KDE is now my favorite desktop

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.

KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool atmosphere of designer-developer cooperation which quickly led to very sleek results that persist to this day.

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.

VDG must be so busy that my #1 feature request for KDE, support for smart copy&paste in Konsole, has been stuck in bikeshedding hell for almost 5 years because the maintainer didn't want to merge an optional feature without the VDG go-ahead :(

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.

Konsole is my least favorite terminal because of all the klutter. Have to remove several buttons, and the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge.

This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/

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.

In Konsole's defense, this is the actual default appearance of a Konsole window when you launch it for the first time in the current stable release:

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 :)

That's better, but the toolbar/buttons could always be configured away. The real problem is the context menu. Has it been simplified or made configurable?

Out of interest, what do you use the context menu for in a terminal emulator so often that it bothers you? I can't even remember the last time I opened it.

I hide all UI and use only the context menu, 90% of the time to open a new tab, 5% of the time to split a tab, and 4% of the time to bring up the config dialog. 1% to open a new window, though I'm often doing Ctrl+Alt+T for that recently.

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.

All these things have keyboard shortcuts If the context menu bothers you, it would seem worth it to use them for frequent actions. CTRL+Shift+T opens a new tab for instance. It's way more efficient anyway in an app that's so keyboard centric.

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.

> To me we are in the "some people will never be happy for no clear reasons" territory.

That's because you ignore/downplay the very clear reason of space waste expressed in the conversation.

No, I mentioned that this is solved with a couple of clicks to do once if you are bothered by this. I see few reasons to complain really. One could prefer having different defaults (and I would, actually), but it's not like their are awful neither.

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.

Yes, that's the downplaying part. Configuring bad default away doesn't make a user happy the bad default existed and required wasting time fixing it (of course it's not a couple of clicks, that's also downplaying, you'd have to first acquire the knowledge that it's possible (not all UIs can be customized) and how to do it (e.g., some DEs require installing some DE Shell Extension to be able to find the relevant config))