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KDE is now my favorite desktop

(kokada.dev)
892 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 18 Sep 25 12:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sirwhinesalot ◴[18 Sep 25 13:47 UTC] No.45289648[source]▶
We now live in a world where KDE looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS. I don't know how that happened, and KDE isn't even particularly nice looking, but here we are.

For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.

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GuB-42 ◴[18 Sep 25 15:24 UTC] No.45290812[source]▶
KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus.

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.

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bigstrat2003 ◴[18 Sep 25 16:08 UTC] No.45291374[source]▶
> 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?

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.

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amatecha ◴[18 Sep 25 18:43 UTC] No.45293441[source]▶
Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.
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xgkickt ◴[18 Sep 25 19:12 UTC] No.45293734[source]▶
At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.
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bee_rider ◴[18 Sep 25 19:34 UTC] No.45293979[source]▶
That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability?

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?

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1. GreenWatermelon ◴[18 Sep 25 21:38 UTC] No.45295327[source]▶
Windows. Windows removed the task bar positioning feature in Windows 11.
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2. oblio ◴[18 Sep 25 22:56 UTC] No.45296025[source]▶
People complain about that but I've been using Windows for 25+ years including working in tech almost exclusively on Windows desktops and laptops for 20+ years across about 10 companies and the amount of times I've seen a Windows taskbar be placed anywhere except at the bottom can be counted on one hand.

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 :-)

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3. lmm ◴[19 Sep 25 01:30 UTC] No.45297000[source]▶
Yeah. More relevantly I suspect that more people move the taskbar accidentally than deliberately - more than once I've seen a relative have it on the left or the top and ask how to put it back.
4. wolvesechoes ◴[19 Sep 25 06:59 UTC] No.45298698[source]▶
That's the thing you need to keep mind when reading anything on HN. Otherwise you would believe no one uses Windows (mostly because of taskbar thing) or Firefox is just unusable because it is unavoidable you constantly keep 1234 tabs open.
5. account42 ◴[19 Sep 25 08:18 UTC] No.45299245[source]▶
The problem with that attitude is that while niche features might be used by a small percentage of the user base, for every feature its a different subset. If you remove all niche features you will end up with software that is worse for a large portion of your users.

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.