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Sure, KDE is awesome, but "Surprisingly Awesome"? The author is surprised that eg. "The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. " or "I can put

by plq 5y ago

Sure, KDE is awesome, but "Surprisingly Awesome"? The author is surprised that eg. "The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. " or "I can put [the panels] at the top of the screen, the bottom, or even the sides!" Seriously? Isn't it weird that people can be impressed by keyboard shortcuts working or apps being able to put an icon in the system tray in the year of 2022? Disclaimer: I have been a KDE user since the first time I managed to boot into the graphical shell on my Gentoo box back in early noughties. That's it, just a happy user. KDE has been around for 25+ years. It has a huge community: Both a substantial amount of users and a daring team that is totally chill not only about diving head-first into colossal amount of work, but also about making substantial changes to its codebase when they think it's necessary. Just look at how much work went into migrating KDE 3 to 4 or splitting kdelibs when going 4 => 5 which is the status quo now. It's also got a solid legal foundation[1], better than relying on just GPL. They got flak when they first decided to build on Qt, a commercial framework so they negotiated this deal with Trolltech. (EDIT: Here's the context[2]) The point is that their dedication to the community is also top notch, which seems rare in the open source world. So I, for one, am not one bit surprised that a team this competent managed to get keyboard shortcuts to work after all. Actually, I'll go one step further and say this: If your daily driver is Linux and you are not forced to running Fluxbox/Openbox/etc. due to resource constraints, you should be running KDE, period. What's next, we will praise Linux for doing preemptive scheduling? Come on :) [1]: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ [2]: http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1sec4.html http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1se... PS: I see comments talking about eg. how bad the early 4.x releases were. Well, that's mainly Ubuntu's fault for shipping a barely finished tech preview in its stable channel. I, for one, don't remember having a problem switching to KDE 4.something once it was offered in the stable channel by the Gentoo KDE team.

ahartmetz 5y ago
This article and the discussion are the first time that I hear so many detailed positive comments about the current KDE keyboard shortcut configuration that I created in, like, 2007 :) Global shortcuts existed before, but the implementation was different, and the configuration UI for both global and app-local shortcuts was different. I talked to a UX designer and implemented the new thing. In KDE3, there was conflict detection with a short, hardcoded list of shortcuts that didn't necessarily correspond to the actually configured shortcuts. I made it work with the real data (global shortcuts, standard shortcuts like copy & paste, maybe app-specific shortcuts of the current app). As always, the devil is in the details. Other people made important improvements later. One of the things that I added was a once-per-session component to remember and listen for global keyboard shortcuts, which, by luck, is exactly the right design for Wayland, where only a privileged part of system (either the compositor or a delegate) can snoop on key presses.

by plq 5y ago

ahartmetz 5y ago

This article and the discussion are the first time that I hear so many detailed positive comments about the current KDE keyboard shortcut configuration that I created in, like, 2007 :) Global shortcuts existed before, but the implementation was different, and the configuration UI for both global and app-local shortcuts was different. I talked to a UX designer and implemented the new thing. In KDE3, there was conflict detection with a short, hardcoded list of shortcuts that didn't necessarily correspond to the actually configured shortcuts. I made it work with the real data (global shortcuts, standard shortcuts like copy & paste, maybe app-specific shortcuts of the current app). As always, the devil is in the details. Other people made important improvements later. One of the things that I added was a once-per-session component to remember and listen for global keyboard shortcuts, which, by luck, is exactly the right design for Wayland, where only a privileged part of system (either the compositor or a delegate) can snoop on key presses.