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Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

Gnome and KDE seem so close in polish these days, it's hard to decide which one to run and I keep on going back and forward.

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If you want customization(do not like the default) is safer to use KDE, with Gnome you need extensions and if you check the Gnome reddits and forums you will notice that latest updates broke the popular extensions again.

Also for accessibility reasons, AFAIK Gnome does not show the font size in the default settings app, this is the first thing that i need when I want to install Linux, I put the LiveCD in and then go and enable the zoom and large fonts.

personally I find gnome's filesselector unusable, whereas kde's is great.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

We've just officially passed the 15 year mark. It's even become a meme now:

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/File_Picker_meme

Last I tried, you couldn't type direct paths into the fileselector or the file browser, basically requiring that you mouse your way around. I found that extremely aggravating and went back to KDE almost immediately.

Ctrl+L has always worked for me, it highlights the path field.

Having a key sequence is fine. Remembering the key sequence is annoying. Every OS and UI wants to have it different. Modern OSes even get rid of hints and text so people don't even know that a key sequence is available.

This shortcut has been the same on MacOS, Windows, and most Linux DEs for ages. Can't please everyone, I guess.

This is true, but having just a keyboard shortcut is still a disaster for discoverability. I've used Windows a fair bit and have spent a decade using various Linux DEs; it was only two weeks ago that I discovered Ctrl+L.

It's a wonderful shortcut, useful in browsers and a huge number of other applications, but having buttons and menus and other UI features - which may take up a tiny bit of space and piss off designers who want ultra simple UIs - are what allow people to become good at using software naturally, without having to actively seek out knowledge from the few enlightened ones.

> I've used Windows a fair bit and have spent a decade using various Linux DEs; it was only two weeks ago that I discovered Ctrl+L.

It wasn't available in Explorer until recently.

More specifically: sometimes I have to work with Windows 2008 servers and it is not available there.

I think in older Windows Explorers you could use an F-key or something but I don't work that much with Windows anymore.

> but having buttons and menus and other UI features - which may take up a tiny bit of space and piss off designers who want ultra simple UIs - are what allow people to become good at using software naturally, without having to actively seek out knowledge from the few enlightened ones.

I tvink we agree. I have had a feeling for a while that a lot of the simplification of UX we have done in the last 10 years is more dumbification, and that by removing the learning curve we've also removed the learning.

Do I mean software should be hard to use? No. Use as clear ux as possible but if you are designing power user apps for existing power users (or people that should become power users) don't be afraid to add some configurability.

If I should try to come up with one rule of thumb: if a ux designer is removing options the users want they might be dumbing down the UX instead of simplifying it.

And it works on browsers, Spotify, etc. As close to a universal shortcut as we're getting, albeit not as well known as ones like Ctrl+S.

You can, simply press Ctrl + L. It's funny to me that you switched desktop environments instead of Googling that.

Well, it wasn't advertised, and I argue it's a basic feature of a file picker / browser so it should be very obvious. To be honest, that was just the final straw. I was already unhappy with Gnome for a variety of reasons, that was just one of them.

It depends on if you like features and configuration options or not. If you don't like features and don't want to be able to set any configuration options, go for Gnome. Otherwise, KDE.

KDE these days seems like configurability-overload. I appreciate the flexibility but it just feels excessive to me. I think a lot of the options should be tucked away into an equivalent of Firefox's about:config. For me, something like XFCE has the ideal config panel complexity. (Of course, it's all subjective.)

There are ways that the configuration can be done for you, however. There's a "Use Desktop Layout From Theme" that would pull in any layout changes from a theme you install.

When I found out that you could apply a theme and, with a few clicks, have KDE fashioned into something that looks indistinguishable from Unity, I almost switched to it just for the novelty.

https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/make-kde-pla...

KDE could use some work in the design department, with a lot of the menus and UI stuff getting an overhaul, but without actually removing functionality (just moving it around to be more sensible, and not overloading new users with too many options at once).

Uhm, which is to say, horrid? Because polish is the last thing that comes to mind with the abomination that KDE is.

The defaults are literally to spam you with notifications because a single fricking file copy finished. Hello! We have SSDs now! No one is fucking waiting for their file copy to finish! If you copy 100 files, no one wants 100 notifications!

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