For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
Super solid, <3 for the KDE team and product.
Reality is... often-times the best things are often unused. And if these things were hypothetically used... there'd be significantly less complaints than the status quo.
VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before.
I've been long a KDE user, even through the 4.0 troubles, but also the first to admit that it used to look clunky. Looking at old screenshots is a quick reminder of how far this initiative has taken it.
I looked at some Asahi Linux videos and it always shows KDE and the interface is Windows like (or what I call Windows like). I never liked that and that is single biggest reason I never tried KDE. I know it's Linux and KDE and GNOME can pretty much made to look like each other (i.e their default look and feel). Is it trivial on Asahi Linux or needs a lot of tweaking?
Something like what ElementaryOS would look like - look/feel/UX wise ElementaryOS has been my gold standard sine it released and the last I checked it still felt that way. But since anything other than what Asahi Linux installs and support by default, i.e. Fedora Remix, is neither recommended nor fares well on Mac so I don't think I can use ElementaryOS (which is essentially Ubuntu LTS) really. Even Asahi Linux team recommends KDE.
Also - can one access certain Mac folders in Asahi (e.g. ~/Pictures)? And is it even recommended, if it's possible (Security wise)?
(I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
I love open source and have been running Linux since 1999, but my experience of contributing to both KDE and GNOME is your PRs never go anywhere unless you're part of the inner cabal of maintainers, otherwise any small bugfix or feature goes into bikeshedding mode, and it's the reason I don't contribute any more.
That said, I run KDE now after two decades of GNOME. It's pretty good and has been looking good for a while now.
It still has weirdly inconsistent margins in places but compared to the disaster that is the jumble of different UIs in Windows that's nothing.
macOS before Tahoe, sure, but now? Have you looked at the screenshots where people layered different fullscreen apps on top of each other and the rounded corners look like a stack of cards because they're all different? It's a complete disaster.
You could power all those fancy new AI datacenters with Steve's spinning skeleton.
> (I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
If you are still hesitating, it's actually really easy to try : just run the command on the Asahi website and follow the instructions. The setup will resize your partition automatically and will not touch anything of your macOS install or your data. It's even easier than on PC where you have to boot the installation media and manage the partitionning yourself. IIRC, there isnt even the option to remove your macOS partition at any moment so you can't even lose your data by mistake.
The only prerequisite is having free space on your disk and everything else is automatic.
Also, uninstalling Asahi is as easy as going to macOS Disk Utility App, right click on the asahi partition, delete, and resize the macOS partition. After those three clicks, your Mac is now in the same state than before installing Asahi.
All the while they develop and push a product that screenshots what you are doing so that AI can "assist" you. Not to mention pushing ads and news and free to play games.
Maybe the margins or icons aren't what you'd prefer, but you're being intellectually dishonest pretending that there is any uniformity in their product let alone even a single iota of care or interest in the experience the user has with their product.
What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be.
And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible somewhere in the 2010s and I don't want to attribute it to laziness, greed, etc... People have been lazy and greedy since people existed, there must have been something else. And I think that mobile is the answer.
UI designers are facing a really hard problem, if not impossible. Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do?
In addition to mobile, you often need to target the browser too, so: native desktop, native mobile, browser desktop, browser mobile. And then you add commercial consideration like cost, brand identity, and the idea that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. Commercial considerations have always been a thing, but the multiplication of platforms made it worse, prompting for the idea of running everything in a browser, and having the desktop inferface just being the mobile interface with extra stuff.
It feels exactly like the KDE website itself: https://kde.org/
That being said, KDE is very usable. I just wouldn't claim that it looks more professional than MacOS. I'd love for that to be the case but it just isn't.
https://mero.ng/i/lWMWazUP.png
The screenshot on the website has all sorts of optional bits enabled, and I would readily agree is not a good showcase.
The reason all those optional bits exist is because you'd be surprised who ends up using a terminal emulator in a general purpose desktop GUI used in many large IT deployments. E.g. a lot of folks who are used to PuTTy on Windows and want a little GUI for SSH connections, and for them this is the game changer.
The "try to show all the goods in your screenshot" mindset is really not a good one though, agree :)
KDE generally functions how you expect. For example, a bunch of FOSS hippies somehow managed to create a control panel (system settings in KDE parlance) that's easy to use and navigate, and Microsoft still haven't accomplished that despite trying for over 10 years at this point.
Also, I can dock my task bar to the side, like God intended.
Who do you think has been "infected" by the "mobile" virus? KDE's only real competitor is way more keyboard focused than KDE...
[1] Hamburger menus are designed to make efficient use of a small vertical display where horizontal screen space is a limited commodity, which just is not the case at all for a large horizontal computer monitor. On a large horizontal display, they're a straight downgrade since you need to click the menu to see what's inside it, which makes action discovery harder. This click is also added to a lot of actions so they add more friction to almost all interactions.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
And this is true despite the fact that a vanishingly small number of users actually use a touchscreen with gnome.
You cannot access any of your Mac folders in Asahi. Your Mac partitions are invisible until you reboot into MacOS.
Some potential workarounds:
1. Use Syncthing to sync your Pictures folder on both operating systems to an external Mac. This of course duplicates the contents of the folder on your Mac/Asahi SSD, which is wasteful.
[Note: Dropbox does not work on Asahi Linux because it only barely works on x86 Linux and it has never worked on Arm Linux.]
2. Use an external USB or SD drive for files you want to share. Needs to be formatted in something both OSes can read/write (e.g. not APFS).
3. Use Paragon's $40 extFS which lets MacOS read and write to your Linux partition. Supposedly; I haven't tried it. This only solves half your problem: It gives MacOS access to your Linux files but not the reverse.
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/
What's really needed is a way to mount APFS partitions from Linux, and I plan to DDG that as soon as I finish typing this...
UPDATE: APFS FUSE seems to be recommended, although it only provides read access to your APFS partition.
https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse
4. Make a brand new partition on your drive for shared files, and format it exFAT. MacOS can read/write exFAT natively and Linux can usually be made to do so, although I haven't tried it yet on Asahi. This seems to me like the most promising option if you don't want to depend on an external drive.
KDE is nice looking to me. MacOS previously had a huge advantage because of fonts rendering. It's probably still a bit better in this regard, but the difference shouldn't be that noticable today.
> So many KDE apps have this same problem.
Right click any KDE app toolbar -> Text position -> Icons only
I also believe it's a setting in the System Settings.
IMHO the 'desktop environment' is supposed to get out of your way. I'll admit that sometimes having a widget that makes it "easier" to connect to random wifi, or bluetooth devices is handy; but that depends on your use-case.
My hardware changes once every 5-10 years, and I never use bluetooth so these features are not helpful to me.
https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909...
You asking this means (maybe?) that you're too young to have used the abhorrent default start menu of Windows 8, but yeah, forcing down users' throats the result of tucking what essentially was a mobile design into a 32" desktop monitor was the pure definition of "stupid decisions driven by marketing".
And it was not only OSes, too much of the web got "infected" with these design trends that are only appropriate for small screens:
It's not, which is why the context menu gives you an "Icons Only" option, along with "Text Only", "Text Alongside Icons" (default), and "Text Under Icons". You can also adjust the icon size, or remove the toolbar entirely.
You keep the UIs separate. Dumbing down desktop UIs to mobile capabilities is just as bad of a design as it was when people tried to jam a desktop UI into mobile. You have to play to the strengths of the platform you are on, not limit each one based on the other. Yes, it's more work, but it's well worth it to have a product which is actually good.
Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app, like seeing the version/build number, or certain settings. I'm not sure I want something like a "See hidden files" ticker occupying screen real estate forever when I could just set it once in an accessory menu.
I question whether these critiques would evaporate if, instead of the three horizontal bars, Gnome instead used a gear icon or something, and turned their contents into a pop-up window rather than a popover element.
The root cause is that UX folks almost never use a product as often as their users.
So what's an "oh, left instead of right" minor change for them is anathema to someone with muscle memory.
Ergo, IMHO, all breaking UX changes should be required to clear a high bar, with the default being status quo + tweaks.
- We now have a plethora of UX logging and can see real time where users struggle.
- There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.
- More people are using technology than ever, and so we have a more representative sample of data to work with.
- Mimicking mobile UIs, as eloquently called out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290812
- I suspect there is something of a race to the bottom WRT To UX teams; they're always designing around any pain point, which has a few knock-on effects:
- There will _always_ be pain points, and so there will _always_ need to be UI changes.
- Designing a product so that the bottom of the bell curve can use it well probably does make an objectively worse product.
- There's nothing wrong with needing to learn a UI, and this "learning" could be mistaken as pain point.
- UX teams can't exist if there aren't things to constantly change, which increases the UI churn.
I prefer what Windows 11 has done with settings being a simple two panel window with categories on left and scrollable settings on the right, with a search/filter bar at top. As you drill deeper you have a breadcrumb at top allowing you to see the levels you are in and click to go back up. This also allows space for descriptions of what each setting does. It could even be improved by allowing users to pin commonly used settings.
This seems overall more simple and cohesive compared to the old Windows control panel with icons and nested settings being popups within popups within popups. It also allows easier scaling and viewing depending on DPI, screen size, resolution, etc.
those misleading hype statements are the reason why stuff like "this is the year of the linux desktop!" is a meme because anybody outside of your nerd/tech bubble will just look at you like you're insane.
But I do happen to enjoy having extraneous menus hidden. Why are they cluttering my screen and workspace when I'm using keyboard shortcuts anyway? I want to see my actual work, not some menu I don't need and will never click on...
Using a mouse to click on a bunch of tiny menus littered all over the place is horrible for productivity and screams "boomer"...
https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba...
That's just one detail, but it shows a consistent eye towards the user that feels missing from kde. It feels like they aimed for "floss version of windows usability" and stopped there.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the hamburger menu is that there is absolutely zero convention for what you put in there, or in which order. You don't know what you'll find in the menu unless you click it. With the old top menu, there were a set of conventions for this; roughly where specific options went, and in which order, and even which hotkeys you'd press to activate the menus. This means that even in an application you were completely unfamiliar with (even hideously complex ones such as an IDE or 3d modelling software), you could fairly easily navigate the application.
I don't say you can't produce things on smart phones, it is just a more restricted environment with things dumbed down, partly for reasons of target demographic, partly for reasons of screen size.
And thus the rise of mobile incentivizes companies ever so slightly to make the desktop more like their mobile counterpart.
In this space open source operating systems (or desktop environments) can be totally uncompromising. They don't need to nudge you into spending money/attention in places that are not in your interest. They don't bolt everything down and pretend to know better than you. In short, they treat you like an adult (producer) and not like a child (consumer).
And that is refreshing.
It's sad because I really like the aesthetics and user experience of the GNOME desktop and its applications. However, the inconsistent user interface for non-GNOME applications is becoming a deal breaker as more of them transition to Wayland. These applications have no choice but to create their own title bars and other UI elements, resulting in a mishmash of different looks, controls, and fonts. Many of them don't even include shadows around the windows because they aren't sure if they should. As a result of all of this, many third party applications look hideous on GNOME.
As much as I want to continue using GNOME, I'm increasingly drawn to KDE with each passing day due to this issue. I rely on applications like Kitty Terminal, mpv, and WINE. They all suffer from this issue on GNOME, but not on KDE. Ultimately, if I have to choose between a desktop environment and third-party applications, I will prioritize the applications. I think many others would do the same.
It very much feels like we've fallen into the same trap medieval handwriting did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi... -- building designs around what looks aesthetically uniform and cool rather than what is easy to parse and use.
For what it's worth, I'm not part of KDE's inner circle, yet the several PRs that I have submitted to them since I started using it (~2 years ago) have all been accepted. One was difficult to shepherd through the gauntlet of opinions, but was finally merged. So the process is not entirely impenetrable.
I sometimes used to fantasise Apple ordering their UX folks to just adopt it pixel by pixel and stick to it.
Imho, this is a big source of the problem.
Granted: there are some amazing UX designers and teams out there.
But my experience with UX teams has been that in most middle-market companies they're usually less that sort and more the {huge designer ego} + {management consulting political skillset} one.
And it's a tough problem to solve! Because ultimately you want someone who can argue very hard for their approach to improving UX (usually against opposition from others). But when someone's ego exceeds their skill, that leads to disaster.
And without a strong Jobs-esque "this sucks" arbiter over them, their changes make it to prod.
Is CachyOS better now?
You can recreate the layout almost perfectly. Don't try to theme it as macOS, just get the UI components in the right places using the widgets it comes with.
It has. I believe this is a consequence of the 4.x debacle 18 years ago. KDE was doing great in the 3.x release, capturing a lot of users, and then everything went sideways with 4.x.
They recovered: by the later releases of 4.x most of the problems were fixed and 4.x was entirely livable. The KDE developers learned a hard lesson and have been very conservative since then. Since the release of Plasma (5.x) in 2014, KDE hasn't self-inflicted any great regressions or misfeatures, and now there is 10+ years of "polish."
It is very nice.
I too have used the "Window Rules" mentioned in the blog post. Very useful for game development where you want certain windows to appear at precise locations on different displays every time, day after day, for years. KDE just gives you features like this, whereas this is considered unnecessary elsewhere.
- Change encoding? I have never changed the encoding of my terminal, not once since first using a computer, circa 1982. UTF8-FTW.
- Adjust scrollback, on the context menu?
- If you hide the toolbar/menu I believe it adds the main menu to the context menu. And that is where the majority of the hundred options live. And at the end, where a Properties or Preferences entry should live.
- Last but not least, no "New Tab" entry, which is the thing I use it for 90% of the time.
Just look at the first screenshot, everything is misaligned, no visual consistency. The second screenshot is even worse. It's really not better than macOS but still better than modern Windows and GNOME.
This is what I've done since SGI 4DWM Terminal (and ancient NT Command Prompt), and almost all other terminal emulators can be configured to do so. Konsole stands alone (to my knowledge) in its insistence on cruft all over the interface. The terminal widget itself seems fine.
To be clear, I don't mind obscure options, but they should live in the control panel. See my cousin comment for more details.
I cannot say this based on evidence, but I'll say anyways based on subjective common sense, that the Start Menu of Windows 95, 98, XP, and 7 were all immensely better than the Start ..."screen" thing of Windows 8.
I like the extra modes of copying since they all have unique uses and prevent editing in cases.
the encoding bit is odd yeah. adjust scrollback is not a common option i suppose.
it would be nice to configure the right click menu more but that's not an option i see in many apps so it's a wash. I use the menu so i don't have those options. it may even be configurable via a file somewhere in .config... i haven't tried or been bothered by the defaults enough to do so.
Oof. It looks like it’s trying to iTerm2 but, as the kids say, it’s not him.
I generally don’t use any “default” terminal regardless of OS or DE if I don’t have to. I’m full time on Ghostty these days and I adore it
(just a text editor is KWrite)
TL;DR - your designer needs a hug
Yes, and this process continues. There are still parts of the environment that need attention or cleanup, but by reading Nate's weekly blog posts [0], you can see that they chip away at cleaning this stuff up week after week after week. And it is all headed in the right direction vs. not (looking at you, Liquid Glass).
The comparison also holds. With every major release macOS has become more like iOS and iPadOS much more so than iOS and iPadOS have become like macOS.
It's a shift I loathe, but Apple has a much harder time selling Macs to iDevice owners than the other way around. It's an understandable and maybe even unavoidable shift for Apple to make, much as it will drive a small number of die-hards elsewhere.
Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?
Mature products need the maintainer mindset a lot more than the builder mindset.
It's hard enough to find devs who are good at maintainer-mode. I think it's even harder with other roles.
There is also a "new way" (I believe QtQuick-based) for applications to create popups, which results in them not being separate windows anymore. System Settings makes prominent use of them for example and those popups just behave entirely different than one is used to. As far as I know it's not even possible to navigate these popups with the keyboard.
I heard rumours that Win 11 was makin' folks jump through hoops to move the taskbar anywhere other than left or right along the bottom. Personally, I ain't used Windows since Win 7; (The last really decent / tolerable Windows), and even back then I was already dual-booting with Linux.
I cannot tell you how many times I want to go into an app's settings, and it takes longer than 20 seconds; some have it in File, some in Edit, others in random menus like "Tools". Further still, the damned menu item itself could be named Settings, Preferences, Options, whatever. Even further, looking at Gimp here, Preferences is one of 25 menu items that I need to scan through. This is not good UX, this is Stockholm Syndrome.
Contrast with Gnome apps: Hamburger -> Preferences, invariably, never takes longer than three seconds to find it.
In fact, Control Center is currently less customizable than iOS because you've been able to fully rearrange the controls on iOS for an entire year now. If anything, it could stand to be more like iOS in that regard, though it's not a huge deal either way.
I don't particularly use widgets much either, but I never felt their inclusion was a net negative, they're just not as useful as other interfaces already available on macOS.
One thing I'll definitely cede though: having some "macOS" apps actually be iOS apps, like Home, is weird not just because the UI design is unusual but also because there's been no attempt to make standard desktop hotkeys work, not even Esc.
This is not an example from KDE, but you do convergence: https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4
gEdit places almost everything in the hamburger menu; opening and saving files have dedicated buttons but for example find/replace is behind the burger, as is "save as". It may not matter much if you use keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+f is pretty common for find and I never try to look for it in the menu) but one might still expect a GUI to allow its features to be easily accessed without the use of a keyboard. I don't think the mix of a few dedicated buttons and a single hamburger menu is necessarily good for discoverability either.
The Image Viewer puts file management and image rotating in the hamburger menu. Oddly enough, other image editing options are available in a separate editing mode that's accessed via its own dedicated button. Also, although file management features are behind the hamburger menu, for some reason image properties are behind a dedicated button.
In both cases the only reason the hamburger menus aren't more populated is because there just isn't that much functionality in either app to begin with.
Evince (the document viewer) also puts almost everything in the hamburger menu -- although in that case, if a traditional menu bar were used instead of the hamburger, most of its functions would probably only be split between "file" and "view" menus or something along those lines.
I'm not sure if those apps are still Gnome defaults but they're some of the examples of what I'd consider somewhat poorly considered use of the hamburger menu.
Outside of Gnome, the new UI in JetBrains IDEs has switched to hiding typical menu bar menus behind a hamburger menu button. I honestly don't understand that decision at all: the menus are still the same, they just require an additional click to access, and since the selection of available menus is only revealed after clicking the button, you can only start scanning for the menu you're looking for after the reveal. While separate from free software desktop design, the new UI in those IDEs is another example of what I would also consider mobile-influenced degradation of desktop UIs -- and a particularly weird one at that.
[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
What is the problem?
And windows which is horrendous doesn’t have a mobile version, at least not something people know about.
You have an interesting theory but I think it doesn’t hold when you take these 2 facts into consideration.
There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.
I don't find that context menu so bad to be honest. If you use it often you should know where things are anyway.
Overall I'm quite surprised at the hate Konsole receives in this HN thread. Removing the toolbars is two clicks away and only needs to be done once. Even the menu bar can be hidden. Such a konsole window would be just the terminal, no cruft, no UI elements. To me we are in the "some people will never be happy for no clear reasons" territory.
I've been using it for years I'm very happy with it. Its search feature is awesome, and its ability to have infinite scroll history is very nice too, it has decent performance.
The one terrible thing I have seen about konsole is that the toolbar buttons were highjacking the keyboard bindings in the terminal, but it was a bug, I think this is now fixed and a workaround was to remove the toolbar.
Oh gosh I wish I could find those old designs again. Unfortunately they didn’t go for it and went with tons of silvery gradients instead.
If I were to assist with their design, I would eliminate everything that already has a headerbar icon or an on-screen affordance; so most of Files, Edit, View, and Layers is taken care of.
The stuff that remains:
- Quit: superfluous, not present in Gnome apps
- View: borrow the Ephiphany (gnome-web) zoom controls, move Grid, Show/Hide, and Ruler units into a preferences dialog
- Add-ins: Move to a preferences dialog
- Window is useless, they have tabs
- Help can stay
So no surprise that the laziest implementation of a hamburger menu is not good.
Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other.
Sway, exwm etc are for power users.
If you aren't in that category, you may not like it or may find it to be not worth the time investment in.
10/10 gatekeeping buddy.
In the end I swapped from Pinta to Gimp and Krita because I couldn't stand that interface
You have to install an extension to get a dock at all.
No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.
You had to install a system tray extension
I'm sure you needed to at some point, but (as you mention), that's no longer the case: it's built in by default.
clipboard manager
If you mean clipboard history... That's true. Although macOS doesn't have a built-in clipboard history viewer either, and I never particularly missed having one. There are plenty of GNOME extensions with clipboard history if you want one.
Generally speaking I like GNOME much more than KDE, since GNOME's gesture support is much better than KDE's. I also personally dislike Windows-style infinitely-nesting-menu taskbars, which is what KDE uses, whereas GNOME is more macOS-like (although it has its own, IMO slightly cleaner style... And of course, it's much more modifiable than macOS).
No other mainstream GUI term has these clutter issues. They are small issues to be sure, but unnecessary.
I actually think the real motive is that they wanted to move to a more unified mobile and tablet friendly UI code base, which centers more around full screen windows.
This is stock Konsole vs Ghostty. Notice Ghostty also has multiple tabs open. There is just so much waste in the Konsole UI.
I categorize KDE as the DE for people who enjoy using Windows more than macOS. Part of that involves just settings and functionality being more discoverable... which involves just throwing way more spurious stuff on the screen. And that makes it look less clean almost definitionally!
But well. More usable for me when I want to find how to do something I do once every 3 months without having to memorize the keyboard command for it (looking at you, macOS finder dialog when I want to open a hidden folder)
They don't work like the UX teams of yesteryear.
In the early 2000s, companies did user studies. Put a potential user in front of the product, let them use it while the UX team observed. Ask questions to the user afterwards. Make changes, repeat.
But that kind of research is expensive, so it's thrown out to instead just collect tons of metrics that likely don't tell a whole story. They think "Users must love feature X because they keep clicking on it!" when the reality is that they're trying to find something else, but the label for X looks related to what they want.
I agree with all your points regarding the race to the bottom. I think that's why UIs hide so much information. Older interface designs are considered "confusing" or "cluttered" because there's so much there at a first glance, even if all the buttons elements are grouped by functionality.
I'm fairly sure it's one of those features used by 0.0001% of the user base but probably 95% of those 200 000 users are techies so every forum is filled with their complaints :-)
In reality there is no such thing as a "sane user" using programs with "sane GUIs". Either someone already has a lot of preferences formed by their experiences using desktop OSes over the years, or they have started using desktop OSes recently and they barely have any expectations.
And because of that there is no such things as "sane user" using "sane GUIs". Your sanity is someone else's insanity.
I love KDE but t's getting close to being 30 years old.
"Not there yet" can probably be completed with "and will never be there unless a major revolution happens and even in that case, it's possible the outcome of that revolution will take them farther, not closer, to that goal".
Thanks
You get some nice predefined widgets to use with QML, but you also potentially have to build Maui/Kirigami against the platforms you deploy to, and it's a C++ & QML project with its own build platform.
So, not a Dock.
People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.
Same for launching an application via keyboard / doing a calculation / finding an emoji. People just want something akin to Spotlight (think uLauncher on Linux). Something lightweight that pops over and allows them to quickly do the thing, without a lot of visual clutter happening and then happening again in reverse.
KDE its Achilles heel is that every KDE application is like its own little fiefdom, compared to Gnome's top-down control of whatever the blessed application for a particular function is.
This is why a KDE desktop often feels incredibly disjointed to use. You can't develop muscle memory for conventions if there are no conventions.
KDE is all about configurability. Changing things to the way you want them to be. It's got lots and lots of options.
I was on macOS was daily driver for a long time. When I moved to it I was pretty aligned with Apple's workflow ideas and Linux desktops were messy crap (KDE 3 and 4 for example). But Apple changed their design over time and started rubbing me the wrong way more and more. Eventually I rediscovered KDE (5) and it was amazing to have my computer work the way I want it again.
Ps gnome doesn't even have a clipboard manager? Wow I use this every day.
I think a lot of people knock it just from looking at some screenshots of the default options. Not knowing everything is configurable. Think the taskbar (panel) is too thick? Just change it. Don't want that toolbar? No worries just turn it off. It's so good.
A touchscreen doesn't detract if you don't use it though. I use my laptop's touchscreen/stylus pretty much exclusively for Japanese writing practice, the rest of the time it's just a regular laptop, but I'd be very sad to not have that feature when I need it.
All of which are useful
> Change encoding? I have never changed the encoding of my terminal, not once since first using a computer, circa 1982.
Then you've never worked with Japanese. Which is fine, but a significant proportion of the world needs to.
> UTF8-FTW
Not for Japanese, sadly.
Attitudes like this sometimes make me regret going in to software engineering. I understand time may be of the essence in some instances, but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship, and it's now just gluing over-engineered and poorly designed shitware together. At least, in the Web Dev world -- maybe other subfields have faired better?
It either requires using a keyboard or moving your mouse to the opposite direction of where the dock appears.
I guess both of those places are especially space constrained, which maybe makes it feel more worth it to me. And I also actively arrange all the items in both cases, choosing not just the arrangement but which will show at all. That means I know them basically as soon as I throw them down.
I wonder if it would be crazy to have the labels on shown-by-default buttons fade only after a certain number of clicks on them.
GNOME looks great, but it’s just so damn frustrating to use. It’s such a weird combination of attention to detail and a focus on usability while completely missing the mark in other areas. I don’t even mind the intended workflow. That’s fine. It’s the rough edges like the hamburger menus you mentioned, extra clicks, inability to change things I expect to be able to change, etc. You have to install gnome-tweaks just to change the font.
I wouldn’t even mind the extensions either if they didn’t break during every update. Best case scenario is you have to re-enable the extension, log out and log back in. Worst case is it doesn’t work anymore and now you’re missing important functionality that the developers couldn’t be bothered to include.
1. Personal computers before the 21st century were really kind of shit. Let alone mobile devices.
2. Software was largely a product that people paid for. It even came in boxes.
3. Software vendors were usually in a highly competitive environment. They had to deliver value for money if they didn't want to get eaten alive.
This meant that the software had to both work on the limited resources of 1990s shitty computers—limited storage, limited speed, limited display colors and resolution, etc.—and be useful to the end user. So companies were kept a lot more honest in terms of UI design. Circumstances forced them to deliver functional, efficient UIs. These days, our computers are fairly powerful and companies are in the business of selling services (or eyeballs to advertisers) rather than software. The user-facing software itself is a loss leader, and if making it a shitty Electron app, or desktop-mobile "convergence", helps save development costs, companies will do it.
See how easy it is to justify "the scourge"? Also, this is exactly the same situation here - using a permanent toolbar on your main screen (not a submenu or some secondary settings screen where extra labels don't cost anything)
> crazy to have the labels on shown-by-default buttons fade only after a certain number of clicks on them.
Great idea, had the same, though an even better is to use frecency as a proxy for memory everywhere (and also apply it to various tips and keybinds etc) - if you've clicked the button 10 times, the label disappears, but if you haven't clicked in a year, it reappears (all configurable per button of course, OS-wide, there are some frequently use symbols like clipboard that you'll never forget due to use in other apps)
Had the toolbars been difficult or impossible to customize or remove, I wouldn't say, but here ulyou can make it look to your taste completely. The issue is a taste question and is a "meh" at best.
I did try Asahi after encouragement from you all. Installation was indeed smooth. I'd say as smooth as it gets (and I am including Mac auth screen and then SIP tweak in recovery CLI - I assume).
However, the UI/UX wasn't what I expected. I think I was looking for something like ElementaryOS (what I had mentioned and I know it might sound like a broken record), but I was looking for an out-of-the-box pleasing and "just works" UI. It wasn't that, sadly.
I first tried Fedora with GNOME, and it was really not good - even in functionality.
Then I wiped it clean and again installed - this time with KDE Plasma. Functionality was much better. But UX/UI left a lot to be desired. For example, the display was scaled to 170%, and I just couldn't bring it to the right size. 185% was closest. Then I had to change trackpad settings, et cetera. I'd assumed Mac hardware-specific DE/OS might come with some initial tweaks done already. I struggled a lot with shortcuts, and the general UI/UX wasn't feeling like home at all. I also think I am a lot biased, not only coming from Mac but stuck on something like Elementary.
Finally, I cleaned it up. Hopefully, there'd be more Asahi Remix distros. Again, thanks a lot to all of you!
If not for that I would 100% agree it is a nice to have.
Eventually with their desired to push JavaScript all over the place, instead of improving Vala, the whole desktop redesign, and the issues that features standard in GNOME 1.0 are nowadays the extension mess you mention, made me don't care any longer.
For a while I moved into Unity, then XFCE, and then nothing, as my Linux usage now is constrained to headless (server/containers), or the consumer distributions of WebOS and Android.
However if I ever going back to having a Linux desktop, it will surely be a decision between everything else except GNOME.
- It used to start with a reasonable size and layout, now it wants to start maximized for some reason and the part of the layout reserved for the monitor arrangement changes size depending on the connected/enabled monitors which pushes other controls around.
- Changing the monitor layout now requires an additional click to enter an edit mode for no reason instead of being able to drag the monitors around directly.
Meanwhile the it still doesn't remember settings when you disable and re-enable monitors and KWin/KDE itself still has tons of issues dealing with multiple monitors like moving windows around or opening windows on a turned off (but enabled in KDE) monitor instead of the one you are interacting with. And of course you can't script the whole mess with xrandr because KDE doesn't adjust the desktop in response to changes that don't go through its settings.
Other areas have seen similar pointless changes that are at best things I need to manually undo or worse live it until I resort to manually patching things to work like they used to. Honestly considering more and more to move to a different DE after over a decade of using KDE.
I don't think anyone actually asks for this. The driving factor seems to be saving cost/effort by making only one design with extremely minor adjustments at best. It used to be that desktop was the main target now its mobile.
The consistency I want is between different applications on the same system but barely anyone cares about that - and many developers actively want their programs to stand out.
This is the reason why telemetry has negative value in the hands of the average developer. You can make all kinds of logically sounding conclusions from it but they are still wrong.
A random example from Amazon (never tried it myself):
https://www.amazon.com/PXIRQ-Sleeves-Touchscreen-Sensitive-B...
I'm an old power user/dev and I used to absolutely love KDE 3 for its take on 90s OS UI, I went into v4 thinking it was a major downgrade (I used KDE 3 as far as the KDEMOD maintainers could push it) and it never got as good as the old v3 days. Somewhere by the end of the KDE 4 life, GNOME 3 formed into something kind of usable and I started noticing some advantages to it, even tried it for a while. Fast forward to now (including a few years where I rolled my own LXDE/XFCE hybrid setup, I was desperate lol) and now I pretty much only use GNOME. I consider it a fine DE for power users... or whatever use you have really. It's great on a notebook, it's great on a desktop and it's great even as an HTPC interface. You do have to wrestle with it for some advanced functionality (dealing with extension isn't always fun, digging into dconf isn't fun...) but the OOB defaults and basic functionality are actually the best there is, maybe even among all desktop OSes.
I mean, if Linus Torvalds out of all people uses it then it must be at least decent for more advanced users, right?
Now whenever I try KDE it feels like an uncomfortable car where every single adjustable thing needs to be tweaked for it to feel minimally usable, except many adjustments are finicky and leave you with a half assed solution. It won't resonate with me anymore...
No you can't. That telemetry gives you view into how users are experiencing the software is a myth because it doesn't include the actions users don't take and it doesn't include the reasons for actions taken.
I have set it up in a way that I don't see any clutter. You can hide whatever you don't want to see on the UI. All I see is the terminal and the tabs.
The killer feature is the 'monitor for silence' and 'monitor for activity'. Comes quite handy for long running background tasks that you want to monitor.
The insanity of it is that many websites push their mobile apps to use them. So, you get shitty mobile sites that ask you to use their app on mobile and are bad on desktop because of the stupid development philosophy (including poor information density and oversized interface for big touch targets).
The whole point of the first iPhone web browser was that you could actually use most typical websites without any effort on their part and it was good enough. Because of the display size and navigation effort required it wasn't the most confortable but the more time passes the more I believe that was kind of the point and almost a "feature" in itself.
We got there because people are glued to their phone, and sadly it's not even a good tool for efficient web browsing (it's useful for quick information gathering but that's it).
You can easily implement Windows or macOS UI layouts using it and it isn't terrible. I actually prefer KDE to either desktop.
It feels like macosx lucked into this with their historical use of command as the modifier, but I also wish I could easily replicate. Instead I just go and remap a few line ctrl-a in KDE settings and otherwise try to live in emacs.
That's why every few months, there's a proposal to redesign it which trades usability for minimalism. Here's one I pulled from a random Google search:
Pinta is interesting, but the UI is terrible. Did we really have to remove the resize handles? They're there when adding shapes, but not when manipulating pixels/selection? Half the options I need being hidden in a hamburger menu isn't great either.
Gimp is gimp. I don't need Photoshop. And I don't want a Photoshop level of a learning curve.
Krita is interesting, but it seems to be aimed at drawing. I struggled to copy the color code from an image. By default my eyes are drawn to the massive advanced color selector on the right, but it's a trap. You actually need the tiny color selector in the top bar. It shouldn't be this hard.
I need a subset of image manipulation features in my work and each tool has a different one.
Anyway, the first distro or desktop environment that figures out this problem will get a lifetime sponsorship from me. It's a huge productivity killer and remapping all apps, toolkits, etc, is untenable.
Of note, Haiku os seems to have solved this issue permanently. It's a matter of will, really.
I don't believe either group is any more right than the other: both sides have about equal amounts of good arguments and pointless posturing. A tabs-vs-spaces situation. Fortunately, in this case, we more often than not have a choice: computing environment GUIs are still pretty personal, so everyone can just use software that follows their expectations. The problem begins when a user from one side is somehow forced to use software following the other side's ideology - but that's a separate story, and arguably it's the "being forced" part that's the actual problem.
Personally, I'm very inconsistent in this regard. There are apps that I've been customizing for more than a decade and, quite honestly, I wouldn't know how to use them were my config to suddenly stop working (Emacs, ZSH, tmux). On the other hand, there are apps I've been using for a similarly long time, but never bothered to configure (other than possibly installing a bunch of plugins): Firefox and Vim come to mind.
There are also apps that I do customize, but either only once and never touch the config again (my window manager, Awesome), or ones that I customize but only to add an escape hatch (adding "Open this file in Emacs" to all JetBrains IDEs, for example).
So from my perspective, what's essential is to have a choice: both GNOME and KDE should exist, should enjoy similar popularity, and should each focus on their favored philosophy. Let those who want to work with defaults use software where a lot of effort went into providing sane defaults (it's ok if customizability suffers), and let those who want to customize use software where significant effort went into allowing customizability (it's ok if defaults are slightly insane).
I'm of two minds on this. I agree with your complaint that "mobile first" (or just responsiveness in general) has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop experience. As a web application developer, the idea of having to maintain two separate codebases - one for mobile and one for desktop - is a big "no thank-you." So responsiveness tends to win on maintenance overhead.
It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly.
My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors.
Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves."
That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche.
Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.
It's fine that impossibly picky users get to click through a few settings once to set their environment to their liking. I'm one myself sometimes.
I wonder if vocal people here who hate this minor (yes, I'll die on this hill) stuff so much took the time to even report this as an issue in KDE's bugtracker. Here's the link if it's not already done:
You're just continuing in your quest to ignore the issue. Just set the goal at "most users", that's fine, you'll still need to defend this actual screen waste to make an argument, but you can't hide behind a generic "can't please everyone"
> hate
There is no hate, you've made it up to make your argument sound better.
> this minor (yes, I'll die on this hill)
No one is looking at, let alone fighing, you on this imaginary hill. The other commenter explicitly said it's not a big issue. I also agree it's minor. Stop bringing more straws for your scarecrow!
> took the time to even report this
To waste it on a repeat of this argument with ~0 chance of a win? Again, you've made up that hate, so there is no motivation in doing that, a more productive use of that time is to use a better terminal (or just configure it away), so that's usually what happens
Thankfully there are a dozen terminals to choose from that don’t make konsole’s minor mistakes. (Although chances are they made others.)
Also neglected the point elsewhere that obscure options are fine in control panels, auxiliary and submenus.
They claim it's one of the cornerstones of their project. Who am I to argue.
Personally, I like how functional Inkscape's UI is AND how minimal Files is, for example..
Folks trying to talk me into a new workflow can’t succeed because I’m multiplatform. Gnome terminal, iTerm2, Win Terminal, etc. konsole is the oddball and least used of the group. Partly because the context menu is a mess.
Linus also may not even really be a power user. He says himself that he rarely writes code anymore, and primarily just sends emails and reviews code.
Well, of course it is: Different UI, different UI code. If that's problem, the developers should not have both a mobile and a desktop app in the first place.
> has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop
understatement of the year :-) ... it often hampers functionality, significantly, and makes the experience rather painful.
Is it really gatekeeping to say that KDE is for power users? Setting it up in a way that really meshes with your use case and preferences is a process that you'll spend many hours or days of time on. That's not something that makes sense for grandma's computing workload.
> This is an opinion stated as fact. KDE is mostly for dads that like a mouse oriented Windows/mac like OS but with buttons to customize. Sway, exwm etc are for power users.
So you're saying that prefering a highly customizable GUI means you're be a power user, but instead you're a gasp dad? This isn't Reddit, buddy. Grow up.
Sure. In many instances, software is just a means to an end. Software is usually not the business itself. So, I understand there has to be balance at some point. In fact, I think it's dangerous to sometimes reinvent the wheel -- like rolling your own auth system. I rather go with a well tested and trusted solution.
> I bought an antique store
I'm jealous. I would love something like this.
Are/were you a developer? If yes, then I am curious about one thing. Does your work towards your store bring more or less fulfillment than your dev life? I went into the field hoping to find passion and to strive for some sense of glory that comes from craftsmanship, but I learned quickly there isn't much passion left and there is absolutely no glory. Though in my mind, programming does not equal software engineering. The people writing KDE are programmers. The person working for a company is a software engineer.
> We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves."
I just had this conversation at work today lol.
> Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less
You are absolutely correct. However, maybe I am just consumed by ignorance, but I think that is the world I want to live in, you know? I watched a YouTube video about a traditional Japanese swordsmith. He runs the only remaining school left in Japan. He follows the exact same process that has been used for something like over 700 years. He has a few apprentices, but nothing is written down. It's all passed down from generation to generation via hands-on work and word of mouth.
For software, that would be beyond unrealistic, but I think there is something utterly beautiful about getting lost in some kind of project and pouring 100% of oneself into their work. You know, to be apart of something much bigger than oneself?
I think about the KDE developers per the thread topic. KDE is likely highly useful and an act for charity for their fellow Linux users. KDE accomplishes what it sought to solve. However, most users will never know or understand what into making KDE, why some choices were made and not others, etc.. As long as KDE works, many users probably won't even think about KDE at all. If I were to install KDE right now, I could tell you if it works or not. I cannot tell you if KDE was written well just by using it, unless overt issues were present. I would truly have no idea about the quality without looking at the source code.
Though, I guess my fundamental point is that you are correct about everything you wrote. I do not disagree with any of it. I am in my early 30s, and I guess I am already jaded haha. This is what "work" and "life" are mostly about? This is how I provide value to society? I just push little plastic buttons on a device and the little electrons flowing through the device make the screen change colors. I went to college just for all this? Don't get me wrong, I love programming, but man, the "adult" or "business" world is just so utterly... fucking boring and unfulfilling haha. Do you know what I mean?
for switching between programs, gnome is designed around workspaces instead of stacking and covering windows so you aren't expected to fly into the expose view to switch apps you just swipe to the side to your other program (or scroll in the corner with the mouse, or press meta+alt+left or right).
For launching programs just press meta and type the first couple letters of it's name. This is exactly the same how I open software on windows, and imo it's quicker due to not taking my hands off the keyboard.
I think it's silly to look at a new desktop and be mad at it for not behaving exactly like other desktops. If you grew up using computers that behaved like gnome you'd likely be just as uncomfortable with a stacking based desktop like windows.
Bottom line, it doesn’t prevent my workflow.
I don't want to do that! And, I am in fact a person. I do not want to switch applications by clicking on things with my mouse at the bottom of the screen. I want to switch applications with keyboard shortcuts or with touch gestures, which GNOME has great support for; and both of those can open the dock too (although you can also alt-tab and skip the Expose-style feature).
Again, it's just a matter of preference and taste. My taste is much more strongly in GNOME's default direction than KDE's default direction.
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