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KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool a

KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool atmosphere of designer-developer cooperation which quickly led to very sleek results that persist to this day. VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before. I've been long a KDE user, even through the 4.0 troubles, but also the first to admit that it used to look clunky. Looking at old screenshots is a quick reminder of how far this initiative has taken it.

uncircle 1y ago
VDG must be so busy that my #1 feature request for KDE, support for smart copy&paste in Konsole, has been stuck in bikeshedding hell for almost 5 years because the maintainer didn't want to merge an optional feature without the VDG go-ahead :( I love open source and have been running Linux since 1999, but my experience of contributing to both KDE and GNOME is your PRs never go anywhere unless you're part of the inner cabal of maintainers, otherwise any small bugfix or feature goes into bikeshedding mode, and it's the reason I don't contribute any more. That said, I run KDE now after two decades of GNOME. It's pretty good and has been looking good for a while now.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Konsole is my least favorite terminal because of all the klutter. Have to remove several buttons, and the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/ https://apps.kde.org/konsole/ What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be. And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      In Konsole's defense, this is the actual default appearance of a Konsole window when you launch it for the first time in the current stable release: https://mero.ng/i/lWMWazUP.png https://mero.ng/i/lWMWazUP.png The screenshot on the website has all sorts of optional bits enabled, and I would readily agree is not a good showcase. The reason all those optional bits exist is because you'd be surprised who ends up using a terminal emulator in a general purpose desktop GUI used in many large IT deployments. E.g. a lot of folks who are used to PuTTy on Windows and want a little GUI for SSH connections, and for them this is the game changer. The "try to show all the goods in your screenshot" mindset is really not a good one though, agree :)
      - mixmastamyk 1y ago
        That's better, but the toolbar/buttons could always be configured away. The real problem is the context menu. Has it been simplified or made configurable?
        Liquid_Fire 1y ago
        Out of interest, what do you use the context menu for in a terminal emulator so often that it bothers you? I can't even remember the last time I opened it.
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        I hide all UI and use only the context menu, 90% of the time to open a new tab, 5% of the time to split a tab, and 4% of the time to bring up the config dialog. 1% to open a new window, though I'm often doing Ctrl+Alt+T for that recently. This is what I've done since SGI 4DWM Terminal (and ancient NT Command Prompt), and almost all other terminal emulators can be configured to do so. Konsole stands alone (to my knowledge) in its insistence on cruft all over the interface. The terminal widget itself seems fine. To be clear, I don't mind obscure options, but they should live in the control panel. See my cousin comment for more details.
  - ezst 1y ago
    Who needs konsole when you can have yakuake?
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      I use the terminal too much for that. I use yakuake for a quick text based ai interface though. That way I can quickly go like "what's the difference between this and that in Spanish?" when I'm writing something.
      - ezst 1y ago
        I use yakuake for everything, I don't know what I would be missing out from a dedicated term: yakuake has tabs, and splits/tiling, so the entirety of my terminal needs are covered in one convenient and easily accessible place :-)
        wkat4242 1y ago
        I'd miss having full screen. I have console full screen on one of my virtual desktops (and I can switch to any desktop with a single key press so in that sense it's the same as yakuake in terms of accessibility). Good point though!
        ezst 1y ago
        Yeah, for the record my yakuake is maximized both horizontally and vertically so it looks and feels like a full-screen term :-)
    - account42 1y ago
      Everyone who uses the terminal for more than one-off commands?
      - guappa 1y ago
        Is your yakuake process running in a very time limited cgroup?
  - wojciii 1y ago
    I use terminator as my terminal .. it allows to split windows which is somewhat implemented in console, but it doesn't work very well..
    - WD-42 1y ago
      And this is why I find KDE annoying. Having to use GTK/GNOME apps for something as simple as a terminal.
      - bmicraft 1y ago
        There are a boatload of non-GTK or GNOME affiliated terminal emulators. I can recommend alacritty for instance.
      - soraminazuki 1y ago
        The default GNOME terminal doesn't do split windows, so it doesn't offer any advantage over KDE in that regard. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/issues/103 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/issues/103
      - antalis 1y ago
        Konsole has that feature too. https://itsfoss.com/konsole-terminal-tweaks/#4-split-the-terminal-window https://itsfoss.com/konsole-terminal-tweaks/#4-split-the-ter...
        wojciii 1y ago
        Yes, but I don't like how this is implemented.
  - neobrain 1y ago
    > the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge What context menu is this about? When I right click into the terminal area, my context menu has a grand total of... 11 items.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Hide the menu/toolbar. And 11 is too many as it is, see my comment elsewhere. Someone posted a screenshot of a new install with 16, but it still doesn't have the main menu disabled. Which adds it to the context menu.
  - rgun 1y ago
    I have probably started using konsole because it was the default, but have since liked it a lot. I use tmux whenever I want to split windows, synchronize keystrokes and things like that but for all else, konsole works perfectly well. I have set it up in a way that I don't see any clutter. You can hide whatever you don't want to see on the UI. All I see is the terminal and the tabs. The killer feature is the 'monitor for silence' and 'monitor for activity'. Comes quite handy for long running background tasks that you want to monitor.
- f33d5173 1y ago
  Is that why they don't have alt selection?
- foresto 1y ago
  I suspect overlooked and stalled pull requests are common in open-source. A small one of mine (to a popular project that is not KDE or GNOME) recently took half a year, and most of that time was spent waiting for reviewers and bikeshedding the docs. My condolences on the frustration. For what it's worth, I'm not part of KDE's inner circle, yet the several PRs that I have submitted to them since I started using it (~2 years ago) have all been accepted. One was difficult to shepherd through the gauntlet of opinions, but was finally merged. So the process is not entirely impenetrable.
abrouwers 1y ago
I disagree - I see stuff like this, and I wonder if anyone actually thinks about the UI, or it's just "features thrown at the wall." It takes me a long time to remove buttons, icons, etc. from KDE's default layout. They seem to take too much comfort in "everything is configurable" as a way to ignore sane defaults. https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/baccccc5ea27399cb3651bcb0754d041e2b0cad3.jpeg https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba...
- jimbo808 1y ago
  Not everyone wants or needs the customizability of KDE. But if you're a heavy desktop user, being able to tailor every aspect of your system to your specific preferences, is absolutely wonderful. Using my Mac for work has become excruciating since I switched to KDE for my Linux machines last year.
  - vbezhenar 1y ago
    I'm heavy desktop user and I never want to tailor every aspect of my system to my specific preferences. I don't have any specific preferences. I have general preferences of any sane user and I want programs to have sane GUI which does not need additional setup. There's no good environment for me in Linux. KDE is too customizable, I installed it once, opened settings and immediately formatted my disk. GNOME is terrible with their tablet UI and miriad hidden keybindings, but at least it does not have billion options, so I'm using GNOME, but I'm not happy with it. All I want is something windows 95-like, but without any settings whatsoever. GNOME 2 was very good desktop back in the days, it's a pity they decided to ruin it.
    - badsectoracula 1y ago
      > any sane user and I want programs to have sane GUI which does not need additional setup In reality there is no such thing as a "sane user" using programs with "sane GUIs". Either someone already has a lot of preferences formed by their experiences using desktop OSes over the years, or they have started using desktop OSes recently and they barely have any expectations. And because of that there is no such things as "sane user" using "sane GUIs". Your sanity is someone else's insanity.
Dunedan 1y ago
I'm not sure usability is moving in the right direction with KDE. Over the past years, more and more applications started to hide menus by default, sometimes adding hamburger menus instead. There is also a "new way" (I believe QtQuick-based) for applications to create popups, which results in them not being separate windows anymore. System Settings makes prominent use of them for example and those popups just behave entirely different than one is used to. As far as I know it's not even possible to navigate these popups with the keyboard.
jorvi 1y ago
> VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before. KDE its Achilles heel is that every KDE application is like its own little fiefdom, compared to Gnome's top-down control of whatever the blessed application for a particular function is. This is why a KDE desktop often feels incredibly disjointed to use. You can't develop muscle memory for conventions if there are no conventions.

uncircle 1y ago

VDG must be so busy that my #1 feature request for KDE, support for smart copy&paste in Konsole, has been stuck in bikeshedding hell for almost 5 years because the maintainer didn't want to merge an optional feature without the VDG go-ahead :( I love open source and have been running Linux since 1999, but my experience of contributing to both KDE and GNOME is your PRs never go anywhere unless you're part of the inner cabal of maintainers, otherwise any small bugfix or feature goes into bikeshedding mode, and it's the reason I don't contribute any more. That said, I run KDE now after two decades of GNOME. It's pretty good and has been looking good for a while now.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Konsole is my least favorite terminal because of all the klutter. Have to remove several buttons, and the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge.
- WD-42 1y ago
  This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/ https://apps.kde.org/konsole/ What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be. And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    In Konsole's defense, this is the actual default appearance of a Konsole window when you launch it for the first time in the current stable release: https://mero.ng/i/lWMWazUP.png https://mero.ng/i/lWMWazUP.png The screenshot on the website has all sorts of optional bits enabled, and I would readily agree is not a good showcase. The reason all those optional bits exist is because you'd be surprised who ends up using a terminal emulator in a general purpose desktop GUI used in many large IT deployments. E.g. a lot of folks who are used to PuTTy on Windows and want a little GUI for SSH connections, and for them this is the game changer. The "try to show all the goods in your screenshot" mindset is really not a good one though, agree :)
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      That's better, but the toolbar/buttons could always be configured away. The real problem is the context menu. Has it been simplified or made configurable?
      - Liquid_Fire 1y ago
        Out of interest, what do you use the context menu for in a terminal emulator so often that it bothers you? I can't even remember the last time I opened it.
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        I hide all UI and use only the context menu, 90% of the time to open a new tab, 5% of the time to split a tab, and 4% of the time to bring up the config dialog. 1% to open a new window, though I'm often doing Ctrl+Alt+T for that recently. This is what I've done since SGI 4DWM Terminal (and ancient NT Command Prompt), and almost all other terminal emulators can be configured to do so. Konsole stands alone (to my knowledge) in its insistence on cruft all over the interface. The terminal widget itself seems fine. To be clear, I don't mind obscure options, but they should live in the control panel. See my cousin comment for more details.
- ezst 1y ago
  Who needs konsole when you can have yakuake?
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    I use the terminal too much for that. I use yakuake for a quick text based ai interface though. That way I can quickly go like "what's the difference between this and that in Spanish?" when I'm writing something.
    - ezst 1y ago
      I use yakuake for everything, I don't know what I would be missing out from a dedicated term: yakuake has tabs, and splits/tiling, so the entirety of my terminal needs are covered in one convenient and easily accessible place :-)
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        I'd miss having full screen. I have console full screen on one of my virtual desktops (and I can switch to any desktop with a single key press so in that sense it's the same as yakuake in terms of accessibility). Good point though!
        ezst 1y ago
        Yeah, for the record my yakuake is maximized both horizontally and vertically so it looks and feels like a full-screen term :-)
  - account42 1y ago
    Everyone who uses the terminal for more than one-off commands?
    - guappa 1y ago
      Is your yakuake process running in a very time limited cgroup?
- wojciii 1y ago
  I use terminator as my terminal .. it allows to split windows which is somewhat implemented in console, but it doesn't work very well..
  - WD-42 1y ago
    And this is why I find KDE annoying. Having to use GTK/GNOME apps for something as simple as a terminal.
    - bmicraft 1y ago
      There are a boatload of non-GTK or GNOME affiliated terminal emulators. I can recommend alacritty for instance.
    - soraminazuki 1y ago
      The default GNOME terminal doesn't do split windows, so it doesn't offer any advantage over KDE in that regard. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/issues/103 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/issues/103
    - antalis 1y ago
      Konsole has that feature too. https://itsfoss.com/konsole-terminal-tweaks/#4-split-the-terminal-window https://itsfoss.com/konsole-terminal-tweaks/#4-split-the-ter...
      - wojciii 1y ago
        Yes, but I don't like how this is implemented.
- neobrain 1y ago
  > the context menu with hundreds of options can’t be simplified to my knowledge What context menu is this about? When I right click into the terminal area, my context menu has a grand total of... 11 items.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Hide the menu/toolbar. And 11 is too many as it is, see my comment elsewhere. Someone posted a screenshot of a new install with 16, but it still doesn't have the main menu disabled. Which adds it to the context menu.
- rgun 1y ago
  I have probably started using konsole because it was the default, but have since liked it a lot. I use tmux whenever I want to split windows, synchronize keystrokes and things like that but for all else, konsole works perfectly well. I have set it up in a way that I don't see any clutter. You can hide whatever you don't want to see on the UI. All I see is the terminal and the tabs. The killer feature is the 'monitor for silence' and 'monitor for activity'. Comes quite handy for long running background tasks that you want to monitor.
f33d5173 1y ago
Is that why they don't have alt selection?
foresto 1y ago
I suspect overlooked and stalled pull requests are common in open-source. A small one of mine (to a popular project that is not KDE or GNOME) recently took half a year, and most of that time was spent waiting for reviewers and bikeshedding the docs. My condolences on the frustration. For what it's worth, I'm not part of KDE's inner circle, yet the several PRs that I have submitted to them since I started using it (~2 years ago) have all been accepted. One was difficult to shepherd through the gauntlet of opinions, but was finally merged. So the process is not entirely impenetrable.

abrouwers 1y ago

I disagree - I see stuff like this, and I wonder if anyone actually thinks about the UI, or it's just "features thrown at the wall." It takes me a long time to remove buttons, icons, etc. from KDE's default layout. They seem to take too much comfort in "everything is configurable" as a way to ignore sane defaults. https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/baccccc5ea27399cb3651bcb0754d041e2b0cad3.jpeg https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/2X/b/ba...

jimbo808 1y ago
Not everyone wants or needs the customizability of KDE. But if you're a heavy desktop user, being able to tailor every aspect of your system to your specific preferences, is absolutely wonderful. Using my Mac for work has become excruciating since I switched to KDE for my Linux machines last year.
- vbezhenar 1y ago
  I'm heavy desktop user and I never want to tailor every aspect of my system to my specific preferences. I don't have any specific preferences. I have general preferences of any sane user and I want programs to have sane GUI which does not need additional setup. There's no good environment for me in Linux. KDE is too customizable, I installed it once, opened settings and immediately formatted my disk. GNOME is terrible with their tablet UI and miriad hidden keybindings, but at least it does not have billion options, so I'm using GNOME, but I'm not happy with it. All I want is something windows 95-like, but without any settings whatsoever. GNOME 2 was very good desktop back in the days, it's a pity they decided to ruin it.
  - badsectoracula 1y ago
    > any sane user and I want programs to have sane GUI which does not need additional setup In reality there is no such thing as a "sane user" using programs with "sane GUIs". Either someone already has a lot of preferences formed by their experiences using desktop OSes over the years, or they have started using desktop OSes recently and they barely have any expectations. And because of that there is no such things as "sane user" using "sane GUIs". Your sanity is someone else's insanity.

Dunedan 1y ago

I'm not sure usability is moving in the right direction with KDE. Over the past years, more and more applications started to hide menus by default, sometimes adding hamburger menus instead. There is also a "new way" (I believe QtQuick-based) for applications to create popups, which results in them not being separate windows anymore. System Settings makes prominent use of them for example and those popups just behave entirely different than one is used to. As far as I know it's not even possible to navigate these popups with the keyboard.

jorvi 1y ago

> VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before. KDE its Achilles heel is that every KDE application is like its own little fiefdom, compared to Gnome's top-down control of whatever the blessed application for a particular function is. This is why a KDE desktop often feels incredibly disjointed to use. You can't develop muscle memory for conventions if there are no conventions.