3 ms·

I don't think KDE looks particularly good, but it works for me (usability wise, and it's not ugly enough to constantly barf - some details look quite nice, but

by dom0 10y ago

I don't think KDE looks particularly good, but it works for me (usability wise, and it's not ugly enough to constantly barf - some details look quite nice, but the big picture kidna doesn't). Gtk on the other hand I can't really handle. Both Gnome and Unity look not that different on a basic level, but aren't nearly as usable to me as KDE (personally I find many design features in both of them also more ugly). Other DEs just look worse. I recently tried Qubes (3.2) on a laptop and was amazed how ugly it is. There are literally dozens of window decorations in Xfce, and all of them look like shit. Practically nothing changed there since half a decade ago when I last used Xfce. Even some obvious graphical bugs persisted! Color scheme support is also universally bad in Linux land (or maybe generally? Windows is poor here, too. OSX I don't know). Wrong combinations of colors (dark grey text on slightly darker background? A pleasure!), apps just not using the color scheme, inverted colors in some apps/places etc. Some "DEs" don't try and just admit design failure. Eg. i3 which I'm using on some laptops since a couple years. It doesn't even have any design to speak of. I only use it, because it works extraordinarily well for me. </rant> Don't even get me started on font rendering. I know it's an utterly difficult topic, and that a lot of work went into it to improve it (and some of this is fairly recent). Still, the font rendering quality is often still rather underwhelming. And in past times, or on older or misconfigured distros (F23 on Qubes for example) the quality is just heinous.

dom0 10y ago
Re. development of KDE - I don't really get the hate here. I used KDE 3, 4 and KF5 currently. Still don't get it.
- pooper 10y ago
  I use KDE (in fact typing this in Kubuntu Xenial) but my main criticism is that KDE would definitely not pass a hallway testing. Here's an example: switch the desktop theme to oxygen. Suddenly, something as mundane as switching airplane mode on and off with the default panels becomes crazy difficult because you can't see the images next to the check box (oh and for some reason all check boxes look like square radio buttons now). I'm sure KDE works great for the people who have used it for years but they don't have newcomers complaining about usability or they don't listen to newcomers complaining about usability.
- stiGGG 10y ago
  I completely switched to GNU/Linux when 3.0 came out. It was quite unstable, not very polished but extremely promising. With the further releases it always gots better and with 3.5 it was almost completely stable and polished, only details had to be improved. Everything was so integrated and with some easy configurations it could look so damn beautiful for the time. Then was 4.0 and everything was destroyed. It was extremely unstable, missed so many features, gots ugly and everything new felt only wrong :-( I left the club at 4.3 or so and bought my first mac where i am still caged. Tried 5.8 some weeks ago and still can't live with it, so sad... :-(
dom0 10y ago
Apropos Qubes and xfce, the award for the most useless battery indicator definitely goes to xfce. They still only have a tiny static tray icon with three or four different images; the battery looks "four fifths full" all the time. To actually know the battery state you have to hover the mouse over it for a couple seconds. This makes me fairly certain that whoever did this never used it. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/HkmkKwk.png http://i.imgur.com/HkmkKwk.png Note how: - The battery is actually at 30 % in this shot (how'd you know?) - The black box next to the battery is actually the netvm nm-applet (edit: actually it's the tray of the Qubes VM Manager; looks like nm-applet vanished - again) - The drowned-in-white-box speaker symbol is the pulseaudio applet - These are the "neatest" window decorations I could find
- stonogo 10y ago
  Xfce and cinnamon are the only DEs that have reliably supported multiple batteries correctly. I agree the icon itself needs to be fixed, but having two or more batteries on gnome or kde results in a situation where it is literally impossible to figure out what is going on.
  - dom0 10y ago
    I've never used KDE on a machine with multiple batteries, can't really comment on that. In fact I almost exclusively use i3 and i3pystatus, the latter has no problems with multiple batteries. Now while trying Qubes I have that twitching in my typing hand to just make i3 work better with QVM, because seriously - xfce is... not nice to use.
apetresc 10y ago
Not sure I understand the last part of that rant. "Why won't i3 admit its a failure? I only use it because it works extraordinarily well!"
- dom0 10y ago
  Design failure. It doesn't have any design. It's has no window decorations - except an optional 1 px border line - and the title bar has no controls, and is simply text on a solid background. This makes it what people normally call ugly, unpolished. Nonetheless it works very well. While doing that it doesn't look very well though. IOW: I don't see it as big problem, because that absence of design / uglyness is a nameplate feature of it. Like a command line interface - it's ugly, but works. In fact, looking at xfce right now again, I'm inclined to say that the simplicity of i3 would look better - design-wise - than what xfce offers.

by dom0 10y ago

dom0 10y ago

Re. development of KDE - I don't really get the hate here. I used KDE 3, 4 and KF5 currently. Still don't get it.

pooper 10y ago
I use KDE (in fact typing this in Kubuntu Xenial) but my main criticism is that KDE would definitely not pass a hallway testing. Here's an example: switch the desktop theme to oxygen. Suddenly, something as mundane as switching airplane mode on and off with the default panels becomes crazy difficult because you can't see the images next to the check box (oh and for some reason all check boxes look like square radio buttons now). I'm sure KDE works great for the people who have used it for years but they don't have newcomers complaining about usability or they don't listen to newcomers complaining about usability.
stiGGG 10y ago
I completely switched to GNU/Linux when 3.0 came out. It was quite unstable, not very polished but extremely promising. With the further releases it always gots better and with 3.5 it was almost completely stable and polished, only details had to be improved. Everything was so integrated and with some easy configurations it could look so damn beautiful for the time. Then was 4.0 and everything was destroyed. It was extremely unstable, missed so many features, gots ugly and everything new felt only wrong :-( I left the club at 4.3 or so and bought my first mac where i am still caged. Tried 5.8 some weeks ago and still can't live with it, so sad... :-(

dom0 10y ago

Apropos Qubes and xfce, the award for the most useless battery indicator definitely goes to xfce. They still only have a tiny static tray icon with three or four different images; the battery looks "four fifths full" all the time. To actually know the battery state you have to hover the mouse over it for a couple seconds. This makes me fairly certain that whoever did this never used it. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/HkmkKwk.png http://i.imgur.com/HkmkKwk.png Note how: - The battery is actually at 30 % in this shot (how'd you know?) - The black box next to the battery is actually the netvm nm-applet (edit: actually it's the tray of the Qubes VM Manager; looks like nm-applet vanished - again) - The drowned-in-white-box speaker symbol is the pulseaudio applet - These are the "neatest" window decorations I could find

stonogo 10y ago
Xfce and cinnamon are the only DEs that have reliably supported multiple batteries correctly. I agree the icon itself needs to be fixed, but having two or more batteries on gnome or kde results in a situation where it is literally impossible to figure out what is going on.
- dom0 10y ago
  I've never used KDE on a machine with multiple batteries, can't really comment on that. In fact I almost exclusively use i3 and i3pystatus, the latter has no problems with multiple batteries. Now while trying Qubes I have that twitching in my typing hand to just make i3 work better with QVM, because seriously - xfce is... not nice to use.

apetresc 10y ago

Not sure I understand the last part of that rant. "Why won't i3 admit its a failure? I only use it because it works extraordinarily well!"

dom0 10y ago
Design failure. It doesn't have any design. It's has no window decorations - except an optional 1 px border line - and the title bar has no controls, and is simply text on a solid background. This makes it what people normally call ugly, unpolished. Nonetheless it works very well. While doing that it doesn't look very well though. IOW: I don't see it as big problem, because that absence of design / uglyness is a nameplate feature of it. Like a command line interface - it's ugly, but works. In fact, looking at xfce right now again, I'm inclined to say that the simplicity of i3 would look better - design-wise - than what xfce offers.