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> Linux desktop development seems to have gone off the rails thanks to that thing. It started earlier. KDE3 used to be great and very Windows-like desktop expe
by frik 10y ago
> Linux desktop development seems to have gone off the rails thanks to that thing.
It started earlier. KDE3 used to be great and very Windows-like desktop experience on Linux/*BSD. Then they choose to rewrite KDE and make it more like OSX, the illfated KDE4 and its slow XML KBus trainwreck followed and burned the KDE platform. Many users switched to Gnome 2 which barely got useable with less features than other desktop platforms. Then the whole Tizen (Intel, Nokia, Samsung, ...) debacle with multiple UI frameworks competiting instead of focusing the resources. The whole thing is dead, beside Bada/Tizen is used in Samsung SmartTVs and SmartWatches and waiting in sleep-mode as backup strategy in case Google changes direction with Android. Then Gnome changed direction and rewrote Gnome with Gnome 3. Many users now switched to distributions that forked Gnome 2 like Mint or replaced it with a Gnome 2 like experience (Ubuntu).
What a sad desktop experience there is nowadays. For desktop experience I favor Windows 7 UI theme or Windows 2000 classic UI, or previously KDE3 (is there a up-to-date fork?). macOS and Ubuntu are okay too. For touch Android 5+ and iOS 6 have the best UI in my opinion.
Sadly many have lost their way and alinated their userbase with illfated design decisions (Win8/10, WinPhone7/8/10, KDE4, Gnome3, Tizen). I am looking forward to the new OS from Google, called Magenta/Fuchsia.
And nowadays the browser is like a second OS and Chrome with its simple UI is great. I dislikevthe weird round tbs in Firefox. IE11 was fine too, but MS lost its way. The Win10Store and XBoxOne are failing and have comparable little marketshare - several former exclusive titles now get released for Win7+ and on Steam as well - good that people aren't dumb, and MS evil strategies failed. Now they need a new CEO who axes and fires the people responsible for the last 5 years. Create a Windows 11 without privacy issues and a nice UI that can changed to look like Win classic and 7.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoKDE3 fork: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
- digi_owl 10y agoGotta say i love the old KDE3 tarball organization. Once you have Qt and some other dependencies in place you build it up layer by layer. present day KDE seems to have taken a page from Gnome, and now is a sprawling mess of tarballs. The closest i have come to KDE3 on the GTK side is XFCE. Similarly, while i understand that breaking things down to multiple tarballs have made developer life easier over at Xorg, building it requires compiling a pile of small tarballs.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago> Similarly, while i understand that breaking things down to multiple tarballs have made developer life easier over at Xorg, building it requires compiling a pile of small tarballs. I wonder if Xenocara works on anything other than OpenBSD... I sympathize with your sentiment. Trying to maintain packages even for something as small as Xfce has been a nightmare (with all the Xfce-goodies, at least). I can't imagine what it would take to maintain so many packages needed for KDE and Xorg these days. While "modular" sounds nice in theory, in practice you wind up wanting most of the modules anyway, so the modularity just becomes a pain in the ass. At the very least, some sort of "mega module(s)" would be nice: one could provide everything, one could perhaps provide a "20% of the code for 80% use cases" type of subset, perhaps there could be various customizations for special purpose applications, etc...