrote:
| They are mostly just trying to remove areas where there are
| multiple layers of separator lines, like boxes inside of boxes.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Any word if we can get it on Fedora 39 yet?
| aquatica wrote:
| We won't. We'll get it with Fedora 40.
| piaste wrote:
| You can also upgrade to Rawhide if you don't want to wait a
| couple of months.
| voxadam wrote:
| Fedora 40 Beta is currently on target to be released March
| 12[0] and will include KDE Plasma 6 so if anyone is looking
| to avoid running Rawhide it's only a two week wait for a
| beta release. It's also possible to install from the most
| recent build of the pre-beta 40 branch[1]
|
| [0] https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-40/f-40-key-
| tasks...
|
| [1] https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/branched/lat
| est-F...
| smallerfish wrote:
| Good job KDE team - nice to see steady progress.
|
| I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at
| bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all
| inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked
| on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to
| ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
|
| I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE
| (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most
| distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
| thriftwy wrote:
| KDE should probably invest in better defaults if these need
| tweaking.
|
| People don't usually dig in the settings menu unless something
| is bothering them. If there are great opt-in features they're
| going to stay off.
| Phlogi wrote:
| just what they did with V6.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Most people I know that use KDE use it because it's so
| customisable. It's not the same crowd as Gnome. I don't think
| this is an impediment at all.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I'm using KDE for 20 years already because it has great
| miscellaneous apps (though it's less important in 2024),
| slick integration between components and nice all-
| encompassing settings app. I do tweak a few things when I
| boot up a fresh install, but generally, I don't feel the
| need to do a deep customization, and am not aware of any
| missed opportunities.
| binkHN wrote:
| > I'm using KDE ... because it has great miscellaneous
| apps...
|
| KWrite and Dolphin are insane!
| refset wrote:
| Agreed - the main reason I switched to KDE from Gnome was
| so I could have a vertical taskbar.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Heh, in the meantime modern Gnome doesn't have a Taskbar
| at all, because it "is not ok to distract users with a
| list of other things they could be doing when they have
| already selected one task to look at"...
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Is that a quote? I couldn't find the source if so. Hard
| to tell if it's a joke based on other GNOME statements.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| I don't know either if it's a joke.
|
| The way I always thought of it is that the taskbar
| generally just can at best have a limited set of
| applications listed and takes up precious vertical
| monitor space, so its mostly limited to the
| overview/activities since that is the "I want to change
| apps" mode of the desktop and is just 1 click away
| (either super or top-left on the desktop).
|
| Then again I am one of the (probably) few people that
| would probably even do away with the top bar currently
| still in GNOME and not have anything other than the app
| visible by default.
|
| I use to be annoyed at the behavior as well when I
| started using GNOME, but at some point I actually started
| preferring it and now barely use the taskbar on Windows.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I remembered it as a version of what some Gnome designer
| claimed, but I tried searching for some statement on the
| topic and I couldn't find any explicitly mentioning it.
| omegabravo wrote:
| it suits my workflow since all windows are full screen on
| all the monitors. I either use alt+tab or super key to
| get the exploded view.
|
| it won't suit all workflows of course
| ako wrote:
| That not only depends on preference, but also on
| hardware. When only using laptop display, most of my
| windows are full screen. However, when using a 32 inch 4K
| display, I prefer my windows smaller, often having
| multiple windows side by side, sometimes tiled.
| Zambyte wrote:
| There are merits to the GNOME design philosophy. My Sway
| workflow and customizations are actually inspired quite a
| bit by GNOME. I don't use any taskbar or system tray. I
| don't even have a clock; I open a terminal and check the
| date command if I want to know the time. I make heavy use
| of workspaces rather than "minimizing" (Sway calls this
| the scratchpad or something like that, which I only use
| if I want to "background" graphical applications). I have
| absolutely no flashy styling or animations; I simply use
| nord where I can.
|
| It's not for everyone. It would be next to impossible for
| someone to sit at my computer and be productive, because
| I have accumulated my configuration over years, with no
| real thought into making things that I configured
| discoverable (I know it's there because I put it there).
| But it works _really_ well for me. I find the ability
| setup a workspace how I want for one task, and then
| switching workspaces to context switch to be very nice.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I do something very similar in KDE with a whole bunch of
| virtual desktops. Though I do use a taskbar because I
| like the overview of it but I don't actually use it to
| switch tasks :)
|
| I always thought Gnome was not very useful for this
| because workspaces are created on the fly whereas I want
| to have them spatially oriented in a fixed grid that
| persists on every boot with the right application tiles
| in them. And I have hotkeys mapped to each one directly
| on the numpad (without key combos, I hate those). So my
| numpad is not a numpad at all but a workspace switcher :P
|
| The problem with the gnome design philosophy is that it
| only works for you if you agree with them on everything.
| If you're pretty opinionated yourself (as I am and it
| sounds like you are too), opinionated software only works
| well if you have the exact same opinions as its creators.
| With something as complex as a DE this will run into many
| mismatches quickly. This is why configurable software is
| so great if you're not willing to compromise on how you
| want things.
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| Current versions of Gnome allow setting a fixed number of
| workspaces in Settings, Multitasking.
|
| To configure hotkeys, you have to set some dconf entries
| manually, with dconf-editor or gsettings from a terminal:
|
| > gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-
| to-workspace-1 "[\"<Super>F1\"]"
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I absolutely agree that it's nice for this to exist as an
| option for users who are used to it. I'm a somewhat heavy
| emacs user, so I'm not at all opposed to esoteric
| workflows.
|
| But I think it's clearly proven to be a bad design as a
| default. Discoverability is very important, especially to
| people who work a lot with a mouse. And using multiple
| apps at the same time is a very common work flow, one
| that an always-on-screen task switcher makes much simpler
| than an alternate view you have to bring up, especially
| if that alternate view also obscures all of your windows.
|
| I will also say I find workspaces a hard to use UI, as I
| always lose context when I have to switch workspace, but
| maybe this is just how my mind works. And the idea of
| one-task-per-workspace has never worked well for me, as
| there are several apps that I use in every task, such as
| chat or email while I'm coding and while doing a
| presentation and while writing some design. It also seems
| to require a lot of setup and discipline.
|
| Finally, as a nitpick, moving apps to a different
| workspace instead of minimizing to taskbar/systray seems
| like much more work to me.
|
| Personally I'm a huge fan of Win7's grouped taskbar with
| window previews, along with its window snap support
| (extended in Win 10).
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Most useful software that badly needs usability
| improvements has a group of people that just got used to
| it, and they will complain bitterly about any attempt to
| correct UI mistakes. If it's customizable, they can
| configure it back after making improvements so it's useful
| to everybody else, too. I hate the way gnome is set up, and
| welcome any updates to KDE with open arms.
| izacus wrote:
| That sounds like survivorship bias though? Everyone else
| already left it and jumped ship to GNOME (including pretty
| much all of the distros).
|
| Are the current users the full target market or just
| leftovers?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Isn't GNOME the one that doesn't have a "desktop"?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Not really, Most distros allow you install what you want.
| For example you don't need Kubuntu to install KDE. Just
| install kde-desktop.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't think I like KDE more because of its
| customizability but that's certainly welcome (as long as
| the default are good, which they also are)
| graemep wrote:
| Most distros will change the defaults anyway., and, as others
| have said, a lot of KDE users use it for its customisability.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > KDE should probably invest in better defaults if these need
| tweaking.
|
| We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed
| many defaults to values that reflect better what the users
| actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies,
| and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the
| back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes
| in this regard.
|
| And you're not wrong, it does help a lot.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Great, but konsole tabs on the bottom by default? Why?
| thriftwy wrote:
| I have them on the bottom for 20 years. The first thing
| I'll change on fresh system. Glad I won't need to do that
| anymore.
|
| I wonder if "new tab" button is always visible now too.
| moffkalast wrote:
| To each his own I suppose, as long as it's adjustable :)
|
| Is it a browser tabs vs. taskbar tabs ideology?
| kuschku wrote:
| People like tabs right next to the area they look at most
| of the time.
|
| In browsers, that's always at the top. In terminals,
| depending on if you're a heavy user (and as result, the
| prompt is at the bottom) or a light user (and the prompt
| is at the top), you'll likely prefer tabs to be in the
| same area, too.
|
| I've actually got different settings for taskbar position
| and terminal tab position between my work ubuntu,
| personal ubuntu, and personal windows systems.
| bombcar wrote:
| For me it's a Windows/Mac thing - if you're a Mac user,
| you're used to having a menu bar at the top, and you're
| always up around the top, so top tabs feel right.
|
| When I was on Windows, the Start Menu/taskbar was on the
| bottom, and bottom tabs felt right (as they became
| available).
|
| Let's all agree that _side tabs_ are of the devil.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't care much either way, why would this matter so
| much?
|
| Also, if this is the only thing that's annoying, KDE won
| I guess.
| agildehaus wrote:
| Tabs are on top by for me on 6.0. Seems to be the
| default, unless my distro (Arch) changed the default.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I can't say which position is the "right" one, but I also
| noticed different distros have different defaults on
| where the tabs are positioned.
|
| It's cool that KDE lets you do that, but it's a bit
| annoying actually as it messes with the consistency of
| KDE. Sure, users can always change their preference to
| what suits them best, but it would be nice if out of the
| box all KDEs behaved and looked the same and leave the
| personalization to the user after installation.
| agildehaus wrote:
| https://github.com/KDE/konsole/blob/61264c1917770102a8512
| 3d3...
|
| It appears the default is Top in Konsole's source.
| alxlaz wrote:
| This is an excellent illustration of why "better
| defaults" is a gateway to endless bikeshedding. One
| person's "better defaults" are another person's "why?"
|
| The only "better" defaults are those that match what
| people already know, not necessarily because they're
| objectively better but because most people will already
| know how to use them. You literally can't get a learning
| curve better than "you already know it".
|
| Konsole has had tabs at the bottom for about 25 years now
| (I don't recall KDE 1.x, but they were definitely there
| in 2.x). Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who
| already uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a
| subset of users who _might_ switch to KDE and expect them
| at the top?
|
| More importantly, is the position of tabs -- especially
| one that you can change! -- like, a real, actual problem?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have a "here are
| some of the options we've got, pick one, there's no
| default!" splash screen on first run.
| alxlaz wrote:
| KDE had exactly that back in its 3.x era, actually. It
| had a first run wizard that allowed you to choose things
| like whether you open things with a single or a double
| click, and options were largely organised based on
| platforms with similar conventions (as in, it had options
| like "single click selects, double click opens (Windows
| style)"). It was remarkably friction-free actually,
| people could just pick the mode that they were already
| familiar with and that was that. It had all the good
| parts of "the right default" (i.e. the "right" default
| was always the one you liked best) and required exactly
| one click to configure.
| jorvi wrote:
| Zorin OS takes this approach (and pretty far). At first
| boot you get to select Windows, Mac, Unity or Zorin style
| and it shifts a bunch of things around based on that.
|
| It would be nice for KDE to have three presets: Windows,
| Mac, and Classic (= KDE).
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who already
| uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a subset of
| users who might switch to KDE and expect them at the top?
|
| If you want to grow your user base: The latter.
| ako wrote:
| Now you're assuming that the group that would switch is
| bigger than the group that appreciates the tabs at the
| bottom. I doubt that the tabs at the bottom are the main
| reason people wouldn't switch to KDE.
| eitland wrote:
| Nooooo!
|
| That is the most frustrating thing about some projects:
|
| They take existing users for granted and make a lot of
| changes to accommodate the new users they envision coming
| in torrents.
|
| These users of course never arrive and in the meantime
| they have alienated the old user base.
|
| With KDE you can put the tabs where you want them.
|
| Or, if you want everything to be like in Gnome or Windows
| or Mac you can just use these.
| aseipp wrote:
| In KDE's case the "you can just customize it" works both
| ways though. They could change the defaults and instead
| and let old users customize it back to the old way it
| was, rather than every new user customizing it. It comes
| across as a pretty weak argument.
|
| The reality is that most users are simply bitterly
| opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of
| the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with
| whether or not the change is actually an improvement that
| helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a
| KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're
| theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet
| exist through UI improvements) actually has happened
| before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's
| complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised,
| versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI
| choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue
| over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old
| UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-
| represented) that is here.
|
| Developers of the project have to balance these concerns
| as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older
| user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean
| every decision and plan in the project is going to
| revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.
| troyvit wrote:
| I think it took you longer to ask that question than it
| does to move the tabs to where you want them. Personally
| I have them on the bottom and like it.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I'm guessing because tabs on top push the terminal down,
| moving all the text and maybe being distracting while
| reading since we are mostly reading from the top of the
| terminal buffer.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I only very rarely use konsole tabs at all (I prefer
| multiple windows), but when I do, I appreciate that
| they're at the bottom of the screen. That tends to be
| where my attention is when I'm using konsole.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| "I encourage anybody using KDE"
|
| Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only
| file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small
| bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers)
| - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also
| basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for
| unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
| topaz0 wrote:
| I don't know how much it affects priority, but they certainly
| accept bugs filed against older versions. Specifying versions
| is a big part of the form for a new bug, and they let you
| select versions going way back.
| Filligree wrote:
| I have a feeling they wouldn't accept bugs filed against
| NixOS, however, considering the huge number of patches
| applied.
|
| Which is a problem. NixOS remains by far the least
| aggravating OS I know, and... yeah. I wish there existed a
| desktop environment that played well with it.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Just submit a bug. If they dont accept it submit a bug to
| NixOS about KDE not accepting NixOS KDE users bugs.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I second my sibling comment -- just submit a bug. I think
| you are wrong that they would ignore it just because
| their context is somewhat different. Linux is full of
| differences like this.
|
| But also: Isn't one of the main benefits of NixOS that
| you can fairly painlessly get and try different versions
| of things? Just see if you can reproduce the bug in the
| same version of upstream. If so, file the bug with kde,
| if not, file the bug with NixOS because it's presumably
| caused by one of the patches.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I think the point is that it won't run on NixOS without
| patches
| bombcar wrote:
| From my experience, reproducibility is king. If you can
| give a formula to reproduce a bug, even if it is obscure,
| it makes it _so_ much easier to track down.
|
| That can be up to and including a downloadable VM image
| that shows the issue.
| kekebo wrote:
| Out of interest, what are the issues you're facing? I'm
| having a great time with NixOS / Plasma 5
| aseipp wrote:
| They have accepted bugs from NixOS before (there are
| nearly a 100 marked as "NixOS Linux" at bugs.kde.org),
| and I don't see any major reason they would stop. It's
| true there are many patches for the KDE libraries and
| Plasma, but realistically most of them are fairly
| "procedural" changes to adapt to non-FHS layouts, etc.
|
| For reference I count about ~66 patch files among the KDE
| expression in nixpkgs as of today, including Plasma, all
| libraries, and related apps. Most of them are in the
| range of 20 lines long, and they are .patch files, i.e.
| the actual applied diff is smaller than that. The largest
| patch is barely 190 lines long and it's for Akonadi,
| mostly rewriting hardcoded FHS paths throughout the
| codebase.
|
| I agree there are some quirks with most desktop
| environments on NixOS in my experience but realistically
| there's a huge amount of stuff in the ecosystem that
| plays anywhere from well-to-poorly in such environments,
| and the Linux desktop stack definitely was not designed
| at a time where this stuff was common. It is what it is,
| I guess.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I am using KDE on NixOS and IME there are no issues
| except the occasional screen freeze on X11 with Nvidia
| cards (and none with Wayland, you read that right!).
| Filed bugs and merged changes too.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It works great on FreeBSD and I get the latest versions
| within days of release.
| ceeam wrote:
| I will be _very_ surprised if there's a KDE6 in official
| ports within three months.
| vedranm wrote:
| It's already there for several months. From the last
| status report:
|
| > KDE Frameworks 6 (alpha) 5.247 was updated in the ports
| tree.
|
| > KDE Plasma Desktop 6 (beta 2) 5.91.0 was updated in the
| ports tree.
|
| https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-10-2023-12/#_k
| de_...
| bayindirh wrote:
| I use Debian Testing which trails release by a couple of
| versions. I search the bug in the Bugzilla, and if it's not
| filed, I file the bug. Sometimes it's marked as a duplicate
| (but additional feedback is useful), sometimes new, but very
| rarely a duplicate of a closed bug.
|
| So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
| skykooler wrote:
| I don't know how long it will take KDE 6 to arrive on Ubuntu
| LTS, but there have been several networking improvements to
| KDE Connect in this release (including supporting mDNS and
| bluetooth for more reliable operation), so possibly it may be
| better for your use case now?
| grepfru_it wrote:
| >how long it will take KDE 6 to arrive on Ubuntu LTS
|
| Probably Ubuntu 26. The release notes for 24.04 do not
| mention kde6. It is also likely the 25.04 or 25.10 release
| will incorporate kde6.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| You can always add the NEON repos to get KDE 6 on Ubuntu
| LTS. I'm running with that right now on 22.04. Be sure to
| also add a repo to get newer Pipewire, as that really helps
| to avoid many papercuts.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Any rolling release distro is probably fine? openSUSE
| Tumbleweed generally gets new packages within a week or two
| of release.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's great to see, though my main gripe with KDE right now is
| Dolphin, the file manager. It tries to do everything but is
| just ever so slightly buggy in every way, it can't run as root,
| and asks to confirm saving twice every single time when editing
| a networked file. As much as it is less featured and ugly,
| Nautilus was less annoying to use.
| COGlory wrote:
| Dolphin is legitimately my favorite KDE program. My
| experience is that it's a phenomenal productivity tool. Being
| able to quickly open or close a terminal. How customizable
| the ordering and appearance and columns are. Easy to
| manipulate tabs.
|
| I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager
| would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
| binkHN wrote:
| > Dolphin is legitimately my favorite KDE program.
|
| Happiness is clicking on a folder with lots of files,
| hitting forward slash, typing a search term, and instantly
| finding your file.
| dizhn wrote:
| I thought I didn't even have to hit / ? Perhaps that's in
| file picker mode.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Are you logging into a desktop as root?
|
| Nah, but I would occasionally like to move things around
| outside of /home without doing it manually in the terminal.
| I'm not sure why that's such a problem.
| kuschku wrote:
| Dolphin can do that! You'll need to install kio-admin and
| you'll get an option to "open folder as root". After you
| authenticate, you'll be able to e.g. move files in /etc/
|
| See https://invent.kde.org/system/kio-admin for details.
|
| This will be included in dolphin natively in the near
| future.
| codewiz wrote:
| Thank you for the tip, didn't know that!
| mikae1 wrote:
| I've historically had a lot of problems with Dolphin too. It
| has gotten _a lot_ better though.
|
| Try https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt as an alternative.
|
| It feels native in Plasma/Breeze and is more traditional. I
| like it.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I wonder, why are more people not using Krusader? I
| understand it is a nuclear bomb for killing mosquitos, but
| with a bit of tweaking it can be fast and easy to use; plus,
| when you _really_ need the big guns, you have them right
| there.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've been using KDE since the beginning, and have never
| heard of Krusader before reading your comment. Maybe I'm
| not the only one, and that's why?
|
| Looking at it quickly, it doesn't seem to be my cup of tea,
| but until now I didn't even know it was there to consider.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I can't believe! I recently filed a ticket and the guy who
| reviewed was the KDE leader? If you are reading this, thank you
| Nate.
| ahoka wrote:
| Switching to copying whatever Windows 11 does instead of Windows
| 10 I guess?
| andreime wrote:
| this comment is ... just wrong; why are you so edgy?
| ahoka wrote:
| Why are people hurt by truth? That's what KDE always did.
| andreime wrote:
| do you know kde 5 was launched one full year before windows
| 10 ?
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| while I agree with the overall premise of your comment,
| that's not what the other poster said _at all_.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| More the opposite; switching to being copied by Windows 12.
| Seriously.
|
| KDE: let's make our panel floating by default to distinguish
| ourselves visually from Windows! _later_ Microsoft rumored to
| introduce floating panel in Windows 12.
| timeon wrote:
| Windows was copying KDE already with Vista/7.
| binkHN wrote:
| I'm happy with them taking the best from Windows 11 so long as
| they don't destroy KDE with distracting ads in the UI like
| Windows 11 does.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Users who prefer the old behavior can toggle it back on in the
| "Mouse Actions" settings under "Desktop Folder Settings", so it's
| not going away entirely.
|
| This is really important to me, the fact that it's configurable.
| The trend in other desktop environments has been to just take
| away features to lead everybody down "the golden path", but
| everybody has different preferences. I prefer a set of sensible
| defaults and a maze of settings to adjust every little thing,
| than just a blanket "here's how it works, deal with it".
| mirpa wrote:
| If you have specific workflow where the golden path is
| suboptimal, sure. But I would not think that average user has
| any preferences and for many users Gnome is very reasonable.
| 0thgen wrote:
| Id second this. I used to lose a lot of productivity via
| desktop tweaking, and have now converted to sticking with
| gnome defaults (as people have said, gnome really does "stay
| out of your way").
|
| hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives
| hobbyist something to experiment with.
|
| I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to
| solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a
| layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists
| (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-
| layer).
|
| I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there
| needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven
| by open source development)
| godshatter wrote:
| I'm a bit worried that it's now off by default, because this is
| one behavior I really like about KDE. Just leave the background
| visible somewhere and you can switch virtual desktops with
| ease. I know you can just click on the graphical virtual
| desktop display in the toolbar, but once I became used to it
| then it became muscle memory and now it's harder to do without
| it. The reason not making it a default worries me is that
| sometimes that makes it a nice candidate for "something we can
| remove that will only affect a minority of users". And it will
| be a minority of users, because most users won't even know it's
| an option.
| jzb wrote:
| (Author here): Users new to KDE don't know what's up with the
| feature. They miss a window and suddenly they're on a
| different virtual desktop. _If_ they connect the behavior
| they may feel like "ooh, I've discovered a new trick" -- or
| they may feel like the desktop is unpredictable.
|
| It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did
| you know you can" type things.
| godshatter wrote:
| I guess I should have stated that I agree that it can be
| confusing and that it might actually be better to have it
| turned off by default. I'm just expressing my worry that it
| will go away entirely soon if no one remembers it. I think
| I've been traumatized by firefox dropping things randomly,
| lol.
| jzb wrote:
| Totally fair. I think it has enough fans that it's safe.
| (I hope!)
| sphars wrote:
| Thank you, this was exactly my experience when I installed
| Nobara 39 last month. Took me a good minute to find where
| turn it off, but I'm glad it's configurable. I agree the
| default should be off.
| switchbak wrote:
| I'm in the camp of folks that think it confuses more than
| it helps. I'm glad there's still the option for those that
| are used to it, but too much of this kind of thing drives
| new users a little nuts.
|
| It'd be interesting to provide an on-ramp for folks to
| progressively explore such things, but doing that
| accidentally is probably not it.
| lytedev wrote:
| Been tinkering with Plasma on my Framework 13 with NixOS and I
| upgraded to Plasma 6 last night. So far things seem pretty great!
|
| The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main
| things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really
| nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you
| know there's probably an option somewhere.
|
| I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my
| workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to
| report back on that.
|
| I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not
| entirely sure why.
|
| Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty
| buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
|
| The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies
| that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
|
| Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to
| be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
|
| Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan
| of the new sound effects across the desktop environment.
| Seriously, they're so good.
|
| New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire
| setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and
| it all seems to work as expected.
|
| Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious
| workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a
| tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
|
| I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with
| Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last
| missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access,
| but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen
| capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines
| remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in
| place and I simply need to set things up.
|
| If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a
| fantastic starting point.
| majoe wrote:
| How good is wayland support on Nixos currently? Did you have to
| make a lot of tweaks to your nix configuration?
|
| Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it
| kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration
| and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for
| hidpi.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I can only talk about Gnome wayland with NixOS, but they
| generally don't do anything too wild with the configs, and
| since they have quite bleeding edge packages, it usually
| works quite well, once it packaged.
| hellcow wrote:
| I just installed plasma6 on nixos (using Wayland) and it
| automatically picked an appropriate fractional scaling for my
| resolution (150%), and everything works and feels great. No
| configuration needed.
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| I assume NixOS runs well. Was there much tinkering at all to
| get it working? Did the finger print reader work? How's the
| battery life?
|
| I didn't read far enough, don't mind me.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if
| it's not broken, don't fix it". Gotta love the consistency over
| the some 15 years I've used it.
| dagw wrote:
| _KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if
| it's not broken, don't fix it"._
|
| Everybody who remembers the KDE 3->4 transition will probably
| violently disagree with that. Hopefully that was an educational
| moment for the dev team and they've actually internalised that
| lesson.
|
| edit: just realised that 3->4 transition was more than 15 years
| ago, which makes me feel very old...
| sho_hn wrote:
| You could say that. We learned a lot from 4.0!
|
| For me one of the biggest accomplishments of our community is
| that people really do stick around. It's very multi-
| generational. Therefore the memory is there and the lessons
| do get learned.
| topspin wrote:
| I want to thank you and detail some of the reasons you
| deserve thanks.
|
| Thank you for the conservative evolution of the KDE DE. In
| my mind the best praise of any major DE release is that
| there is no reason to fear it, and you've done that. Again.
|
| Thank you for protecting KDE from iconoclast mentalities.
| This is a difficult thing to do and only hard nosed
| managerial discipline can achieve this, especially for an
| open source DE.
|
| Thank you for accommodating compositor-less operation.
|
| Thank you for Konsole. Yakuake is also great and I'm making
| use of it as well. However, what I appreciate most is that
| the latter has not disrupting the former. I can have work-
| a-day Konsole and Yakuake can be used where it works well
| at the same time. Thank you!
|
| Thank you for not adopting the minimalist, "golden path"
| mentality. Options have great value to me and I can't tell
| you how much I appreciate that KDE, almost uniquely among
| both commercial and open source mainstream DEs, doesn't
| take them away: KDE is the only conventional DE that
| doesn't demonstrate contempt for my preferences.
|
| The single-click/double-click activation choice is a
| excellent example of the thinking that makes KDE awesome.
| It goes without saying that changing that default must have
| been a tough decision. Yet you made the pragmatic, correct
| choice. Thank you for that.
|
| The vestigial voices still beating KDE over the head for
| the 3->4 issues, despite over a decade of clear _evidence_
| that the lessons have long since been learned, are
| diminishing. They 're being replaced by full throated, well
| deserved praise.
|
| I humbly ask that you hear one concern of mine: X11 is
| crucial and will remain so for a long time yet. I have
| absolutely no problem with Wayland and imagine myself
| adopting it, some day, perhaps even accidentally. In the
| meantime, please do not neglect the X11 experience. I have
| yet to see any evidence that you have, but it is a worry
| for me.
|
| Thank you - From a loyal and deeply appreciative KDE user.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| lmao, that was my exact thought when I read that comment.
|
| I still have nightmares about that. I ended up moving to i3
| as a result of that transition and never looked back,
| although KDE is my "backup desktop".
| jzb wrote:
| Heh. Yes. They definitely seem to have internalized that
| particular experience.
| voxadam wrote:
| As a reasonably satisfied long time user of KDE I find it
| best to treat KDE 4 like the 'Star Wars Holiday Special' and
| pretend like it never happened.
| estebank wrote:
| This is not the only snarky comment about the 3->4
| transition, but I feel they are overly harsh. A big problem
| with that transition was distros jumping to ship pre-release
| software to users long before the release was ready, which
| really soured the perception of the new version. There were
| bugs, but the perception lasted longer than the reality, IMO.
|
| That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2
| transition and subsequent death.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Yep, this was sad. Amarok used to rock
| okanat wrote:
| > That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2
| transition and subsequent death.
|
| Strawberry Player (the fork of Clementine which is the fork
| of Amarok 1.4) is still going and it is ported to Qt 6 so
| it works okay with many highdpi environments
| dagw wrote:
| _I feel they are overly harsh_
|
| From a purely technical perspective perhaps, but overall I
| don't think so. KDE3 was hugely popular and regularly
| depolyed. Based on my personal observations (admittedly EU
| based), it was the single most popular *nix desktop at the
| time. KDE4 more or less killed that over night and as far
| as I can tell KDE has never recovered neither marketshare
| nor the mindshare it had.
|
| On a personal note I went from a huge KDE fan, and someone
| who deployed and managed KDE3 workstations at a small
| company, to literally not using it for over a decade.
|
| _the perception lasted longer than the reality_
|
| Which is the one really important lesson in all of this.
| sgu999 wrote:
| I've learned to appreciate that if I showed this version to a 20
| years younger me who had just gotten into Linux with Fedora,
| they'd probably find the UI extremely familiar. Meanwhile I have
| to relearn how to use my iPhone and Macbook every year now...
| necroforest wrote:
| If you need to relearn your iPhone/Mac interfaces every year,
| you might want to get screened for Alzheimers.
| sgu999 wrote:
| And you might want to avoid reading comments too literally :)
| dvh wrote:
| I left big DEs because of the constant overhauls (and because of
| their slowness). The WM of my choice (jwm) hasn't changed in
| decade and still being actively maintained and developed.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| How do you install jwm?
| dvh wrote:
| sudo apt-get install jwm
|
| (Then logout and choose jwm when typing password)
| HunOL wrote:
| > The nice thing about KDE is that so much is configurable, but
| finding configuration settings is still a challenge in Plasma 6.
| For example, the aforementioned setting to scroll virtual
| desktops is found in the Desktop Folder Settings application, but
| not in the System Settings application under the Virtual Desktop
| settings.
|
| My current Linux installation on desktop is from 2016 and
| everything was configured years ago. Recently I had to install
| Linux in Virtualbox and decided to go with KDE. I was overwhelmed
| with settings not in a good way. Maybe when I was younger I was
| more enthusiastic and liked it, but now I want reasonable
| defaults and consistent UI/UX experience.
| abainbridge wrote:
| Yep. I want to have the same config as everyone else to
| maximise the chance that I'm using the well tested path of the
| software.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| If you want consistency of configuration over years go with
| FVWM.
|
| I'm kidding (and kinda not), it's a valid complaint.
| tux1968 wrote:
| It would be really nice if configuration was scriptable, so
| that you could have one configuration script, and run it on
| every new install. Would remove the need to hunt and peck.
| HKH2 wrote:
| NixOS?
| topaz0 wrote:
| What makes you think it isn't? There seem to be old-fashioned
| config files for anything that you could do in the settings
| app or whatever.
| mkl wrote:
| You don't even need a script - just use the same home folder
| or copy over the ~/.config/* files. KDE's configuration is
| all text files.
| sotix wrote:
| KDE has reinvigorated my love for the desktop after years on Mac.
| I use it on my PC, laptop, and steam deck! I'm a big fan of their
| apps including Konsole, Kate, and KDEConnect. It's an all around
| impressive project and surpasses MacOS and Windows in my opinion,
| which is remarkable. Really grateful to everyone that works on
| it.
| rgun wrote:
| The other day one of my colleagues was trying to sell me the
| Apple ecosystem by giving a specific example. He has airpod
| connected to his mac. As soon as he gets a call, they switch to
| his iPhone. He was quite surprised when I told him that the
| same thing happens with my Asus laptop running Kubuntu,
| Motorola phone and Oneplus ear buds.
| phatfish wrote:
| With default settings KDE is very familiar for people coming
| from Windows (well Windows 10 at least), and runs well for me
| without any serious errors. The biggest issue for Linux desktop
| use seems to be outside of the control of KDE/Gnome/Other DE
| now, which is rock solid support for all the flavours of
| consumer hardware out there.
|
| MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all
| the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux
| ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm
| still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora
| so I'm getting new kernel versions).
| binkHN wrote:
| I completely agree with this. As someone who recently
| switched to Linux from too many years of Windows, the lack of
| hardware support is frustrating. As I've delved into this
| world for a few months now, I can clearly see the cases where
| Windows gets a hardware feature or related through a driver
| update, but this doesn't happen in Linux for a while because
| it needs to be integrated into the kernel.
| sotix wrote:
| Does anyone have advice on contributing code to the project? I'd
| love to give back, but it's a bit daunting, and I'm not the most
| familiar with c++. Would love to find a smaller place to start.
| PcChip wrote:
| You can also become a quarterly/yearly PayPal contributor
| jrepinc wrote:
| There is this list of 15-minute bugs that should be easy to
| tackle
| https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...
|
| Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great
| way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE
| games or educational applications.
|
| You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get
| help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-
| contributors:kde.org
| ismailmaj wrote:
| I was excited to try HDR on Plasma 6 but it currently only works
| with AMD GPUs, not Nvidia.
| seancolsen wrote:
| I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
|
| I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-
| used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours
| later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this
| functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
|
| [1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871
| [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]:
| https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop
| MBCook wrote:
| Can you explain what's so much better about Wayland support?
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's a large amount of robustness improvements,
| particularly around multi-monitor and docking scenarios with
| dynamic and fractional DPI. We've also introduced technology
| to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor
| crash and restart.
|
| We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol
| extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider
| Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the
| layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g.
| enabling third-party panels.
|
| We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in
| particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning
| a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the
| Steam Deck).
|
| More complete porting of many little quality-of-life
| workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running
| in Wayland.
|
| Performance work.
|
| Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the
| latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
|
| Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the
| Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps
| video players and game engines.
|
| Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself,
| some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the
| QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland
| protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover
| protocol.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Thank you(plural) for all your efforts. Donated as well.
|
| I feel like this iteration of KDE will finally convince me
| to move to linux permanently.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Thanks for the donation, it really helps :-)
| Zambyte wrote:
| Super excited to play around with this on my Steam Deck!
| Wayland support was actually one of the main reasons I left
| KDE on my primary machine, eventually in favor of Sway.
| Really glad to see so much progress has been made on that
| front :)
| MBCook wrote:
| Wow. That's quite a lot. Thanks.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| HDR support is huge and is the last thing preventing me
| from ditching Windows on my gaming PC.
| __loam wrote:
| I'm not sure if it has anything to do with KDE itself or if
| it's Kubuntu's fault but one small annoyance I've dealt
| with is how my wacom drawing tablet is mapped to the screen
| space. I've had to manually map it so that the tablet touch
| space isn't spread across three monitors and I've also had
| this setting get reset. I'm really excited to see more
| support for multiple monitors coming down the pipe. Do you
| know anything about the tablet issue or is this something I
| just need to do some more research on?
| nijave wrote:
| >We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to
| stay running should the compositor crash and restart
|
| Sweet this is one of the reasons I gave up on KDE 5 I tried
| a couple months ago. Some combination of KVM and amdgpu was
| causing crashes (I think something to do with hotplugging
| displays and Wayland) and it seemed like everything
| downstream got nuked as well
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| That RDP screen sharing is very interesting. Does it
| require an open session attached to a real screen, or is
| starting headless remote sessions possible?
| troyvit wrote:
| > I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
|
| I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but
| several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat
| measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that
| games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11
| it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour.
| Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD
| ecosystem.
| bogwog wrote:
| > freetube
|
| I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube
| all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never
| had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you
| on?
| tamimio wrote:
| > freetube
|
| I have it and works fine on plasma6/wayland.
| troyvit wrote:
| This must just be me then. I'll give it another shot!
| gtirloni wrote:
| I'd imagine XWayland Xorg emulation is far from perfect so I
| wouldn't be surprised if games that depend on that would
| crash.
|
| That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a
| hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using
| proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
| bitwize wrote:
| The thing that you have to remember about Xwayland is that
| it _is_ Xorg. It just has a Wayland DDX[0] on the back end
| rather than a device-specific DDX or one that talks e.g.,
| directly to the modesetting driver.
|
| [0] Device-Dependent X, i.e., the bits of X that talk
| directly to the display. Contrasted with Device-Independent
| X (DIX), i.e., the bits that do state tracking and protocol
| communication with clients.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| I'm using KDE on Debian / Wayland because I was forced to [0].
| I moved to it from from Gnome, which I was forced to use for
| similar reasons.
|
| I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo)
| button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE
| Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that
| function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The
| "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too
| fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac
| days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The
| rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than
| Gnome, of course.
|
| Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared
| to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if
| the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto
| something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per
| se.
|
| [0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on
| paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never
| have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a
| lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The
| 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch
| when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path
| through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to
| work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11
| the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well.
| With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display
| manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's,
| then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you
| use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other
| combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| i'm in a similar boat -- i miss being able to tap the super
| key. i don't mind that the defaults are different, but i'm
| sad that (since it's considered a modifier key) KDE doesn't
| allow it to be bound on tap. this prevents me from
| replicating Gnome's behavior.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| You can do that. I'm not on KDE right now but basically
| there's 2 steps:
|
| 1. You can go to System Settings -> Keyboard and there,
| enable Super key to act as another button.
|
| 2. Set the shortcut to that another button.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I have to be honest, anytime I see a major version update I start
| to have nightmares of the KDE3/4 update.
|
| With that negativity aside, I use i3 nowadays but KDE is still
| always my other desktop. I've been using it since the KDE1 days
| and have always strongly preferred it over gnome :) Even in i3,
| Konsole is my console of choice.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| This 3 to 4 was 15 years ago, time to forget about it already.
| The developers have learned from it.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I moved to i3 as a result of that transition, I think I'll
| continue remembering.
| sylware wrote:
| If KDE was not c++ (with its underlaying toolkit), I would give
| it a try.
| fullstop wrote:
| Why does this matter?
| sylware wrote:
| I am a dev, I understand why c++ and similar are definitive
| nonos.
| efficax wrote:
| good luck avoiding c++ software on the desktop. FWIW, c++
| has many more features than plain c for improving safety
| and reliability (for example shared_ptr) if that's your
| concern.
| fullstop wrote:
| I would suggest that nearly every person on this website is
| a developer. Both C and C++ let you shoot yourself in the
| foot quite easily, but at least C++ has RAII.
|
| If you're referring to Rust, it's just not there yet for
| anything serious: https://areweguiyet.com/
| k8svet wrote:
| Tell that to those of us dogfodding COSMIC right now. ;)
| fullstop wrote:
| I looked into this as well, but both libcosmic and
| cosmic-applibrary are still a WIP -- that's self-
| described, as well! There is no, for example, Qt or GTK
| in the Rust world yet.
|
| I'm sure that it will be a reality at some point, but
| it's not there yet in a format a third party could use
| without it being obsolete after a few months. I am
| hopeful, though!
| coffeeaddict1 wrote:
| What software are you using to read HN then?
| josephcsible wrote:
| I understand not wanting to write C++, but what do you have
| against merely using a program written in it?
| HankB99 wrote:
| KDE user here. I'm on Debian so I'm still on 5.27 and will be for
| a while. That's OK. I like Plasma 5.27 and my only disappointment
| is that I won't file bug reports if I run into any issues. I
| don't expect they would be addresses and I prefer that the devs
| focus on moving 6 along. By the time 6 is on Debian (trixi,
| hopefully) lots of kinks should be worked out.
|
| And speaking of kinks, I'm disappointed in the number of posters
| on Mastodon who are angrily claiming that they will never use KDE
| again because of issues they run into on the first day of a major
| release. What did they expect?
|
| And I will repeat: Many thanks to the devs, testers, documenters
| and all others who make this happen. Well done!
| BadHumans wrote:
| I hope this increases stability. KDE takes the startup approach
| of move fast and break things. For all of their progress in
| functionality, I have so many annoying bugs that I deal with on a
| daily basis.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Curious to hear them. It's been a bug free experience for me,
| even on Wayland.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Well allow me to list them off. I'm using Plasma 5.27
|
| - If my monitor dims due to inactivity then I start using my
| computer again, the monitor stays dim and does not come back
| up to the brightness I had it unless I turn off my monitor
| and turn it back on. I resolved this by just turning off
| dimming.
|
| - If KDE goes to lockscreen due to inactivity but I start
| interacting with my computer during the transition, my
| monitor just stays black and doesn't return to desktop or go
| to lockscreen.
|
| - My bluetooth headphones disconnect whenever KDE goes to
| lockscreen.
|
| -I use multiple languages and sometimes my languages will
| switch randomly despite not hitting the language hotkey and
| often I will mash my language hotkey and the language still
| won't change.
|
| Those are just what I remember off the top of my head but I'm
| maintaining a list somewhere in a notebook.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Oh jeez that does sound brutal. I do not experience those
| issues on my Deb 12 desktop. The lockscreen/dimming/etc
| stuff specifically works well for me. It's very responsive
| to return from lock, if I catch it in the transition I can
| abort. Wondering if it's the underlying platform you are
| on, or a third party plugin or module that could be doing
| this.
| BadHumans wrote:
| It's entirely possible Fedora sucks and is at fault while
| KDE itself is not responsible for the problems.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >do away with the default of using the scroll wheel on the
| desktop to switch virtual desktops
|
| I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can
| bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right
| item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be
| useful would be for accessibility.
|
| >Wayland as default
|
| I have plasma installed here and one weird thing I noticed is
| that if I use the wayland version sometimes text isn't rendered
| on windows or entire panels flash black rectangles, while if I
| use the X11 version my mouse speed becomes slower. I wonder if
| the update addresses these issues. Anyway after trying out
| several DEs I ended up using Xfce because my mouse feels faster
| in it.
| godshatter wrote:
| > I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can
| bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right
| item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would
| be useful would be for accessibility.
|
| For me personally, it lets me think of desktops in terms of
| what is left or right of them, rather than what actual number
| it is, i.e my Steam desktop is to the right of my browser
| desktop and to the left of my remote session. If I need to go
| to the email desktop from where I'm at, it's two scrolls away.
| I usually leave a little bit of the desktop visible on each
| virtual desktop to facilitate this.
|
| So, not an accessibility thing for me but an actual preference.
| People are different. I know, it shocked me too.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I see. In every program that supported this I've triggered it
| by accident so often I had to disable it.
| godshatter wrote:
| Even now I occasionally use the scroll wheel and not
| realize my mouse is out of my window and have the same
| moment of surprise so I can relate.
| e12e wrote:
| Interesting:
|
| > Qt has switched to CMake, away from the qmake build system
|
| Found some more information:
|
| https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-cmake-the-past-the-present-and...
| (2021)
| shmerl wrote:
| Nice, hopefully Wine Wayland works better with it than with Kwin
| from Plasma 5.
| int0x21 wrote:
| I went KDE after Gnome went to version 3 and never looked back
| moooo99 wrote:
| I've been using Gnome almost exclusively for the past two years,
| although I also spent significant amounts of time in a tiling WM
| (Sway).
|
| I like the overall experience of gnome. The apps feel nice, the
| DE feels snappy etc. But the tiling features of KDE make me
| curious. I like sway, but I recently completely messed up my
| configuration and it's a an absolute pain to get back working
| even halfway decent, so I may as well give a integrated DE a try
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Also consider pop-shell which is a fork of GNOME with tiling
| built-in. However, I'm not sure about its future since PopOS is
| switching to COSMIC DE in the next release.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I actually did try the Pop Shell extension with my Fedora
| installation, but found it to be more cumbersome than
| helpful.
|
| Admittedly, this may very well be due to the fact that I
| didn't quite have the time to configure it to match my tiling
| WM mappings i've been used to at this point
| uticus wrote:
| Meh, I want a window manager, not a full desktop environment. I
| want key-combo switching between apps and allowing the apps to be
| moved and sized. And that's it. No need for special 'start/run'
| features, for DE-bundled apps, for DE-based widget bars, for DE-
| based notifications, etc. Get everything out of the way for
| focusing on the apps and allowing interaction between them only
| as needed.
|
| The problem imo is that Wayland is too hard to write your own WM
| for. People wrote X11 WMs in weekends when they got fed up with
| the status quo. How many do the same for Wayland?
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| So much of my workflow depends on X11. I hope we can keep it
| going. I don't think I could do this on Wayland: using my
| gpt4-vision toolkit to read my blocked domains list from kagi and
| xdotool entering the list into Azure Custom Search Api.
| https://twitter.com/xundecidability/status/17632190171608678...
| ak_111 wrote:
| Still wondering if I can use emacs bindings on KDE, I recall a
| few years ago that wasn't possible without some tricky
| workarounds.
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| Does Slack actually open on Plasma 6?
| smm11 wrote:
| I've never been able to get the hang of KDE, but this release is
| quite impressive. This and SystemD is really one step closer to
| something like OS X.
| jrepinc wrote:
| FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made
| https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/e6e8f177-22f1-432a-9c7f-ab76b17a...
| sarasasa28 wrote:
| oh man, I remember when I cared about this. I am so happy to be a
| normie with a Macbook now
| flexagoon wrote:
| KDE is pretty cool but I just don't get why they're still using
| their Breeze theme. GNOME got so much more beautiful with the new
| Adwaita theme. It's time for KDE to redesign their default theme
| as well, Breeze looks absolutely terrible and outdated,
| especially the icons, it all feels super cheap and like it was
| all drawn by some random guy, not a huge project with a UI team.
|
| KDE can look amazing with a custom theme, why don't they just
| pick one and make it official?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Really? The default GNOME Adwaita theme has been pretty blech
| in my opinion for a number of years. The update just kinda
| flattened out the visual identity and kept the same "sickness"
| looking colors.
|
| I quite like the GTK toolkit but I'll never be able to tolerate
| the default Dark colorscheme. If we're strictly talking about
| colors, I find Breeze to be more pleasing in Light and Dark
| mode.
| ognarb wrote:
| There is effort to multiple concurrent efforts to update the
| breeze style:
|
| Mine is here which is still quite WIP
| https://carlschwan.eu/2023/12/19/announcing-brise-theme/
|
| And there is another one for icons
| https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/breeze-icons-upda...
| sdwvit wrote:
| KDE plasma is the main reason I could switch completely from
| windows / macos for work and hobbies. Very mature DE that can
| challenge commercial solutions.
| geenat wrote:
| Long live the cube.
| haolez wrote:
| KDE sits in a weird place in my case. If I want something to just
| get out of the way, I use GNOME. If I want to scratch my geek
| itch and have a super custom and fancy hacker desktop, I resort
| to things like i3. KDE doesn't appeal to me as of today. Just my
| personal anecdote.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I use KDE because it's stable, has every feature I want, and
| uses existing metaphors I am familiar with.
|
| In my circle of Linux users, a lot of the people that choose
| KDE do so because they don't find the desktop layer interesting
| to hack on, and just want a tool for interacting with Linux.
| jedbrown wrote:
| What is the state of tiling in Plasma 6 and how does it compare
| to Pop Shell (https://github.com/pop-os/shell) for GNOME?
| cocoa19 wrote:
| KDE team has done a fantastic job in the looks department. Every
| time I look at the latest release it looks better and better.
|
| I every now and then use KDE and it keeps looking less and less
| as a "desktop environment for developers" (read: ugly), and more
| like a desktop environment that everybody loves. These latest
| screenshots look fantastic.
| teekert wrote:
| I love how Gnome and KDE Plasma diverged. I change desktops every
| now and then, now I'm feeling like Gnome is just enough desktop
| and I'm loving it. But I have to say, this news item has me
| longing for Plasma's configurability again (and wobbly windows).
| I just love that there is so much choice on Linux!
| zerr wrote:
| Linux desktop UI environments always felt laggy compared to
| Windows. Is it the same nowadays?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| "An aging Thinkpad with 16 GB of RAM"
|
| Wow, a 5-year-old laptop. Things were so primitive in 2018. Here
| in my the mighty year of 2024, my computer has....... 16 GB of
| RAM.
| throwaway8481 wrote:
| Okay, I am of course excited that KDE is making such fantastic
| strides forward. How-the-ever, GNOME is ahead of them because of
| the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial
| scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME
| extensions enabling things like PaperWM.
|
| Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of
| these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely
| important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing
| Gnome, but that's what's comfortable.
|
| Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're
| so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled
| desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like
| physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple
| puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an
| environment with actual physics interactions. How light bounces
| between layered interface components. It's going to be hugely
| resource-intensive but someday we'll look back on 2D GUIs and DEs
| like something that pales in comparison to the amazing interfaces
| of a 3D environment where we can attach virtual surfaces to walls
| and ceilings and have them follow after us as we move around the
| office/house with our headsets.
|
| (Someday: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/174)
|
| PS: I'm loving how both KDE and GNOME are pushing a lot of DE
| behaviors into JS extensions. On a separate front, everything we
| interact with is like _this close_ to being entirely within a web
| browser.
|
| Nobody likes what I've said, but I'm prophesying now: DEs will
| need to go "spatial", and all of /this/ will be in a web browser
| by 2027.
| pyrophane wrote:
| My personal UI preferences aside, one place where KDE is ahead
| of Gnome right now that matters a great deal to me is support
| for fractional scaling, especially supporting different scaling
| factors one different displays (laptop vs monitor).
|
| KDE seems to have this working pretty well, whereas Gnome does
| not and it isn't clear when they will get there.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high
| dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable
| refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling
| things like PaperWM.
|
| Wait... all of this is a lot to take in. HDR progress has gone
| great on Red Hat's side, but KDE has been working on it just as
| long (with arguably further progress). VRR has existed on KDE
| for a while as "Adaptive Sync" and the work that goes into
| updating GNOME extensions exists mostly because the GNOME
| developers refuse to make a stable API for it.
|
| GNOME and Red Hat obviously do great work for the community,
| but these seem like weird examples. To the contrary, with
| GNOME's fractured extensibility and now-missing system tray, a
| lot of Windows and MacOS users will probably feel confused
| booting up GNOME 40. I say all this from a GNOME system myself
| =P
|
| > Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize
| we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing"
|
| Holy whiplash, Batman! I disagree so hard my head is spinning.
|
| For one, "the curve" of Spatial Computing is so-far relegated
| to cheap Android SDKs and $3,500 iPad-killers. Nobody is
| shipping Johnny-Mnemonic style hardware today, and probably
| won't be for another decade. Focusing on developing that
| technology is not only a waste of time, but entirely tangential
| to the work that goes into making the modern desktop usable.
| GNOME and KDE's efforts shouldn't be dedicated to a
| hypothetical userbase that might never exist.
|
| ...and on the flip side, a lot of work _has_ gone into
| "spatializing" Open Source software. OpenXR is the de-facto
| standard for VR experiences, and is well-supported on Linux
| clients. With Wayland, the desktop's rendering model is now
| _finally_ up to a position where someone could feasibly write a
| foveated window renderer. There are people doing it right now,
| despite the lack of demand: https://simulavr.com/
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I was surprised when someone told me that KDE is the biggest open
| source project in existence after Linux kernel. But indeed it
| looks like it. They are trying to reinvent the entire desktop
| computing stack in-house. This is what Apple does but without the
| corporate. I hope they succeed so I can have my fully free and
| thus user-centric desktop on par with proprietary offerings.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > Plasma 6 is likely to be a little bit rough around the edges
| for a while, and users might want to review known issues before
| deciding to upgrade.
|
| https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...
|
| This one caught my eye:
|
| https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480122
| SUMMARY If the screen is turn off and then the pc goes
| to sleep (only possible if the lid is closed because trying to
| use a shortcut to sleep cause pc screen to turn on), on lid open
| the screen is black and the pc is unusable (require a reboot).
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I'd be _very_ excited if KDE can be the first usable Linux on
| mobile (usable = with my $banking_app, $messenger_app, etc.). If
| anyone were to pull it off it 'd be KDE.
| minzi wrote:
| I am always so conflicted about adopting new desktop
| environments. Every time I feel like I dump 10-20 hours into it
| and still end up using my mac more often. This looks so tempting,
| but I feel fairly confident the outcome will be the same for me.
| Maybe the only way to achieve this is to get rid of my macbook.
| akho wrote:
| Good to see better Wayland support in a popular environment.
|
| Judging by the screenshots, the UI remains a mess though. It's
| really surprising how people can be selectively blind about these
| things.
| nazzacodes wrote:
| Is it just me that's a bit disappointed with the rate of change
| of desktop linux? Particularly the UI side of things? I feel like
| desktop linux is way behind Mac and even Windows in so many ways.
| Would love to see modern stripped back kde/gnome alternative:
| less kitchen sink applications, minimalist power user friendly
| design sense, 1st class tiling window management, keyboard
| friendly workflow etc.
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