12 ms·

KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. Exposed options make computing discovery possible. Sometim

KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. Exposed options make computing discovery possible. Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system. This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".

drooopy 4y ago
"KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era." I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.
- pxc 4y ago
  I find this quite strange. I was a kid (and heavy computer user) when Windows 9x was current. I'd been a user of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows XP before I got into Linux and KDE, back in the KDE 3.4 days. I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot. The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Amarok is a distant descendant of WinAmp, which was indeed developed for Windows 95. :) WinAmp -> X11Amp -> XMMS -> Amarok ... -> Clementine -> Strawberry, if you want a current player that looks like Amarok 1.4.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      Describing Amarok as a descendant from XMMS feels like describing Firefox as a descendant from Lynx.
      - FeepingCreature 4y ago
        That's fair, there's no code lineage, and it's hard to see Amarok's XMMS/Winamp descent from 1.4. But the design lineage is maybe more credible if you look at historic screenshots like https://amarok.sourceforge.net/amarok_20040203.png https://amarok.sourceforge.net/amarok_20040203.png . (Note the "PL EQ" buttons, straight off the Winamp main widget.) edit: Even further https://web.archive.org/web/20030815185552/http://amarok.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php https://web.archive.org/web/20030815185552/http://amarok.sou...
        pxc 4y ago
        Those are cool to see! I got into Amarok in the 1.3 days, so I never saw the Winamp-like interfaces. For the same reason, I also never used it before it had collection support, so I always used it to manage my collection and didn't browse the filesystem with it. FWIW, my favorite Amarok design is the 2.x one. The initial rewrite sucked in all the ways that KDE 4 did, but it had better defaults and it was more flexible. Once the plugin ecosystem mostly recovered, it was awesome again!
        FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Glad you got a good player. For me, the big dense screen-filling freeform playlist was the main selling point, so 2.0 was a huge letdown.
        pxc 4y ago
        I remember feeling disappointed and frustrated with the 2.0 layout as well. I think it was around 2.3 that the player got some UI tweaks which let you make use of screen space in similar proportions to 1.4.x. It's been super long since I really used a local player, but IIRC later versions of Amarok 2.x let you rearrange the panes that make up the single window interface, including IIRC stacking them into tabs which is similar to the vertical, collapsible tabs on the left side of 1.4.x. What was exciting for me about the 1.4.x player and earlier was the contextual information provided for songs— especially lyrics fetching and Wikipedia embedding. I used the lyrics fetching to learn and sing along to hundreds of songs when I was a teenager. It took decades for streaming services to catch up on lyrics display and trivia. I also heavily utilized the collection management features and patterns, which were so excellent. Amarok was my primary tool for organizing a collection of MP3, Vorbis, and eventually Opus files that grew into the hundreds of gigabytes, on spinning rust. The metadata fetching and editing and file renaming functions were vital for me, although later I did do a lot of maintenance with Musicbrainz Picard. The dynamic playlists in 2.x were great for parties, and I liked moodbars for showing people specific sections of songs and the cool visuals. Anyway, to me Clementine feels like a very cluttered hodgepodge of features and menus, in a way that Amarok never did.
mindcrime 4y ago
This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience". So VERY much this. I don't want an "experience" that's curated and chosen for me. I want to decide for myself how my desktop is going to look, feel, and work. And that is why I use KDE over Gnome, etc. KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.
- isthisthingon99 4y ago
  Most users don't care but yes it's nice for the market to have something like this.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    IME they very much do care, they're simply not aware that a constantly changing user interface is not just something you have to deal with, like death or taxes. Every time I play tech support for friends and family it's the same story about how everything looks different yet again and how they can't find that thing that was right here just recently. (For myself I have cobbled together something that looks roughly like Windows 95 did decades ago, but doing that for others comes with its own problems, so not forcing that on anyone.)
    - zx8080 4y ago
      Did you try xfce with win95 theme? This works pretty stable, though not kde.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Stop making homophobic and transphobic posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34402242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34402242
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 4y ago
irthomasthomas 4y ago
That is what attracted me to KDE. However, in recent years there design philosophy has become more aligned with Windows and mobile. It seems more difficult to create skeuomorphic themes, now. The trend seems to be for dizzying, translucent, psychedelic themes, where figuring out what I can and cannot interact with is like a point and click adventure game, only without the joy. But this seems to be in line with KDE's new stated design goals: Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed. Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software. [0] To me, this feels like dumbing down, and this is disappointing for a powerful desktop. A desktop PC is such a vast and powerful utility that it's interface should be reasonably complex, like the cockpit of an airliner. I'm working with 14 to 30 inch screens, I don't need the same UI as a 5" phone. Instead, we are following Musk's lead and hiding everything behind an Android-like system, with burger menus, disappearing UI elements, brightly coloured icons, and bouncy window animations. And even though KDE is still infinitely customizable, the vast majority of themes out there follow this trend. If anyone knows of a good skeuomorphic theme that still works, I'd love to see it. [0] https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/
- int_19h 4y ago
  "Dizzying, translucent, psychedelic themes" is how I would describe KDE pretty much... always? Here's a fairly typical KDE desktop circa 2005: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUSE_Linux,_KDE_3_Desktop.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUSE_Linux,_KDE_3_De...
  - irthomasthomas 4y ago
    Holy transparency, batman! I'm guessing KDE 3 introduced the transparency API or something? But that wasn't a default theme was it? I've used trinity, or TDE, which is a KDE 3 fork, but it's built in themes are way more conservative and practical.
Barrin92 4y ago
it's personally why I don't like KDE. I have no nostalgia for the old school windows desktop and it feels like something designed by a Soviet Design bureau combined with an airplane cockpit. There's always three different menus to change the same thing and buttons everywhere. GNOME goes a little bit overboard sometimes with the simplification but it just feels so much cleaner out of the box.
- sph 4y ago
  Yes and no. I would use KDE if either they went full Windows 98 in their style, or modern slick like GNOME. Instead they have this bland Windows 10 flat look that has no personality. The familiar Windows 98 gray had saturation, constrast and even a touch if colour (the gray tends a bit towards the red) The modern KDE look is a diluted flat gray/desaturated cerulean blue which I really do not like. So uninspired, cold, clinical, corporate, clashing with that friendly look they want KDE to represent. It is uncanny, and while the GNOME design team loves to change stuff just for the sake of it, they have more taste and eye that whoever runs the design team at KDE. Can we have a desktop that doesn't look like a poster that's been left in the sun for too long? Can we have contrast back and more colours than just light gray and light blue?
  - jraph 4y ago
    I like KDE's default theme and color scheme very much, but you can fine tune the colors to your taste or pick a Windows 9x-like theme :-)
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Part of what gives the default KDE theme that feel you describe I think is its usage of transparent grays. Generally when you do transparency in UI it needs to be transparent white or transparent black (though in some case, dark transparent gray can work), because transparent mid-grays make everything feel kinda dingy, with whatever's showing through feeling like it's being seen through a thick fog on a dark rainy day.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    By default, Win98 used the same gray as Win95 (#C0C0C0). If I remember correctly, it was Win2K that made it warmer, and it was definitely an improvement.
torben-friis 4y ago
> KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments. As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc. It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is that there was experimentation. Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are: - 90's-like UX - terminal focused setups (tiling windows managers, etc) - dumbed down tablet-like experience.
- WharfWhoretress 4y ago
  KDE has the same exploding windows and other window effects.
  - torben-friis 4y ago
    My point was not that those effects from 20 years ago are unavailable, it's that I have not seen current similarly experimental projects that expand what we think of as a desktop. There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006
    - bodangly 4y ago
      You see this a lot though. It’s because it becomes harder and harder to do something new and different when it’s all sort of been done before. Innovating something that’s been done to death is a lot harder than innovating when things are still less well defined. I think video games are in this same space. Rarely does a game actually innovate or come up with something truly novel anymore. Ultima Online was the most amazing thing I ever saw at the time, but now that I’ve seen a million different MMOs the entire genre feels stale. Have fighting games really advanced much from either a Street Fighter type, Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs Capcom or Smash Brothers style? What about action adventure - is God of War Ragnarok innovating anything? It doesn’t feel that different than playing any number of other games, just maybe more polished. Uncharted is just another take on Tomb Raider at the end of the day. Same thing with movies or television. There just isn’t that much new ground to break.
Zababa 4y ago
Exactly my feelings, altough it would be with Windows 2000 and XP since I wasn't born before. The file explorer, dolphin, is a good example of that, and a pleasure to use.
antihero 4y ago
I’d love the KDE experience with the Gnome aesthetic.
rhaway84773 4y ago
Gnome assumes developers don’t have an insane amount of time to spend on their open source desktop apps. And that users deserve high quality apps that work well together. So Gnome devs, seeing the vast majority of bug reports that developers of first and third party apps received were a result of the large number of configurations and extensions and customizations have decided to rein it back. Doing so means Gnome developers can start with a smaller footprint which they will now expand to add customizations back in a supported manner. It’s a different approach. The good thing is that with Linux different groups can try different approaches and users can switch relatively painlessly between them. So far, having gotten a lot more responsibilities with growing older, I’ve found that letting Gnome pick sensible defaults, etc, and not requiring me to spend a lot of time and mental energy configuring stuff has meant that Gnome has been the most productive general use Desktop in my personal life (i3 for work life…).
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  The issue is that everyone needs at least one or two customisations that they can't live without, even though they don't need all of them. And so they end up installing gnome tweaks which is a buggy mess which will never be fixed, as with most third party extensions. In comparison, even though there are a lot of bugs in KDE, they will eventually be fixed, given that most customisations are first party.
  - asdajksah2123 4y ago
    Seems like you prefer the KDE model. Great! Use KDE! I, unfortunately, have a limited amount of time and prefer not waiting for those bugs to eventually be resolved. So I prefer using Gnome, where the limited flexibility is not a problem for me, and the far more consistent and stable Gnome environment is extremely valuable! So I use Gnome. That's the great part about Linux. And I can somehow manage to do that without suggesting that KDE developers need to stop treating their users like a bunch of kids with no jobs living in their mother's basements. Many in the Linux community seem incapable of doing that second thing, which is the crappy part about Linux.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
What distro do you use? Would you recommend it to newcomers? I've friends and family who always ask me this. My partner tried Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken, and writing in Chinese (her native language) was simply not feasible. I tried live media of a few random distros, but basic things were always broken (e.g.: touchpad scrolling didn't work, things like that).
- bmn__ 4y ago
  The best distro for newcomers is the one their mentor in the local LUG is using. Any other way is just a recipe for misery. > Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken That sucks. I can say with confidence that this is not the case on openSUSE with KDE. I have fcitx5, fcitx5-chinese-addons and a few other relevant packages installed and it works fine.
  - WhyNotHugo 4y ago
    I tried OpenSUSE and it had scaling issues. Basically, everything was tiny (to a point where it was unreadable). OpenSUSE used X11 by default (rather than Wayland), and configuring scaling on X11 has never fully worked for me, so I didn't want to sink time into that. It didn't seem that Wayland was an option. I admit I didn't have a huge amount of patience or put a lot of time into OpenSUSE; after wasting a lot of time into trying to make input work on Fedora [and failing], we basically went through multiple distros in a weekend and quickly moved on whenever one had obvious issues rather than try and figure out if it was possible to tinker around it. Do you know if X11 is still the default or Wayland if is well supported? Or any other advise for this scenario?
    - bmn__ 4y ago
      I observe no scaling issues, I use the settings below and it works just fine. System Settings → Hardware → Display and Monitor → Display Configuration → Global scale [125%] System Settings → Appearance → Fonts → Adjust All Fonts… and raise the size to 16pt.
    - ssnistfajen 4y ago

drooopy 4y ago

"KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era." I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.

pxc 4y ago
I find this quite strange. I was a kid (and heavy computer user) when Windows 9x was current. I'd been a user of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows XP before I got into Linux and KDE, back in the KDE 3.4 days. I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot. The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Amarok is a distant descendant of WinAmp, which was indeed developed for Windows 95. :) WinAmp -> X11Amp -> XMMS -> Amarok ... -> Clementine -> Strawberry, if you want a current player that looks like Amarok 1.4.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Describing Amarok as a descendant from XMMS feels like describing Firefox as a descendant from Lynx.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      That's fair, there's no code lineage, and it's hard to see Amarok's XMMS/Winamp descent from 1.4. But the design lineage is maybe more credible if you look at historic screenshots like https://amarok.sourceforge.net/amarok_20040203.png https://amarok.sourceforge.net/amarok_20040203.png . (Note the "PL EQ" buttons, straight off the Winamp main widget.) edit: Even further https://web.archive.org/web/20030815185552/http://amarok.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php https://web.archive.org/web/20030815185552/http://amarok.sou...
      - pxc 4y ago
        Those are cool to see! I got into Amarok in the 1.3 days, so I never saw the Winamp-like interfaces. For the same reason, I also never used it before it had collection support, so I always used it to manage my collection and didn't browse the filesystem with it. FWIW, my favorite Amarok design is the 2.x one. The initial rewrite sucked in all the ways that KDE 4 did, but it had better defaults and it was more flexible. Once the plugin ecosystem mostly recovered, it was awesome again!
        FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Glad you got a good player. For me, the big dense screen-filling freeform playlist was the main selling point, so 2.0 was a huge letdown.
        pxc 4y ago
        I remember feeling disappointed and frustrated with the 2.0 layout as well. I think it was around 2.3 that the player got some UI tweaks which let you make use of screen space in similar proportions to 1.4.x. It's been super long since I really used a local player, but IIRC later versions of Amarok 2.x let you rearrange the panes that make up the single window interface, including IIRC stacking them into tabs which is similar to the vertical, collapsible tabs on the left side of 1.4.x. What was exciting for me about the 1.4.x player and earlier was the contextual information provided for songs— especially lyrics fetching and Wikipedia embedding. I used the lyrics fetching to learn and sing along to hundreds of songs when I was a teenager. It took decades for streaming services to catch up on lyrics display and trivia. I also heavily utilized the collection management features and patterns, which were so excellent. Amarok was my primary tool for organizing a collection of MP3, Vorbis, and eventually Opus files that grew into the hundreds of gigabytes, on spinning rust. The metadata fetching and editing and file renaming functions were vital for me, although later I did do a lot of maintenance with Musicbrainz Picard. The dynamic playlists in 2.x were great for parties, and I liked moodbars for showing people specific sections of songs and the cool visuals. Anyway, to me Clementine feels like a very cluttered hodgepodge of features and menus, in a way that Amarok never did.

mindcrime 4y ago

This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience". So VERY much this. I don't want an "experience" that's curated and chosen for me. I want to decide for myself how my desktop is going to look, feel, and work. And that is why I use KDE over Gnome, etc. KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.

isthisthingon99 4y ago
Most users don't care but yes it's nice for the market to have something like this.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  IME they very much do care, they're simply not aware that a constantly changing user interface is not just something you have to deal with, like death or taxes. Every time I play tech support for friends and family it's the same story about how everything looks different yet again and how they can't find that thing that was right here just recently. (For myself I have cobbled together something that looks roughly like Windows 95 did decades ago, but doing that for others comes with its own problems, so not forcing that on anyone.)
  - zx8080 4y ago
    Did you try xfce with win95 theme? This works pretty stable, though not kde.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Stop making homophobic and transphobic posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34402242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34402242
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago

irthomasthomas 4y ago

That is what attracted me to KDE. However, in recent years there design philosophy has become more aligned with Windows and mobile. It seems more difficult to create skeuomorphic themes, now. The trend seems to be for dizzying, translucent, psychedelic themes, where figuring out what I can and cannot interact with is like a point and click adventure game, only without the joy. But this seems to be in line with KDE's new stated design goals: Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed. Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software. [0] To me, this feels like dumbing down, and this is disappointing for a powerful desktop. A desktop PC is such a vast and powerful utility that it's interface should be reasonably complex, like the cockpit of an airliner. I'm working with 14 to 30 inch screens, I don't need the same UI as a 5" phone. Instead, we are following Musk's lead and hiding everything behind an Android-like system, with burger menus, disappearing UI elements, brightly coloured icons, and bouncy window animations. And even though KDE is still infinitely customizable, the vast majority of themes out there follow this trend. If anyone knows of a good skeuomorphic theme that still works, I'd love to see it. [0] https://develop.kde.org/hig/ https://develop.kde.org/hig/

int_19h 4y ago
"Dizzying, translucent, psychedelic themes" is how I would describe KDE pretty much... always? Here's a fairly typical KDE desktop circa 2005: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUSE_Linux,_KDE_3_Desktop.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SUSE_Linux,_KDE_3_De...
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  Holy transparency, batman! I'm guessing KDE 3 introduced the transparency API or something? But that wasn't a default theme was it? I've used trinity, or TDE, which is a KDE 3 fork, but it's built in themes are way more conservative and practical.

Barrin92 4y ago

it's personally why I don't like KDE. I have no nostalgia for the old school windows desktop and it feels like something designed by a Soviet Design bureau combined with an airplane cockpit. There's always three different menus to change the same thing and buttons everywhere. GNOME goes a little bit overboard sometimes with the simplification but it just feels so much cleaner out of the box.

sph 4y ago
Yes and no. I would use KDE if either they went full Windows 98 in their style, or modern slick like GNOME. Instead they have this bland Windows 10 flat look that has no personality. The familiar Windows 98 gray had saturation, constrast and even a touch if colour (the gray tends a bit towards the red) The modern KDE look is a diluted flat gray/desaturated cerulean blue which I really do not like. So uninspired, cold, clinical, corporate, clashing with that friendly look they want KDE to represent. It is uncanny, and while the GNOME design team loves to change stuff just for the sake of it, they have more taste and eye that whoever runs the design team at KDE. Can we have a desktop that doesn't look like a poster that's been left in the sun for too long? Can we have contrast back and more colours than just light gray and light blue?
- jraph 4y ago
  I like KDE's default theme and color scheme very much, but you can fine tune the colors to your taste or pick a Windows 9x-like theme :-)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Part of what gives the default KDE theme that feel you describe I think is its usage of transparent grays. Generally when you do transparency in UI it needs to be transparent white or transparent black (though in some case, dark transparent gray can work), because transparent mid-grays make everything feel kinda dingy, with whatever's showing through feeling like it's being seen through a thick fog on a dark rainy day.
- int_19h 4y ago
  By default, Win98 used the same gray as Win95 (#C0C0C0). If I remember correctly, it was Win2K that made it warmer, and it was definitely an improvement.

torben-friis 4y ago

> KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments. As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc. It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is that there was experimentation. Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are: - 90's-like UX - terminal focused setups (tiling windows managers, etc) - dumbed down tablet-like experience.

WharfWhoretress 4y ago
KDE has the same exploding windows and other window effects.
- torben-friis 4y ago
  My point was not that those effects from 20 years ago are unavailable, it's that I have not seen current similarly experimental projects that expand what we think of as a desktop. There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006
  - bodangly 4y ago
    You see this a lot though. It’s because it becomes harder and harder to do something new and different when it’s all sort of been done before. Innovating something that’s been done to death is a lot harder than innovating when things are still less well defined. I think video games are in this same space. Rarely does a game actually innovate or come up with something truly novel anymore. Ultima Online was the most amazing thing I ever saw at the time, but now that I’ve seen a million different MMOs the entire genre feels stale. Have fighting games really advanced much from either a Street Fighter type, Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs Capcom or Smash Brothers style? What about action adventure - is God of War Ragnarok innovating anything? It doesn’t feel that different than playing any number of other games, just maybe more polished. Uncharted is just another take on Tomb Raider at the end of the day. Same thing with movies or television. There just isn’t that much new ground to break.

Zababa 4y ago

Exactly my feelings, altough it would be with Windows 2000 and XP since I wasn't born before. The file explorer, dolphin, is a good example of that, and a pleasure to use.

antihero 4y ago

I’d love the KDE experience with the Gnome aesthetic.

rhaway84773 4y ago

Gnome assumes developers don’t have an insane amount of time to spend on their open source desktop apps. And that users deserve high quality apps that work well together. So Gnome devs, seeing the vast majority of bug reports that developers of first and third party apps received were a result of the large number of configurations and extensions and customizations have decided to rein it back. Doing so means Gnome developers can start with a smaller footprint which they will now expand to add customizations back in a supported manner. It’s a different approach. The good thing is that with Linux different groups can try different approaches and users can switch relatively painlessly between them. So far, having gotten a lot more responsibilities with growing older, I’ve found that letting Gnome pick sensible defaults, etc, and not requiring me to spend a lot of time and mental energy configuring stuff has meant that Gnome has been the most productive general use Desktop in my personal life (i3 for work life…).

cuteboy19 4y ago
The issue is that everyone needs at least one or two customisations that they can't live without, even though they don't need all of them. And so they end up installing gnome tweaks which is a buggy mess which will never be fixed, as with most third party extensions. In comparison, even though there are a lot of bugs in KDE, they will eventually be fixed, given that most customisations are first party.
- asdajksah2123 4y ago
  Seems like you prefer the KDE model. Great! Use KDE! I, unfortunately, have a limited amount of time and prefer not waiting for those bugs to eventually be resolved. So I prefer using Gnome, where the limited flexibility is not a problem for me, and the far more consistent and stable Gnome environment is extremely valuable! So I use Gnome. That's the great part about Linux. And I can somehow manage to do that without suggesting that KDE developers need to stop treating their users like a bunch of kids with no jobs living in their mother's basements. Many in the Linux community seem incapable of doing that second thing, which is the crappy part about Linux.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

What distro do you use? Would you recommend it to newcomers? I've friends and family who always ask me this. My partner tried Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken, and writing in Chinese (her native language) was simply not feasible. I tried live media of a few random distros, but basic things were always broken (e.g.: touchpad scrolling didn't work, things like that).

bmn__ 4y ago
The best distro for newcomers is the one their mentor in the local LUG is using. Any other way is just a recipe for misery. > Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken That sucks. I can say with confidence that this is not the case on openSUSE with KDE. I have fcitx5, fcitx5-chinese-addons and a few other relevant packages installed and it works fine.
- WhyNotHugo 4y ago
  I tried OpenSUSE and it had scaling issues. Basically, everything was tiny (to a point where it was unreadable). OpenSUSE used X11 by default (rather than Wayland), and configuring scaling on X11 has never fully worked for me, so I didn't want to sink time into that. It didn't seem that Wayland was an option. I admit I didn't have a huge amount of patience or put a lot of time into OpenSUSE; after wasting a lot of time into trying to make input work on Fedora [and failing], we basically went through multiple distros in a weekend and quickly moved on whenever one had obvious issues rather than try and figure out if it was possible to tinker around it. Do you know if X11 is still the default or Wayland if is well supported? Or any other advise for this scenario?
  - bmn__ 4y ago
    I observe no scaling issues, I use the settings below and it works just fine. System Settings → Hardware → Display and Monitor → Display Configuration → Global scale [125%] System Settings → Appearance → Fonts → Adjust All Fonts… and raise the size to 16pt.
  - ssnistfajen 4y ago