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How long is 'a very long time'? I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream.

by Jedd 4y ago

How long is 'a very long time'? I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better. Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.

Daunk 4y ago
As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.
- Jedd 4y ago
  Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings. It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem. If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro. I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.

by Jedd 4y ago

Daunk 4y ago

As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.

Jedd 4y ago
Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings. It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem. If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro. I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.