4 ms·

Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)! However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are bo

Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)! However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are both quite usable. Which is a stark contrast from when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out. They were both nothing more then glorified beta's. The first release of Gnome 3 was basically like the first Windows 10 release with the Metro UI; Totally unusable. Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset.

makapuf 6y ago
I think you're talking about win8, win10 was a return to saner defaults on desktop (ui-wise, let's not talk about privacy): start menu, by example.
oofabz 6y ago
I use Mate and I think it's misleading to characterize it as a reheated Gnome 2. That's how it started, but the project has come a long way since then. Mate now uses GTK3 instead of GTK2. It supports GPU-accelerated compositing and Hi-DPI displays. Mate is a well-maintained modern desktop environment, not a historical curiosity.
- notankies 6y ago
  It also plays nicely with tiling WMs; you can replace the default with i3 or Awesome or whatever and enjoy mate-settingsd and having a nice GTK3 panel that looks nice, but also tiling windows.
RedShift1 6y ago
Meh, depends on what you define as usable. KDE 3 ran fluently on my 2010 HP EliteBook 8540w but KDE 4 runs like a dog and you get nothing extra for it.
kick 6y ago
Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).
zokier 6y ago
> Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset. For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts? Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gnome anywhere, like we have Plasma Mobile from the KDE camp.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  phosh is not a first-party Gnome project, but it's a shell which essentially runs near-unmodified Gnome 3 apps full-screen on a phone display. I've tried it on a PinePhone, and the apps mostly work (but with some issues related to touch, small screen sizes, and orientation).
- simion314 6y ago
  Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc. Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI. IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
badsectoracula 6y ago
KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful. It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software just can't not evolve) and started throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. And unsurprisingly, a lot of it did stick. To its credit, KDE 5 does seem to try to clean up the mess a bit though in that over the years it is the only between the two that doesn't compulsively make me want to remove it from any Linux machine i get my hands on (and can remove stuff :-P). Sadly XFCE seems to be heading down the same way.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers. But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer). I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.
deleted 6y ago
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makapuf 6y ago

I think you're talking about win8, win10 was a return to saner defaults on desktop (ui-wise, let's not talk about privacy): start menu, by example.

oofabz 6y ago

I use Mate and I think it's misleading to characterize it as a reheated Gnome 2. That's how it started, but the project has come a long way since then. Mate now uses GTK3 instead of GTK2. It supports GPU-accelerated compositing and Hi-DPI displays. Mate is a well-maintained modern desktop environment, not a historical curiosity.

notankies 6y ago
It also plays nicely with tiling WMs; you can replace the default with i3 or Awesome or whatever and enjoy mate-settingsd and having a nice GTK3 panel that looks nice, but also tiling windows.

RedShift1 6y ago

Meh, depends on what you define as usable. KDE 3 ran fluently on my 2010 HP EliteBook 8540w but KDE 4 runs like a dog and you get nothing extra for it.

kick 6y ago

Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).

zokier 6y ago

> Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset. For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts? Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gnome anywhere, like we have Plasma Mobile from the KDE camp.

nyanpasu64 6y ago
phosh is not a first-party Gnome project, but it's a shell which essentially runs near-unmodified Gnome 3 apps full-screen on a phone display. I've tried it on a PinePhone, and the apps mostly work (but with some issues related to touch, small screen sizes, and orientation).
simion314 6y ago
Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc. Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI. IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

badsectoracula 6y ago

KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful. It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software just can't not evolve) and started throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. And unsurprisingly, a lot of it did stick. To its credit, KDE 5 does seem to try to clean up the mess a bit though in that over the years it is the only between the two that doesn't compulsively make me want to remove it from any Linux machine i get my hands on (and can remove stuff :-P). Sadly XFCE seems to be heading down the same way.

qwerty456127 6y ago
I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers. But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer). I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]