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Comment by cuteboy19 | Hacker News Reader

> This type of behavior is consistent with numerous projects, including Firefox, the Linux kernel, KDE and many, many others.

No, it's not. KDE will work with you to add any reasonable feature that most people would find useful, even at risk of introducing a few bugs here and there. (Gnome ends up having a similar amount of bugs anyway). You can very easily turn KDE into any other desktop you want, even gnome or windows. It provides one preferred oob experience however

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KDE is _by far_ the most configurable desktop environment available, and it makes it easy. The control panel is amazingly consistent.

Is this why KDE has 394 screens of settings?

The beauty is that they only show up if you look for them. They are not in your face, but always there, in case you need them.

Like VLC? I like the prefs in that. Not exactly easy to navigate, but easy to find something you Googled.

But that _is_ KDE's philosophy: let anyone turn it into exactly what they want.

So how can they be accused of my way or the highway? Even windows and macos give you more "ways" than gnome

If you ask them to remove things that confuse some users they won't do it because that would be against their philosophy. That is what 'my way or the highway' means.

You can remove any option from any context menu or title bar, so I don't think that quite applies.

If you say that having any particular default means "my way or the highway" then that term becomes meaningless, no?

I'm not talking about configurations or defaults. I'm talking about removing features and settings so my grandfather doesn't get confused, but I'm afraid that would go against their philosophy.

It's configurable. You can remove virtually any feature yourself. Now if you want to remove the configuration option itself, that becomes a very different question

This sounds like a Russian-style argument: "you won't remove everyone else's choices and just force everyone to do everything my way, so you're being obstructionist!"

If they made an additional trimmed down KDE version for non-technical users, that would be more not less choice.

Regarding "Russian-style argument": Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The vast majority of people do not want to configure anything. They want it to just work. They don't want software where it's possible to pick wrong configurations as well. There are only a few exceptions to this like accessibility. Configuration should be the last resort where there are different kinds of users who absolutely must have the software work in one way and it isn't possible to help both at the same time. It should not be used for menial UI layouts and visual design.

The OOBE should be good enough for such people

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