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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)!

However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are both quite usable. Which is a stark contrast from when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out. They were both nothing more then glorified beta's. The first release of Gnome 3 was basically like the first Windows 10 release with the Metro UI; Totally unusable. Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset.

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I use Mate and I think it's misleading to characterize it as a reheated Gnome 2. That's how it started, but the project has come a long way since then. Mate now uses GTK3 instead of GTK2. It supports GPU-accelerated compositing and Hi-DPI displays. Mate is a well-maintained modern desktop environment, not a historical curiosity.

It also plays nicely with tiling WMs; you can replace the default with i3 or Awesome or whatever and enjoy mate-settingsd and having a nice GTK3 panel that looks nice, but also tiling windows.

KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful.

It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software just can't not evolve) and started throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. And unsurprisingly, a lot of it did stick.

To its credit, KDE 5 does seem to try to clean up the mess a bit though in that over the years it is the only between the two that doesn't compulsively make me want to remove it from any Linux machine i get my hands on (and can remove stuff :-P).

Sadly XFCE seems to be heading down the same way.

I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?

I still find it extremely buggy. I've been hearing these "KDE 5 is fine now" for the past few months in comments, podcasts, blog posts, etc. Yesterday I gave in and decided to try the latest release. After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed.

It's working as it always has been for me, since the early days of 4. It's pretty much dead for me now.

For the record, this has been happening on many machines, and I don't use nvigia GPUs and similar stuff.

Also, I try to report bugs in software that I use, but KDE has the appearance of software which receives no QA at all. It's one thing to report a bug in sway or some XFCE application which crashes maybe once in a few years, and other to use something which crashes a dozen times a day. I'd be filling bugs all day long.

> Yesterday I gave in and decided to try the latest release. After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed.

What distro? New or installed on top of something else?

I have run KDE Neon since a few years ago om two (admittedly high end) laptops and it has been very smooth.

> I have run KDE Neon since a few years ago om two (admittedly high end) laptops and it has been very smooth.

I have been using always-latest KDE5 with Manjaro on a very old (Core 2 Duo, Intel graphics) laptop for some years already and it's perfect. Less than 5 crashes a year.

KDE4 would crash as soon as I attached an extra display. KDE5 also crashed often when it was immature. Now it works like a breeze. As somebody who has watched (and tried regularly) KDE since the inception of KDE3, I can say KDE has finally reached maturity (if not perfection) about 1.5 years ago.

The KDE bug reporting process is a huge pain, too. I discovered that Konsole crashes when unlimited scrollback is enabled and /tmp becomes full. Submitting the crash report requires answering a pop quiz, and if any of your answers are unsatisfactory then you get a message that your report is not useful. Navigate that gauntlet and then you are asked to create an account and write a bug report, and your crash dump becomes public.

Good software needs a really easy way to report bugs and get back to work. And people to triage the reports. I do not work for KDE, but the bug reporting process treats me like I do.

> After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed.

This has been my experience since KDE 4 too pretty much 4 out of 5 attempts i made to check out KDE, including trying KDE Neon (which included weird visual glitches that i never saw before in any desktop environment).

Though FWIW my latest attempt is openSUSE Tumbleweed running on my GPD Win 1 (which isn't exactly a mainstream device, though it does have an Intel integrated GPU which has open source drivers, which helps a bit) and it seems to work fine there. I do very light use of it however, mainly launching games and such - normally i'd be using Window Maker, but GPD Win 1 needed a very recent kernel to boot and also RandR to be configured to rotate the screen (the 'native' screen is actually in portrait mode but the computer uses it in landscape) and i didn't want to bother with that at the moment i installed it so i grabbed the first non-Gnome-based rolling distribution that had official support for some form of desktop environment that i expected to have a GUI application to setup rotation... which basically meant KDE :-P.

Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers.

But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer).

I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.

I would say if you like KDE 3, you liked KDE 2 as well. KDE 2 was the tick of the tick-tock of KDE 2/3. KDE 5 is the tock of the tick-tock of KDE 4/5. At least that is how I'd describe it (Intel been tock-tock-tock'ing the past years notwithstanding).

I have fond memories of KDE 2/3 and GNOME 2. I also ran KDE 1 and GNOME 1 back in the days (initially GNOME cause of RedHat Linux and the license issues with KDE). If you compare them to Windows 9x and early NT they were quite good.

I think that with the exception of the kernel being a layer on top of MS-DOS (but that would be comparing with Linux not with KDE), Win9x was better technically than KDE1.

For example I do not think to this day there is anything tech-wise like COM with all of its related tech like OLE (which allows documents to embed objects exposed by other applications which themselves can run in 'embedded mode' to edit said embedded objects), ActiveX (which in a similar way allows applications to make use of reusable controls that can describe themselves), Automation (which allows applications to expose scriptable interfaces that can be called by any other application), Active Scripting (which allows applications to embed scripting languages which themselves are registered with the system so that, e.g., you can install a scripting engine for Python which then can be used to script any application that uses Active Scripting even if that application has no idea about Python) and a bunch of other things.

(note that DBus does provide the 'expose interfaces' part, but it is only about that whereas COM is a more generic technology that was used for all of the above)

What you're describing for a "dbus but for ui" is one of the core KDE technologies still in use today named KPart [0][1].

[0] https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Using_KParts

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Platform_4#KParts

Yeah i know about KParts, however KParts is more limited and the tech is only about KParts whereas COM is used for a lot of things, including even stuff unrelated to the GUI (e.g. Active Scripting). In addition COM defines a binary interface for accessing objects that can be supported by any programming language that can support structs and pointers whereas KParts is only for C++.

Windows 9x was a single user operating system; Linux and KDE/GNOME were and are not. Windows 9x is an absolute security nightmare, including ActiveX. Therefore, the comparison is moot (though ironically enough, X is also a security nightmare).

ActiveX is still available on Windows 10, it has nothing to do with security aside from being shoved into IE4 as a way for Microsoft to lock the web into Wintel back when Java's crossplatform-ness was seen as threatening to their desktop dominance - and thus gaining a bad name because it really wasn't designed for such a use.

ActiveX is just a standardized way to embed controls, in practice it isn't any difference than any desktop application that has support for plugins nor any less (or more) safer than that. COM in general is just a standardized form of a plugin system with a bunch of predefined interfaces (or binary protocols if you want) for applications that weren't written with each other in mind to still be able to work together and share functionality.

> Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset.

For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts?

Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gnome anywhere, like we have Plasma Mobile from the KDE camp.

phosh is not a first-party Gnome project, but it's a shell which essentially runs near-unmodified Gnome 3 apps full-screen on a phone display. I've tried it on a PinePhone, and the apps mostly work (but with some issues related to touch, small screen sizes, and orientation).

Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc.

Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI.

IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).

I think you're talking about win8, win10 was a return to saner defaults on desktop (ui-wise, let's not talk about privacy): start menu, by example.

Meh, depends on what you define as usable. KDE 3 ran fluently on my 2010 HP EliteBook 8540w but KDE 4 runs like a dog and you get nothing extra for it.

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