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KDE and XFCE are my favorites. I could probably daily drive XFCE but with higher resolution (4K) monitors, KDE tends to look a lot better, at least in my experi

KDE and XFCE are my favorites. I could probably daily drive XFCE but with higher resolution (4K) monitors, KDE tends to look a lot better, at least in my experience. I loathe Gnome and don't really understand why it has become the default DE on so many platforms. Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. A unified clipboard (kb shortcuts as well as shared buffer), proper 4k rendering/scaling at a nuclear level, etc. This is my biggest gripe with Linux. I would ditch macOS entirely if I could do the following: 1. complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere (there are hacks for this, but they are hacks), 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) with consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications, 3. the ability to copy and paste text into or out of a terminal without fuss. I don't care about X11 vs Wayland. All this considered - and I can't believe I am about to say this - Windows 11 is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be and I kinda like it. Might need to go see a doctor I am starting to say funny things.

FpUser 4y ago
>" quality of life / ergonomics." Then just replicate Win98 desktop. good ergonomics has nothing to do with high resource usage.
ryukafalz 4y ago
> 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) > I don't care about X11 vs Wayland. It sounds like you might care though, albeit not directly. That blurriness is often the result of attempting to use fractional scaling (i.e. not an integer multiple like 200%, 300%, etc). This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. You can do fractional scaling on X11 but Wayland typically does it better, and without the blurriness.
- taeric 4y ago
  I'm in PopOS and have 150% scale on one monitor, with 100% on the other. Not seeing anything blurry, and pretty sure I'm on X11. Is that an older problem? And I think the point was more that many of us don't care how it is fixed. If that takes a new application, so be it. If it can be done on the older one, also so be it.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    >pretty sure I'm on X11 Please post the output of `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE`.
    - taeric 4y ago
      x11
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - gastlygem 4y ago
        X11 has been doing fine in the past few years. I have both my home and office computer running it with dual 4k displays and all appear to be swell. I use Cinnamon as desktop because it happens to be the easiest to configure for 150% scaling. I think I've tried xfce and some others but ended up with mixed results.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. This is why I went for 32" 2560x1440 when I got a larger monitor. Very similar pixel pitch to the 24" 1920x1080 units that I had before (one of which stands beside it in portrait, so 1080x1920). I didn't need more smoothness, just wanted more on screen without needing to make things smaller.
- hedora 4y ago
  You could also turn off fractional scaling under X11. That's been my preference for 20 years (yes, HiDPI displays have been around that long...)
- jjice 4y ago
  This is the entire reason I use Wayland on my personal machine (Ubuntu 22 with Gnome). The X11 fractional scaling is fine, but a bit blurry. Wayland makes it look crisp, like it should.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
>A unified clipboard Yes, please.
- scythe 4y ago
  I think the irony is that Linux could easily achieve this by simply copying the OS X use of Meta (Cmd/"Windows") key for the copy/paste instead of DEs stubbornly trying to ape the Windowsy Ctrl-key combination paradigm, which conflicts with the use of Ctrl by terminal applications. The time is long past when keyboards would ship without a Meta key. Another user mentioned Ctrl-Shift, but pressing three keys requires too much dexterity for a simple operation like copy (and you might accidentally Ctrl-C your script!).
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    That's actually a really good idea. Although given everything in linux works with ctrl-c except terminal emulators, that's probably where the change needs to happen, ie using meta there.
  - paddim8 4y ago
    Ctrl+C feels way more ergonomic than Meta+C to me though. Fingers don't need to bend as much. That matters with very common operations like copying
  - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
    I thought Meta is usually Alt? Or am I confusing it with Mod? AFAIK Haiku has things like copy on Alt. So you'd have to press Alt+C to copy. Personally, I would prefer to keep the "Windows"/Super key free for OS-wide shortcuts, e.g. tap=search, hold=drag window with mouse, Super+enter=terminal, Super+h=minimize (as in GNOME), Super+w = overview (as in KDE), etc. Using Alt for that and Super for commands would also work, but is somewhat counterintuitive to me as Super has the logo of an OS on it. On the other hand it is the same key order as used by macOS.
sigzero 4y ago
I liked Gnome 2 and I like that I can use Cinnamon if I choose Gnome still. I just don't like that current version 3 of Gnome.
- jacob019 4y ago
  Which is why Mate exists.
- ColonelPhantom 4y ago
  GNOME 3 isn't the current version anymore. GNOME 3.40 got released as GNOME 40 instead, which was succeeded by 41, 42 and now 43. Personally I understand the criticism of GNOME 3, but I liked it a lot more than the GNOME 40 series. I've switched to KDE Plasma around this summer, I think from GNOME 42.
unethical_ban 4y ago
Battery life and a more pleasant trackpad experience. I know it's hard to tune a good trackpad profile with such varying hardware, but it sure.would be nice to get a MacBook like smoothness on a Linux DE. And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend. I'm okay with fedora on my laptop, and I must say I've gotten used to Gnome. There is a tweak tool for gnome that allows for adjusting some things I think should be tweakable and discoverable by default.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  True. Apple cannot be touched when it comes to laptops. My M2 Air is a marvelous machine. I do most of my dev via remote/ssh now and so the battery life on this machine is almost measured in days now. In Geekbench 5 it outperforms my new core i7-12700k on single core performance.
- flakeoil 4y ago
  Yes, the issue with Linux is not Linux. It's the hardware. Mainly the processor. I'm amazed that Qualcomm, Broadcom or someone else cannot release a decent ARM based processor that can compete with the M1 in terms of performance and power consumption. I really hope there will come something in 2023.
  - paddim8 4y ago
    You can run Linux on M1 machines though
- deckard1 4y ago
  After getting a ThinkPad, I went out on a quest to get trackpad kinetic scrolling working and I came to the conclusion that it will always suck on Linux. Some apps feature it (Firefox, certain Gtk apps). But the problem is that libinput does not implement it (for good reasons, AFAIK) which means it's left up to the GUI libraries to implement. Each. And. Every. Time. If you have a Qt app running next to a Gtk app, good luck. And this is, yet again, why Apple wins in UX. Their kinetic scrolling is implemented across the entire desktop. As it should be. You can't get a consistent feel when you let individual apps implement it with wildly different parameters. > And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend. On Linux you can get close to what Mac does. I believe what the Macbook does is it has a hybrid hibernate/suspend. Suspend, for me, only lasts 2-4 hours and then my battery dies. I think there is another suspend setting that improves this, but there is actually a hybrid suspend that will hibernate after X hours of suspend. My laptop can be closed for a week or more and still have battery.
j1elo 4y ago
Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays? I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-scroll-speed https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-... (hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider") I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...
- Schlaefer 4y ago
  > Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays? If you use Wayland the answer is Yes. There's a "Scrolling speed" configuration in the Mouse settings.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  At least in XFCE, that "reasonable expectation" has been fulfilled for as long as I can remember. In KDE, I have no idea, because the last KDE that I have used was 3.5, which was the best desktop environment that I have ever used, including in comparison any Windows or MacOS version (while KDE 4.0 was the worst).
  - pxc 4y ago
    You should give Plasma a try some time! It's mature and feature-rich again, like KDE was in the 3.5 days.
    - qu4z-2 4y ago
      (not the GP) I tried it again last year some time and it was neither as configurable nor as stable as 3.5. Granted, maybe it's just rose-coloured glasses, but Trinity DE still seems to provide a better experience for me to this day.
Ruq 4y ago
I'm using GNOME 43 right now on Wayland, and it is quite comfy. But this is mainly due to me heavily using extensions and tweaks to better the experience. I agree that vanilla GNOME just isn't good enough. But especially for Wayland, GNOME is far superior to KDE in terms of stability and glitch-freeness.
yoyohello13 4y ago
For 3, Ctrl+Shift+C/V seems to work fine for me in pretty much every environment.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  For such a frequently utilized key combo, three keys is too many. On macOS cmd-c and cmd-v work everywhere, too. Windows it is ctrl-c and ctrl-v. Linux it is... dependent on what application you are using and wildly frustrating. Sure, you can remap keys, but then you need to start to really be concerned with config management, backing that up, etc. Getting 'up and running' from 0-hero on macOS takes a few minutes for me, but with Linux it's a couple of days of tweaking at this point.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > Linux it is... dependent on what application you are using and wildly frustrating What other application uses something else than CTRL+C for copying on Linux? Been using various Linux flavors for decades and the only application that requires a different shortcut than CTRL+C is terminals, as they already use CTRL+C for something else. Otherwise I can't think of a single application using something else than CTRL+C.
    - pxc 4y ago
      Besides CTRL+SHIFT+C/CTRL+SHIFT+V to copy/paste in terminals, there are some other alternative mappings for common functions that I like to use sometimes and which work pretty widely: - copy: Ctrl+Insert - paste: Shift+Insert - next tab: Ctrl+PgDn - previous tab: Ctrl+PgUp
    - whalesalad 4y ago
      I am spoiled on macos, where cmd is the primary modifier key. So cmd-c and cmd-v are for copy/paste, and ctrl-c still continues to work in a terminal. I understand the need for ctrl-shift-c in a linux term, where ctrl-c needs to remain for signaling processes. I just wish I could globally remap this. Some of the hacks exist for this (https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto) but it's a leaky abstraction and not fool proof.
BrotherBisquick 4y ago
> I don't care about X11 vs Wayland. Have you tried Wayland? Look, I'm not an evangelist, but it solves so many annoying little problems with X11 that I never want to go back. You don't realize how much of a hacked-together, obsolete kludge that X11 is until you use an alternative.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  The problem for me is that I do not entirely know what Wayland is solving for me. I am looking at it from the pragmatic viewpoint. I will use whatever technology is superior, but for the last few years Wayland has not been a 100% drop-in replacement and certain applications don't work. Heck, for the longest time Wayland would straight up not run on modern nVidia hardware. I have tried it, in fact I just rolled out Fedora 37 w/ KDE Plasma on Wayland to my new i7 box ... but I have only used it for a few hours as it is more of a toy project than a daily dev machine.
  - dTal 4y ago
    Well, here's one unexpected benefit I discovered - vastly lower CPU use when playing videos. I don't know enough about display architecture to understand why, but on one of my more underpowered machines it makes the difference between being able to use streaming services, and not being able to.
    - nyanpasu64 4y ago
      Perhaps you can enable hardware video decoding on Firefox X11, by visiting about:config and setting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled = true (unsure about media.ffmpeg.dmabuf-textures.enabled = true).
rektide 4y ago
If you want completely monolithic & uniform experience built for your specific needs that no one else has on Linux but you, I don't think you'll be happy, ever. > consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications You can get fairly close to this if you use gnome or kde specific distros. But you're generally asking: please don't be open source. Please don't have a bazaar of ideas. Please build me one big cathedral. You ask here is antithetical to the purpose of whom you are asking. On most general purpose distributions, users probably ought to end up having multiple different UI elements. > complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I actually like this idea a lot, because it suggests a certain system-wide malleability layer that, at the moment, doesn't exist. Anywhere, on any system, at all. How would you go about making your Mac have consistent Windows keybindings, for example? I'd be interested to see how people thought we might tackle this, generally. Folks could make a custom Linux distro that pre-configures each app to be Mac like. I think that's the best chance. But jeeze it seems like an unholy crusade to support a very specific niche, a niche not known for participating & giving back & relishing what we are & do. Awfully big bridge to build & it will forever have some rickety-ness to it. You could use something like https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools to read certain Mac key-combos or what not and rewrite them. But what would you rewrite to? I don't have a good sheet of what it is you'd be asking for or wanting to just work. My spitball idea for how we'd really fix this: I'd like each app to register with a dbus service all of the "actions"/commands it can do, and allow rebinding & activation of the actions over dbus. Maybe even actions actually are just dbus methods, but annotated somehow, to describe their hotkeys or to give them human friendly names? Anyhow, whatever the impl, there could be a central "hotkey manager" that could see all keyboard bindings & let us top-down manage them. There'd need to be some way for "Save" in Kate to be combined/grouped together with "Save" in Firefox, somehow, for this to be helpful. Managing this namespace of actions would be a terror of a problem, utterly absurd, in my view, which implies strongly the difficulty of the ask here I'm trying to respond to, but I actually think it'd be a pretty noble & cool effort. In part because of what it relates to: System command apps. Tools like dmenu/alfred/albert/quicksilver are meant as general top down interfaces, are often scriptable/extensible/deeply configurable to allow fast access & control of a variety of actions. By recognizing keybindings as what they are: actions/commands, and suggesting that the "actions"/commands of an app get bubbled up to the system layer & get managed there, we just make these top-commanders more powerful. There's also an extreme parallel here to voice-agent systems, like Chrome Assistant, Alexa, Siri, where apps present actions & the system is in charge of taking user input and translating it into actuation; they too are directory systems of actions, rather than having each app in isolation. > ability to copy and paste into or out of a terminal without fuss Copy/paste just works for me? Not sure what the problem statement is here, and/or what terminals you've suffered under. > Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. 100%. My main personal laptop is 4GB. I run sway which is low resource consumption, but in general resource consumption seems like a huge non-factor to me. In general, Linux isn't going to win by being more conservative. Pining about resource consumption is self-rewarding, self-gratifying: one feels zealous & virtuous, like you have the true cause amid a fallen world & are the path of the defender. But IMO it's mostly detracting & abusing the good & necessary & vital suffusion of creativity & possibility into the world. The scope of consumption is not that bad. And we have the important task of figuring out where to go still ahead of us: I'd rather be conservative once we have better ideas of what works, at any resource budget, & hone back down from there. Rather than forever dance around this maxima/minima we're on & tune for what we have. I'm also unimpressed with this article in general. Showing the amount of memory mapped in seems incredibly uninteresting & indicative of nothing. Amount of data read has some correlation with start time but loosely: if Gnome is reading 1GB sequential (it's not but for example) while KDE is 512b reads randomly (it's not) but half the size, you'd probably still want to pick Gnome.
dynamic_sausage 4y ago
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension
dynamic_sausage 4y ago
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension
therealmarv 4y ago
> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I also use a customized layout (mostly international English with shortcuts for German Umlauts and Y and Z remapped to eachother). It definitely works in most modern Linux desktops to use a "custom keyboard layout" like described here. There are many guides which are outdated on the topic. It's a hack and also not super simple to execute (you only need to do it once) but it is persistent and system-wide in all programs at least: https://askubuntu.com/a/483026/28810 https://askubuntu.com/a/483026/28810
- nmlt 4y ago
  What he probably meant is that Command+C is copy, etc. You can’t easily do that because every Linux program expects different things. The hack to make it work is to switch keyboard configs when you switch the application, I think. It’s far from ideal.
  - csumtin 4y ago
    Just posting here too, I've plugged into evdev to remap keys so the keybindings work on all apps and in gnome Wayland. https://github.com/csumtin/cua https://github.com/csumtin/cua
csumtin 4y ago
In regards to point 1 about keybindings, I've used evdev to get something similar to Mac(my alt is CMD). https://github.com/csumtin/cua https://github.com/csumtin/cua
graymatters 4y ago
Yes, Windows 11 is surprisingly good. It’s the new Windows 7, which was the new Windows XP, which was the new Windows 98.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Except for that sweet, sweet telemetry.

FpUser 4y ago

>" quality of life / ergonomics." Then just replicate Win98 desktop. good ergonomics has nothing to do with high resource usage.

ryukafalz 4y ago

> 2. proper 4k rendering (no blurry stuff) > I don't care about X11 vs Wayland. It sounds like you might care though, albeit not directly. That blurriness is often the result of attempting to use fractional scaling (i.e. not an integer multiple like 200%, 300%, etc). This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. You can do fractional scaling on X11 but Wayland typically does it better, and without the blurriness.

taeric 4y ago
I'm in PopOS and have 150% scale on one monitor, with 100% on the other. Not seeing anything blurry, and pretty sure I'm on X11. Is that an older problem? And I think the point was more that many of us don't care how it is fixed. If that takes a new application, so be it. If it can be done on the older one, also so be it.
- hollerith 4y ago
  >pretty sure I'm on X11 Please post the output of `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE`.
  - taeric 4y ago
    x11
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gastlygem 4y ago
      X11 has been doing fine in the past few years. I have both my home and office computer running it with dual 4k displays and all appear to be swell. I use Cinnamon as desktop because it happens to be the easiest to configure for 150% scaling. I think I've tried xfce and some others but ended up with mixed results.
dspillett 4y ago
> This is common on 4k displays as many are too small for 100% scaling to be readable but too big for 200%. This is why I went for 32" 2560x1440 when I got a larger monitor. Very similar pixel pitch to the 24" 1920x1080 units that I had before (one of which stands beside it in portrait, so 1080x1920). I didn't need more smoothness, just wanted more on screen without needing to make things smaller.
hedora 4y ago
You could also turn off fractional scaling under X11. That's been my preference for 20 years (yes, HiDPI displays have been around that long...)
jjice 4y ago
This is the entire reason I use Wayland on my personal machine (Ubuntu 22 with Gnome). The X11 fractional scaling is fine, but a bit blurry. Wayland makes it look crisp, like it should.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

>A unified clipboard Yes, please.

scythe 4y ago
I think the irony is that Linux could easily achieve this by simply copying the OS X use of Meta (Cmd/"Windows") key for the copy/paste instead of DEs stubbornly trying to ape the Windowsy Ctrl-key combination paradigm, which conflicts with the use of Ctrl by terminal applications. The time is long past when keyboards would ship without a Meta key. Another user mentioned Ctrl-Shift, but pressing three keys requires too much dexterity for a simple operation like copy (and you might accidentally Ctrl-C your script!).
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  That's actually a really good idea. Although given everything in linux works with ctrl-c except terminal emulators, that's probably where the change needs to happen, ie using meta there.
- paddim8 4y ago
  Ctrl+C feels way more ergonomic than Meta+C to me though. Fingers don't need to bend as much. That matters with very common operations like copying
- ColonelPhantom 4y ago
  I thought Meta is usually Alt? Or am I confusing it with Mod? AFAIK Haiku has things like copy on Alt. So you'd have to press Alt+C to copy. Personally, I would prefer to keep the "Windows"/Super key free for OS-wide shortcuts, e.g. tap=search, hold=drag window with mouse, Super+enter=terminal, Super+h=minimize (as in GNOME), Super+w = overview (as in KDE), etc. Using Alt for that and Super for commands would also work, but is somewhat counterintuitive to me as Super has the logo of an OS on it. On the other hand it is the same key order as used by macOS.

sigzero 4y ago

I liked Gnome 2 and I like that I can use Cinnamon if I choose Gnome still. I just don't like that current version 3 of Gnome.

jacob019 4y ago
Which is why Mate exists.
ColonelPhantom 4y ago
GNOME 3 isn't the current version anymore. GNOME 3.40 got released as GNOME 40 instead, which was succeeded by 41, 42 and now 43. Personally I understand the criticism of GNOME 3, but I liked it a lot more than the GNOME 40 series. I've switched to KDE Plasma around this summer, I think from GNOME 42.

unethical_ban 4y ago

Battery life and a more pleasant trackpad experience. I know it's hard to tune a good trackpad profile with such varying hardware, but it sure.would be nice to get a MacBook like smoothness on a Linux DE. And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend. I'm okay with fedora on my laptop, and I must say I've gotten used to Gnome. There is a tweak tool for gnome that allows for adjusting some things I think should be tweakable and discoverable by default.

whalesalad 4y ago
True. Apple cannot be touched when it comes to laptops. My M2 Air is a marvelous machine. I do most of my dev via remote/ssh now and so the battery life on this machine is almost measured in days now. In Geekbench 5 it outperforms my new core i7-12700k on single core performance.
flakeoil 4y ago
Yes, the issue with Linux is not Linux. It's the hardware. Mainly the processor. I'm amazed that Qualcomm, Broadcom or someone else cannot release a decent ARM based processor that can compete with the M1 in terms of performance and power consumption. I really hope there will come something in 2023.
- paddim8 4y ago
  You can run Linux on M1 machines though
deckard1 4y ago
After getting a ThinkPad, I went out on a quest to get trackpad kinetic scrolling working and I came to the conclusion that it will always suck on Linux. Some apps feature it (Firefox, certain Gtk apps). But the problem is that libinput does not implement it (for good reasons, AFAIK) which means it's left up to the GUI libraries to implement. Each. And. Every. Time. If you have a Qt app running next to a Gtk app, good luck. And this is, yet again, why Apple wins in UX. Their kinetic scrolling is implemented across the entire desktop. As it should be. You can't get a consistent feel when you let individual apps implement it with wildly different parameters. > And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend. On Linux you can get close to what Mac does. I believe what the Macbook does is it has a hybrid hibernate/suspend. Suspend, for me, only lasts 2-4 hours and then my battery dies. I think there is another suspend setting that improves this, but there is actually a hybrid suspend that will hibernate after X hours of suspend. My laptop can be closed for a week or more and still have battery.

j1elo 4y ago

Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays? I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-scroll-speed https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-... (hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider") I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...

Schlaefer 4y ago
> Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays? If you use Wayland the answer is Yes. There's a "Scrolling speed" configuration in the Mouse settings.
adrian_b 4y ago
At least in XFCE, that "reasonable expectation" has been fulfilled for as long as I can remember. In KDE, I have no idea, because the last KDE that I have used was 3.5, which was the best desktop environment that I have ever used, including in comparison any Windows or MacOS version (while KDE 4.0 was the worst).
- pxc 4y ago
  You should give Plasma a try some time! It's mature and feature-rich again, like KDE was in the 3.5 days.
  - qu4z-2 4y ago
    (not the GP) I tried it again last year some time and it was neither as configurable nor as stable as 3.5. Granted, maybe it's just rose-coloured glasses, but Trinity DE still seems to provide a better experience for me to this day.

Ruq 4y ago

I'm using GNOME 43 right now on Wayland, and it is quite comfy. But this is mainly due to me heavily using extensions and tweaks to better the experience. I agree that vanilla GNOME just isn't good enough. But especially for Wayland, GNOME is far superior to KDE in terms of stability and glitch-freeness.

yoyohello13 4y ago

For 3, Ctrl+Shift+C/V seems to work fine for me in pretty much every environment.

whalesalad 4y ago
For such a frequently utilized key combo, three keys is too many. On macOS cmd-c and cmd-v work everywhere, too. Windows it is ctrl-c and ctrl-v. Linux it is... dependent on what application you are using and wildly frustrating. Sure, you can remap keys, but then you need to start to really be concerned with config management, backing that up, etc. Getting 'up and running' from 0-hero on macOS takes a few minutes for me, but with Linux it's a couple of days of tweaking at this point.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Linux it is... dependent on what application you are using and wildly frustrating What other application uses something else than CTRL+C for copying on Linux? Been using various Linux flavors for decades and the only application that requires a different shortcut than CTRL+C is terminals, as they already use CTRL+C for something else. Otherwise I can't think of a single application using something else than CTRL+C.
  - pxc 4y ago
    Besides CTRL+SHIFT+C/CTRL+SHIFT+V to copy/paste in terminals, there are some other alternative mappings for common functions that I like to use sometimes and which work pretty widely: - copy: Ctrl+Insert - paste: Shift+Insert - next tab: Ctrl+PgDn - previous tab: Ctrl+PgUp
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    I am spoiled on macos, where cmd is the primary modifier key. So cmd-c and cmd-v are for copy/paste, and ctrl-c still continues to work in a terminal. I understand the need for ctrl-shift-c in a linux term, where ctrl-c needs to remain for signaling processes. I just wish I could globally remap this. Some of the hacks exist for this (https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto) but it's a leaky abstraction and not fool proof.

BrotherBisquick 4y ago

> I don't care about X11 vs Wayland. Have you tried Wayland? Look, I'm not an evangelist, but it solves so many annoying little problems with X11 that I never want to go back. You don't realize how much of a hacked-together, obsolete kludge that X11 is until you use an alternative.

whalesalad 4y ago
The problem for me is that I do not entirely know what Wayland is solving for me. I am looking at it from the pragmatic viewpoint. I will use whatever technology is superior, but for the last few years Wayland has not been a 100% drop-in replacement and certain applications don't work. Heck, for the longest time Wayland would straight up not run on modern nVidia hardware. I have tried it, in fact I just rolled out Fedora 37 w/ KDE Plasma on Wayland to my new i7 box ... but I have only used it for a few hours as it is more of a toy project than a daily dev machine.
- dTal 4y ago
  Well, here's one unexpected benefit I discovered - vastly lower CPU use when playing videos. I don't know enough about display architecture to understand why, but on one of my more underpowered machines it makes the difference between being able to use streaming services, and not being able to.
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    Perhaps you can enable hardware video decoding on Firefox X11, by visiting about:config and setting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled = true (unsure about media.ffmpeg.dmabuf-textures.enabled = true).

rektide 4y ago

If you want completely monolithic & uniform experience built for your specific needs that no one else has on Linux but you, I don't think you'll be happy, ever. > consistent titlebars and ui elements across all applications You can get fairly close to this if you use gnome or kde specific distros. But you're generally asking: please don't be open source. Please don't have a bazaar of ideas. Please build me one big cathedral. You ask here is antithetical to the purpose of whom you are asking. On most general purpose distributions, users probably ought to end up having multiple different UI elements. > complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I actually like this idea a lot, because it suggests a certain system-wide malleability layer that, at the moment, doesn't exist. Anywhere, on any system, at all. How would you go about making your Mac have consistent Windows keybindings, for example? I'd be interested to see how people thought we might tackle this, generally. Folks could make a custom Linux distro that pre-configures each app to be Mac like. I think that's the best chance. But jeeze it seems like an unholy crusade to support a very specific niche, a niche not known for participating & giving back & relishing what we are & do. Awfully big bridge to build & it will forever have some rickety-ness to it. You could use something like https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools to read certain Mac key-combos or what not and rewrite them. But what would you rewrite to? I don't have a good sheet of what it is you'd be asking for or wanting to just work. My spitball idea for how we'd really fix this: I'd like each app to register with a dbus service all of the "actions"/commands it can do, and allow rebinding & activation of the actions over dbus. Maybe even actions actually are just dbus methods, but annotated somehow, to describe their hotkeys or to give them human friendly names? Anyhow, whatever the impl, there could be a central "hotkey manager" that could see all keyboard bindings & let us top-down manage them. There'd need to be some way for "Save" in Kate to be combined/grouped together with "Save" in Firefox, somehow, for this to be helpful. Managing this namespace of actions would be a terror of a problem, utterly absurd, in my view, which implies strongly the difficulty of the ask here I'm trying to respond to, but I actually think it'd be a pretty noble & cool effort. In part because of what it relates to: System command apps. Tools like dmenu/alfred/albert/quicksilver are meant as general top down interfaces, are often scriptable/extensible/deeply configurable to allow fast access & control of a variety of actions. By recognizing keybindings as what they are: actions/commands, and suggesting that the "actions"/commands of an app get bubbled up to the system layer & get managed there, we just make these top-commanders more powerful. There's also an extreme parallel here to voice-agent systems, like Chrome Assistant, Alexa, Siri, where apps present actions & the system is in charge of taking user input and translating it into actuation; they too are directory systems of actions, rather than having each app in isolation. > ability to copy and paste into or out of a terminal without fuss Copy/paste just works for me? Not sure what the problem statement is here, and/or what terminals you've suffered under. > Desktop linux is not being held back by system usage. If anything, we need to stop caring about that for a while and focus on quality of life / ergonomics. 100%. My main personal laptop is 4GB. I run sway which is low resource consumption, but in general resource consumption seems like a huge non-factor to me. In general, Linux isn't going to win by being more conservative. Pining about resource consumption is self-rewarding, self-gratifying: one feels zealous & virtuous, like you have the true cause amid a fallen world & are the path of the defender. But IMO it's mostly detracting & abusing the good & necessary & vital suffusion of creativity & possibility into the world. The scope of consumption is not that bad. And we have the important task of figuring out where to go still ahead of us: I'd rather be conservative once we have better ideas of what works, at any resource budget, & hone back down from there. Rather than forever dance around this maxima/minima we're on & tune for what we have. I'm also unimpressed with this article in general. Showing the amount of memory mapped in seems incredibly uninteresting & indicative of nothing. Amount of data read has some correlation with start time but loosely: if Gnome is reading 1GB sequential (it's not but for example) while KDE is 512b reads randomly (it's not) but half the size, you'd probably still want to pick Gnome.

dynamic_sausage 4y ago

> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension

dynamic_sausage 4y ago

> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension

therealmarv 4y ago

> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere I also use a customized layout (mostly international English with shortcuts for German Umlauts and Y and Z remapped to eachother). It definitely works in most modern Linux desktops to use a "custom keyboard layout" like described here. There are many guides which are outdated on the topic. It's a hack and also not super simple to execute (you only need to do it once) but it is persistent and system-wide in all programs at least: https://askubuntu.com/a/483026/28810 https://askubuntu.com/a/483026/28810

nmlt 4y ago
What he probably meant is that Command+C is copy, etc. You can’t easily do that because every Linux program expects different things. The hack to make it work is to switch keyboard configs when you switch the application, I think. It’s far from ideal.
- csumtin 4y ago
  Just posting here too, I've plugged into evdev to remap keys so the keybindings work on all apps and in gnome Wayland. https://github.com/csumtin/cua https://github.com/csumtin/cua

csumtin 4y ago

In regards to point 1 about keybindings, I've used evdev to get something similar to Mac(my alt is CMD). https://github.com/csumtin/cua https://github.com/csumtin/cua

graymatters 4y ago

Yes, Windows 11 is surprisingly good. It’s the new Windows 7, which was the new Windows XP, which was the new Windows 98.

deafpolygon 4y ago
Except for that sweet, sweet telemetry.