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KDE's major sin is the lack of a sane, usable, default configuration. It took me a few years to understand that people don't want to invest, not even a few hou

KDE's major sin is the lack of a sane, usable, default configuration. It took me a few years to understand that people don't want to invest, not even a few hours, to configure their DE. And KDE comes with a lot of configuration settings. So they ended up in Gnome. I've been using it for ~10 years and although it's the only DE I can get any job done, even today the defaults are ugly and overwhelming. And only a few distros(OpenSUSE only?) make an effort to provide a decent KDE experience for the user.

rmsaksida 12y ago
I think Linux users in particular don't mind investing in their DEs, but the investiment cost shouldn't be so high in the beginning as to scare off new users. DEs have to carefully balance a good initial configuration with the flexibility for long term usage. A second issue with "investing in your DE" is that we tend to update computers and installations a lot these days. Any extra step required to configure your environment becomes tedious over time. I used to have a rich dotfiles folder, but the pain of maintaining it became so high that I slimmed it down to the absolute minimum. I even forced myself to conform to some programs' defaults. The less time I spend hunting for this kind of highly specific documentation, the better.
- rantanplan 12y ago
  I know I know. It's just that it saddens me that the KDE people don't seem to understand that first impressions are a big thing. I really believe that in terms of engineering KDE has no competitor... on any platform or OS. But as history has shown us, this is not enough. When an avid KDE user like me can't stand the defaults and spends 1-2 hours on every new installation to make it usable, something is not right. Also add to the fact that at some point I need to get some work done and not mess with DE config options... sigh.
emergentcypher 12y ago
In my experience, trying to use KDE is always a waste of a _lot_ more than a few hours. And even once I've got it configured the way you like, it feels like it's barely holding together with duct-tape at the seams. There's always a few things missing, always something, but I'm afraid to touch it for fear it'll all rip apart. KDE feels like a mish-mash of disparate parts that sort of go together. Much of the "work" I do in setting up KDE is giving it a clean and consistent interface. So I, too, always go back to GNOME after trying KDE for a few weeks.

rmsaksida 12y ago

I think Linux users in particular don't mind investing in their DEs, but the investiment cost shouldn't be so high in the beginning as to scare off new users. DEs have to carefully balance a good initial configuration with the flexibility for long term usage. A second issue with "investing in your DE" is that we tend to update computers and installations a lot these days. Any extra step required to configure your environment becomes tedious over time. I used to have a rich dotfiles folder, but the pain of maintaining it became so high that I slimmed it down to the absolute minimum. I even forced myself to conform to some programs' defaults. The less time I spend hunting for this kind of highly specific documentation, the better.

rantanplan 12y ago
I know I know. It's just that it saddens me that the KDE people don't seem to understand that first impressions are a big thing. I really believe that in terms of engineering KDE has no competitor... on any platform or OS. But as history has shown us, this is not enough. When an avid KDE user like me can't stand the defaults and spends 1-2 hours on every new installation to make it usable, something is not right. Also add to the fact that at some point I need to get some work done and not mess with DE config options... sigh.

emergentcypher 12y ago

In my experience, trying to use KDE is always a waste of a _lot_ more than a few hours. And even once I've got it configured the way you like, it feels like it's barely holding together with duct-tape at the seams. There's always a few things missing, always something, but I'm afraid to touch it for fear it'll all rip apart. KDE feels like a mish-mash of disparate parts that sort of go together. Much of the "work" I do in setting up KDE is giving it a clean and consistent interface. So I, too, always go back to GNOME after trying KDE for a few weeks.