The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
lwn.net
lwn.net
I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871 [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]: https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop
We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.
We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).
More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.
Performance work.
Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.
Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.
I feel like this iteration of KDE will finally convince me to move to linux permanently.
Sweet this is one of the reasons I gave up on KDE 5 I tried a couple months ago. Some combination of KVM and amdgpu was causing crashes (I think something to do with hotplugging displays and Wayland) and it seemed like everything downstream got nuked as well
From what I have read, login sessions require integration with a login manager, and from what I understand that work isn't done yet (this work being a prerequisite).
It seems[2] that gnome is going to support this in a future release (march?)?
I'm sure KDE will have something similar in the works eventually. I currently use xrdp/xorg-xrdp for headless remote login sessions, and while it works ok, I would love to switch to using something more integrated into kde itself.
[1]: https://discuss.kde.org/t/remote-desktop-using-the-rdp-proto...
For this reason, I was stuck on Fedora GNOME for a long while, because only they had it.
KRdp[2][3] looks promising, even though (like GNOME) it requires a GUI session to exist first, before you can connect via RDP. But there are ways to deal with that if you really gotta have it.
But this support is not actually implemented in any app in KDE Plasma 6, is it? My understanding is that it is possible, but there is no built-in functionality to take advantage of it. More "you can build an RDP server now that will work on Wayland" than "there is an RDP server that has been released". (I think?)
[1]: My reddit question, which also includes how to download and try the KRdp alpha/example thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1b3kc0p/what_ever_happ...
[2]: the project itself doesn't have a lot of info: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp
[3]: the announcement blog has more: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/
I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.
I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?
I have it and works fine on plasma6/wayland.
That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
[0] Device-Dependent X, i.e., the bits of X that talk directly to the display. Contrasted with Device-Independent X (DIX), i.e., the bits that do state tracking and protocol communication with clients.
I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.
Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.
[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
1. You can go to System Settings -> Keyboard and there, enable Super key to act as another button.
2. Set the shortcut to that another button.
Gnome (and systemd) seems to want to emulate macOS mostly, and as user of macOS I'm not sure why you would want to do that. But macOS has nothing that matches Super key exactly - so well done to Gnome for that innovation.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1391793/kde-5-24-overview-la...
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/wl29ub/comment/ijrr6w0...
I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
People don't usually dig in the settings menu unless something is bothering them. If there are great opt-in features they're going to stay off.
KWrite and Dolphin are insane!
The way I always thought of it is that the taskbar generally just can at best have a limited set of applications listed and takes up precious vertical monitor space, so its mostly limited to the overview/activities since that is the "I want to change apps" mode of the desktop and is just 1 click away (either super or top-left on the desktop).
Then again I am one of the (probably) few people that would probably even do away with the top bar currently still in GNOME and not have anything other than the app visible by default.
I use to be annoyed at the behavior as well when I started using GNOME, but at some point I actually started preferring it and now barely use the taskbar on Windows.
it won't suit all workflows of course
It's not for everyone. It would be next to impossible for someone to sit at my computer and be productive, because I have accumulated my configuration over years, with no real thought into making things that I configured discoverable (I know it's there because I put it there). But it works really well for me. I find the ability setup a workspace how I want for one task, and then switching workspaces to context switch to be very nice.
I always thought Gnome was not very useful for this because workspaces are created on the fly whereas I want to have them spatially oriented in a fixed grid that persists on every boot with the right application tiles in them. And I have hotkeys mapped to each one directly on the numpad (without key combos, I hate those). So my numpad is not a numpad at all but a workspace switcher :P
The problem with the gnome design philosophy is that it only works for you if you agree with them on everything. If you're pretty opinionated yourself (as I am and it sounds like you are too), opinionated software only works well if you have the exact same opinions as its creators. With something as complex as a DE this will run into many mismatches quickly. This is why configurable software is so great if you're not willing to compromise on how you want things.
To configure hotkeys, you have to set some dconf entries manually, with dconf-editor or gsettings from a terminal:
> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-1 "[\"<Super>F1\"]"
But I think it's clearly proven to be a bad design as a default. Discoverability is very important, especially to people who work a lot with a mouse. And using multiple apps at the same time is a very common work flow, one that an always-on-screen task switcher makes much simpler than an alternate view you have to bring up, especially if that alternate view also obscures all of your windows.
I will also say I find workspaces a hard to use UI, as I always lose context when I have to switch workspace, but maybe this is just how my mind works. And the idea of one-task-per-workspace has never worked well for me, as there are several apps that I use in every task, such as chat or email while I'm coding and while doing a presentation and while writing some design. It also seems to require a lot of setup and discipline.
Finally, as a nitpick, moving apps to a different workspace instead of minimizing to taskbar/systray seems like much more work to me.
Personally I'm a huge fan of Win7's grouped taskbar with window previews, along with its window snap support (extended in Win 10).
For the chat and email stuff, as long as you have screen space (or if you don't mind them going to the background sometimes), you can set those windows to be on every workspace. KDE has a thumbtack icon that you can click in the window bar to make that window show on every desktop.
I specifically want to reply to this, because it is not at all how I use workspaces. I almost never find myself moving an application from one workspace to another. Instead, I switch to a new workspace before opening the application (causing the application to open on the new workspace), unless I know I want to use the new application at the same time as an application on an existing workspace. Switching workspaces essentially replaces alt+tab in my workflow.
Gnome does what it does because Gnome is not intended to be the final form of a DE that the user uses. Gnome is intended to be a DE that distros can make their own by adding their own opinionated choices, extensions and modifications on top.
So while you complain about the lack of a vertical taskbar, in actual practice, outside of maybe Fedora users (which is essentially a distro largely designed to be used as a test bed), nearly every other Gnome user does have some form of taskbar because their distro included it, or they did a 1-click install from the Extensions app.
That's not to say that the designers are not supportive of the existence of extensions. They clearly do, that's why they make a nice Extensions app in the first place. But they never say "yeah, we made it as barebones as possible to make it easy for extensions". They explain why it's better for users not to have a minimize button on windows [1], or why they've removed the systray to avoid confusion and so on [0].
[0] https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gno...
[1] https://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/where-did-the-but...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/11bhxa7/com...
That is still creating needless work for existing users. Change the default for new users if you must but the update for existing users should be transparent unless they explicitly op into changes.
Are the current users the full target market or just leftovers?
We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.
And you're not wrong, it does help a lot.
I wonder if "new tab" button is always visible now too.
Is it a browser tabs vs. taskbar tabs ideology?
In browsers, that's always at the top. In terminals, depending on if you're a heavy user (and as result, the prompt is at the bottom) or a light user (and the prompt is at the top), you'll likely prefer tabs to be in the same area, too.
I've actually got different settings for taskbar position and terminal tab position between my work ubuntu, personal ubuntu, and personal windows systems.
When I was on Windows, the Start Menu/taskbar was on the bottom, and bottom tabs felt right (as they became available).
Let's all agree that side tabs are of the devil.
Also, if this is the only thing that's annoying, KDE won I guess.
It's cool that KDE lets you do that, but it's a bit annoying actually as it messes with the consistency of KDE. Sure, users can always change their preference to what suits them best, but it would be nice if out of the box all KDEs behaved and looked the same and leave the personalization to the user after installation.
It appears the default is Top in Konsole's source.
The only "better" defaults are those that match what people already know, not necessarily because they're objectively better but because most people will already know how to use them. You literally can't get a learning curve better than "you already know it".
Konsole has had tabs at the bottom for about 25 years now (I don't recall KDE 1.x, but they were definitely there in 2.x). Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who already uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a subset of users who might switch to KDE and expect them at the top?
More importantly, is the position of tabs -- especially one that you can change! -- like, a real, actual problem?
It would be nice for KDE to have three presets: Windows, Mac, and Classic (= KDE).
If you want to grow your user base: The latter.
The people using Konsole are already the highly technical people, and therefore probably not newbie users.
That is the most frustrating thing about some projects:
They take existing users for granted and make a lot of changes to accommodate the new users they envision coming in torrents.
These users of course never arrive and in the meantime they have alienated the old user base.
With KDE you can put the tabs where you want them.
Or, if you want everything to be like in Gnome or Windows or Mac you can just use these.
The reality is that most users are simply bitterly opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the change is actually an improvement that helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet exist through UI improvements) actually has happened before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised, versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-represented) that is here.
Developers of the project have to balance these concerns as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean every decision and plan in the project is going to revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.
That's a weird way to write "and automatically import settings from previous versions to keep the behavior the same without user effort".
But the old users can have it too, that's what configurability is for, just save the state to user config and don't change any such behavior on upgrades, only for fresh installs
The problem with these (and many other UX initiatives) is there isn't a fallback for us who used them from the start.
If there was it wouldn't have been a problem.
Same goes for KDE (if you forget 4), Windows (more or less if you skip Windows 8) since 95, bash, LibreOffice.
Prioritizing the needs of potential new users may bring you actual new users, but not prioritizing those of existing users may send some of them away. How do you know which group is bigger?
Sure, the group of potential users is massive but not all of them will switch. Meanwhile you're making software worse for people who actually use it and, at least for FOSS software, are usually your biggest advocates, part of the developer base, and one of the most important means through which new users are brought in.
Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
Which is a problem. NixOS remains by far the least aggravating OS I know, and... yeah. I wish there existed a desktop environment that played well with it.
But also: Isn't one of the main benefits of NixOS that you can fairly painlessly get and try different versions of things? Just see if you can reproduce the bug in the same version of upstream. If so, file the bug with kde, if not, file the bug with NixOS because it's presumably caused by one of the patches.
That can be up to and including a downloadable VM image that shows the issue.
If you have a specific issue under nixos, it's going to be fairly easy to see if it's very unlikely to be caused by custom patches.
For reference I count about ~66 patch files among the KDE expression in nixpkgs as of today, including Plasma, all libraries, and related apps. Most of them are in the range of 20 lines long, and they are .patch files, i.e. the actual applied diff is smaller than that. The largest patch is barely 190 lines long and it's for Akonadi, mostly rewriting hardcoded FHS paths throughout the codebase.
I agree there are some quirks with most desktop environments on NixOS in my experience but realistically there's a huge amount of stuff in the ecosystem that plays anywhere from well-to-poorly in such environments, and the Linux desktop stack definitely was not designed at a time where this stuff was common. It is what it is, I guess.
This is how it used to work (and still does with enterprise distros, because you might as well use the support contract you paid for). But users these days have gotten savvy enough to start engaging with upstream directly, especially since many upstreams have made it easier to be engaged with by using GitHub etc instead of mailing lists etc.
Sometimes engaging directly with upstream works, as it apparently does with KDE according to other comments in this thread. Sometimes upstream gets annoyed because they only care about their tree, eg systemd devs get annoyed when users report bugs that have long been fixed in master, but still exist in an old stable release that happens to be the latest on some LTS distro. It depends on the project, so when in doubt start with the distro tracker.
> KDE Frameworks 6 (alpha) 5.247 was updated in the ports tree.
> KDE Plasma Desktop 6 (beta 2) 5.91.0 was updated in the ports tree.
https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-10-2023-12/#_kde_...
So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
Probably Ubuntu 26. The release notes for 24.04 do not mention kde6. It is also likely the 25.04 or 25.10 release will incorporate kde6.
I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
Happiness is clicking on a folder with lots of files, hitting forward slash, typing a search term, and instantly finding your file.
Nah, but I would occasionally like to move things around outside of /home without doing it manually in the terminal. I'm not sure why that's such a problem.
See https://invent.kde.org/system/kio-admin for details.
This will be included in dolphin natively in the near future.
Try https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt as an alternative.
It feels native in Plasma/Breeze and is more traditional. I like it.
Looking at it quickly, it doesn't seem to be my cup of tea, but until now I didn't even know it was there to consider.
And "resolved" like [0] which is a 9 year old regression is marked "resolved upstream" becase KDE devs refuse to implement a workable solution FOR KDE like there used to be in 3.x and 4.x and instead require a perfect solution that will never happen as can be seen by the bug report's age. Not worth my time to report bugs if they will be treated like this.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
YMMV
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example clients..)
And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol, you can layer any X functionality right back in...
Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.
I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").
They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.
The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.
Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.
But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.
Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.
One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
Of course, one can always use a different DE, but there's always friction in not going with what the distro you're using picked as their default (and tends to support better in practice). I think a lot of GNOME hate is coming from the users who feel that a DE that does not adequately reflect their workflow is being pushed on them so aggressively by their distros.
Oh, did you mean the other kind of desktop cube...
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...
Gnome just does way too many things I don't want it to do and that can't be disabled.
Yes, I don't like that about GNOME either.
The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.
1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) -> Click on the window I want.
2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I want.
I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a personal thing.
You install a distro that includes Gnome. Did your distro choose not to package a taskbar extension? That’s a good hint your distro is not intended to be an end user distro.
99% of Gnome users have a taskbar.
This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars. GNOME is very usable, and if it's not, you don't know how to use a computer at all.
Most of my day is spent in applications. I launch an application and that's where I'm spending my time. I'm not using the desktop environment all that much. I really don't find much difference working in Windows, macOS, KDE or Gnome or even iPadOS as far as interacting with the graphical environment goes.
On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I know.
GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential. For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system tray without quiting the application, which reduces visual clutter. I know you can add this with an extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.
I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's equivalent is full screen I believe.
I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the ones I can quickly think of.
This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.
Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.
As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.
I never really understood how to efficiently use virtual desktops or what their benefits are compared to one desktop. Would you mind to explain?
Well, I would imagine that is because you generally only need extensions on KDE for niche things, while GNOME needs extensions for more 'basic' things. Obviously you don't need an extension for a system tray if one already exists by default.
Because GNOME developers mindlessly pursue "minimalism" with religious zealotry, finding an outlet for their frustration of not being good enough to work for the Church of Apple.
As I recall, those are exactly the kinds of extensions that get broken by Gnome updates on a regular basis.
I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE, and all the other systems were still being developed. But then the Electron / web app people would probably still try to pave over everything cool and unique on each system to run one mediocre app everywhere.
I'm sure if you gave GNOME an extended trial, you would adapt and find some things you actually prefer.
Having lower productivity does not mean something is "unusable." It is, in fact, still usable. You just don't like it.
Maybe learn what unusable and hyperbole mean.
What does this discussion gain from you being pedantic? Everyone with common sense knew what I meant.
> This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars.
You not liking something is not the same as it not being "usable." You simply don't like it as much.
Your comment would be a lot less interesting if it were written without hyperbole. It would simply be "I don't like GNOME as much as KDE." And no one would really care about that, it wouldn't be a notable comment.
Go annoy someone else.
People who go around saying they "can't use GNOME" because it's "not customizable" without ever even trying would be the ones that are not appreciating all desktops, like an adult.
I have tried GNOME before, thanks for your assumption, so I know for a fact it's less customisable than Plasma. But less customisation doesn't equal less value anyways, so I don't even know what your point is.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
It is the easiest solution, requires no research or technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft from the hours of customizing.
The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working optimally.
> I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer.
I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms.
Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps, including the desktop environment are containers.
Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
Yes, the package manager is definitely not a part of the desktop.
While its a joke, every joke contains some portion of a joke.
Also, trying to chase the elusive 'casual user' is what caused all the GNOME UX mess in the first place I guess. I'm not an 'archetypical' Linux nerd, I hate wasting time with fixing stuff that should "just work", but I'm also expecting a computer to be a professional tool which I can customize to my needs (within reason at least).
The ease of the GUI ends when a serious system-level issue arises. This has never not been the case, it's just a matter of how much the documentation expects you to know what's going on, and how much that impacts the first-run experience. If the first-run is good enough, "reinstall" becomes the go-to fix.
Installing and running KDE will mess up GTK settings in GNOME for instance. You might end up with the Breeze GTK theme in the GNOME session. Which works, but this is most likely not wanted (even though GNOME looks great with the Breeze theme).
I'd not advise regular users to do this without a warning.
You could even switch between them each time you log in, depending on your mood that day.
Regardless, not sure where you've gotten that impression of Linux. The only times I've reinstalled is when I've gotten a new laptop, and in those cases I just copy my home directory over to the new laptop and everything just works.
The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical; I don't think anyone even remotely knowledgeable would recommend a reinstall in that case. Just a trip to the package manager app and a restart.
I think there are quite a few reasons why the Linux desktop isn't more common, but "need to reinstall to fix issues" certainly isn't one of them.
I agree that trying out a new desktop environment by selecting a distro package would not normally require a reinstall. However, in general installing and removing packages (not specifically a desktop manager), especially custom ones with conflicting dependencies can lead to things being broken without a clear direction forward. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each broken system tends to be broken in its own way — which makes it hard to find help. Maybe wifi, sound, or BlueTooth get inexplicably flaky. Or power management. It is not hard for me to imagine a situation where a user just gives up and reinstalls. Reading up on Silverblue (which someone else mentioned) and other technologies like Nix give me hope that things are improving.
I am forced to save things instead of all the times in the past that I have lost important data.
If my system blows up right now, I will be wiped clean with a fresh install in less than 15 minutes.
I don't really care what other people do with their computers. If someone doesn't want to use Plasma, they are the ones missing out.
If you have the time to debug these and straighten them out, it's fine, but given how simple a clean install is these days that's often the easier path.
You can certainly remove packages that were installed as dependencies, even if `apt remove` doesn't do this by default. I think it's `apt autoremove` or `apt purge` (although I haven't used apt in a long time). All of the package managers I've used have a way to do this.
On the other hand, for the average user I don't know why you'd bother. It's not like it's interfering with other stuff you want to do, unless you are extremely tight on hard drive space.
The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it.
But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.
It might satisfy hipster designers but not users.
Might not be "professional" but it sure is more productive.
https://i.imgur.com/XcZvanv.png
(Burnt yellow is my current system accent color, the borders adapt to the setting)
I must say, I am not impressed by the UX of the whole setup... which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
Looking forward to trying Plasma Mobile; maybe it can improve on the status quo.
It was the fad of that time, when Microsoft also introduced Windows 8 and the "Modern UI" Metro.
But at least they came to their senses, also because no devs bothered to adopt it :) and they still didn't manage to sell any Windows tablets.
That was such a branding problem for Microsoft. Microsoft supplied so many Surface tablets to the NFL and the commentators kept calling them iPads.
There was a recent article on here that explained GNOME 2.x was windows-like enough that there was fear Microsoft would come after Linux distributions with patent lawsuits, hence the departure from that style of UI in the next version. KDE on the other hand was made with a patent sharing agreement in place.
Edit: The point made in that article seems to be disproven though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493246 . Even Miguel de Icaza said it's nonsense. Can't get more authoritative on Gnome than that.
But it was just too weird with the workspaces on the fly, the huge window decorations (despite touch I would mainly use the pen anyway) and the lack of a real launcher. I used it for about 3 months and got rid of it. It just rubbed me the wrong way constantly and I really couldn't stand the designers' attitude, every time I wanted to change something I ended up googling it and finding some excuse from the devs on why they wouldn't account for it (usually along the lines of "you shouldn't want/need that").
What didn't help was that Linux on the Surface Pro 3 was a huge PITA also. Often the keyboard wouldn't work after having been disconnected, or the pen would stop working, or it would turn on in my bag for some weird reason and be boiling hot, or it would fail to pick up the ethernet of the dock etc. Most of these issues were solved by a reboot but I ended up rebooting a lot to solve all these stupid random problems and I really got sick of that.
But the "Weirdness" of Gnome 3 didn't help. I have a lot of opinions on how stuff must work and tried modifying gnome with plugins to make it work that way, and that led to a lot of issues when updates came out and the plugins weren't updated. Opinionated software just isn't for me. I want options. Lots and lots of options :)
Eventually I moved back to a desktop and gave KDE another try (the last time was in the KDE 4 period and I didn't like it) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything I wanted to change about the default UI had an option in there somewhere to do it. It felt like the developers were reading my mind and pre-empted every wish :3 I've always cherished software packages like that.
And it only kept getting better and better with things like accent colours in the anniversary update. I use a lot of my own theming as well for both my DE and web apps and KDE is really great for that. I was actually planning to make a real theme myself but it's so configurable now that I can really make it pretty much like I want with just some configuration clicks.
I donate monthly to KDE now just because I want them to continue this great work and philosophy.
I do think that on a laptop, GNOME is probably the best environment to use, out of any OS.
And I don't use laptops, only desktops. Good point also as I have much more screen real estate available. For example I use a 3x3 grid of 9 virtual desktops (with the numpad as a quick-switching pad), something that on Gnome isn't possible without a whole bunch of addons that break with every update :) Because it doesn't allow for virtual desktops in a grid matrix by default and I don't think it's got direct access hotkeys to them either. I really love that I can just configure all that in KDE without having any kind of addon or modification (and many other things I change too).
I'm just not one of those "just use it like it's intended" people. I have my own ideas on how my computer should work. But yes not everyone is me.
Not really. According to Fitts's Law, it would be easier to point your mouse cursor to a larger target.
It’s not “facts on the ground” when you’re literally courting diverse opinions. That law just covers the average. ;P
taking inspiration from MacOS i see
Windows 8 and later were all designed by professional UI designers.
Also, every single company website or app that has absolutely atrocious UI was designed by a professional UI designer.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.
The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful.
After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita).
[0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries
I did not forget it, Qt has great integration and documentation but this was not a comparison of the specific features Qt and some other toolkit like Gtk may have. My claim was that Qt isn't something special that would make Krita successful while using anything else would make it less successful.
I didn't bring those things up because they weren't really relevant for my claim. Also FWIW desktop integration for Krita isn't as important as it'd be for some other types of applications - consider that Krita even comes out of the box with its own themes that it uses instead of trying to "blend in" the underlying desktop looks.
In terms of what Krita does, there isn't any functionality that it uses from Qt that couldn't be found in other toolkits like Gtk - or other libraries. It wouldn't be the same way and certainly not with the same code, but Krita could have been written using a different GUI library and framework and even in a different language and still had the same success because the GUI framework it uses is not why it is successful: it is the functionality the program provides (which was written by the Krita developers themselves) and the communication the developers have with the users (which isn't even something technical).
There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices. An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework. A competing framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.
I disagree here, i'm certain it would be as successful because the GUI framework is not the reason for Krita's success, it is the functionality it provides and how the developers interact with the community. The GUI framework does not have any image manipulation specific functionality (all of that is implemented by the Krita developers) and the community interaction isn't even a technical thing in the first place.
> There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices.
I did not claim that they are interchangeable (though they can be, depending on the program's design), i even explicitly wrote that taking Qt out of Krita would mean almost rewriting the entire program as it relies heavily on it.
What i claimed was that Qt is not the reason for Krita's success and it could have the same success with other mature toolkits. There is nothing special about Qt aside from being around for long enough time to have its functionality "battle tested". This is not unique to Qt though.
> An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework.
This is the case with any toolkit or really any library that has a lot of applications written against it, assuming the developers do not ignore all bug reports and issues the users of their libraries report.
Also since you brought up Maya specifically, Maya used to be based on the Motif toolkit until Maya 2010 (it was changed to Qt in Maya 2011), which by the same logic would mean that up until 2011, using Motif would be great for professional content creation applications since Maya used it too.
This isn't unique to Qt though, other widget toolkits can provide that functionality. In fact LCL/Lazarus provides such fractional scaling even for Gtk itself by doing the scaling "manually" when using the Gtk backend.
GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time
Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.
Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.
There are tons of professional and highly successful apps for content creators that use custom made (and often shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what sell the product.
Are they profitable these days?
That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.
For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I’m guessing an acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead where Qt is apparently doing quite well.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
You're running a pre-release?
In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
The pain is very real with Gnome.
It's a very, very poor ape of MacOS.
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
These days it's all much of a muchness really.
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
Memories…
I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes
I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I have seen that too).
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
What is missing, compared to gimp?
And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.
It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense).
GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them.
And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita.
There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default:
https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
Yes it does, but it does not have all the tools that Gimp provides.
> and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default
I need to "destructively" modify images more often than non-destructively.
> There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
You can most likely get some similar result if you play around with the curves but it is certainly not as simple or easy as having a dedicated brightness/contrast filter like you can find in other image editing applications. Having that specialization might feel unnecessary for developers who are used to trying to make things more generic, but from a UX perspective it can be very preferable (if your goal is to make an image editing application - from the perspective of a 2D digital painting application, this sort of specialization may indeed feel like UI bloat).
As i mentioned in my original message it isn't so much that you can't do things in Krita, it is more that the stuff that exist are often clunkier and the more you need outside "2D digital painting", the more limitations and clunkiness you face.
But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.
Oh well, back to GIMP.
On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second.
> the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system
Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms).
> spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops
The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Users who prefer the old behavior can toggle it back on in the "Mouse Actions" settings under "Desktop Folder Settings", so it's not going away entirely.
hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.
I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).
I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)
It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did you know you can" type things.
It'd be interesting to provide an on-ramp for folks to progressively explore such things, but doing that accidentally is probably not it.
This is great news.
The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not supposed to be recording my whole display?
I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
Historically, what you had was single click to select, then something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-press to select; in my experience, both double-click and long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early, causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-click action).
Well, I don't have my desktop set up to use drop down menus, but as far as i remember, it is one click to do the action listed, not double click. Unless you mean older operating systems?
But yes, I almost always use miller columns to browse the file system on OSX. This way any folder is both select and opened on a single click.
Miller columns are great and should be implemented everywhere. Imagine how good they would be for navigating large websites.
I'm not familar with Miller columns, but if you're changing the behaviour of your file browser, then I'm not sure why you're suprised single click might not work as intended.
Miller columns have been one of the default views in OSX Finder for about two decades, opening and selecting at the same time is how they are supposed to work. Here's a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7trdpY9MI
I think miller columns was part of KDE file manager for some time, before they decided they were too complicated for developers.
Ok, I see what you mean by Miller columns now. I guess I wouldn't consider that image preview on ths side 'opened' though. 'Opened' to me would mean launching a dedicated image viewer with that file.
When using miller columns in Finder, you will open a folder at the same time as you're selecting it. Files will only preview.
https://pointieststick.com/2022/08/19/this-week-in-kde-dolph...
So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to "new user pressure".
At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
We invested a lot of effort in Plasma6 to make screen recording on Wayland as smooth as possible. With OBS (and our native screenshot/recording tool Spectacle) it just "works".
We also developed a mechanism to make screen recording/sharing work for old XWayland clients (to have things like screen sharing work from i.e. the Electron Discord app)
The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you know there's probably an option somewhere.
I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to report back on that.
I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not entirely sure why.
Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan of the new sound effects across the desktop environment. Seriously, they're so good.
New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and it all seems to work as expected.
Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access, but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in place and I simply need to set things up.
If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a fantastic starting point.
Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for hidpi.
I didn't read far enough, don't mind me.
The issue with making it 3-finger is that 3-finger swipes are reserved for desktop switching, and desktops can be arranged in a 2D grid
I do wish it was configurable in the settings and that any combination of 3 or 4-finger swipes could be bound to anything
It's not configurable yet in 6.0, but we do plan to add configurability for touchpad gestures
MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora so I'm getting new kernel versions).
Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're awful to use.
I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.
This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.
No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.
I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.
Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
No, it's nearly :-) as tall as a 1080p screen. It's 810px (edit: modulo some scaling?) but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the bottom of the screen. Hence "nearly".
> Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
Widget size, padding and margins are all part of the theme. I use QtCurve (which is pretty wasteful, too, though nowhere near as bad) and it's far more efficient to use.
A theme that makes better use of available screen space would allow one to keep the toolbar around, and make better use of search features (yes, the search panel is usually not folded out, but if you have to fold it out, search, then scroll or fold it back in to read around a search results, that's not exactly useful).
If you need to disable UI elements to make an application usable, that's not a good design.
The panel is around 50px or so at most, by default it seems to be 44px. And I indeed think the screenshot is scaled, since it looks like it's bigger than on my machine.
I checked out QtCurve on my laptop which still runs KDE 5 (it seems to not be ported to Qt6), and it is indeed a bit more compact than Breeze 5. It's definitely a bit more on the cramped side in my opinion though, as the toolbar buttons have barely any padding at all around them. I definitely don't think it's wasteful, at least.
I agree that the toolbar and search pane are a bit hungry for vertical space in Breeze, but I also don't think most Kate users have the search pane open regularly. Making it more suitable for the sidebar (a la VSCode) might be nice though, but it seems it already does some limited self-rearrangement when horizontally limited (which could look better, granted).
It can be seen that Breeze 6 does save a few pixels here and there at least, without looking cramped in any way.
As for disabling UI elements, I personally think the toolbar in Kate is fundamentally wasteful. The only way it might become useful is when you customize it to contain actions that you do tend to use regularly.
Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did not remove separation between elements. However it is now achieved by drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing every single thing which is extremely ugly.
I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution laptop.
And there is also some before and after comparison on the announcement https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/
Managed to get back to X11, for some reason the logoff button does not work anymore but at least my monitoring scripts do.
[1] https://github.com/Kalmat/PyWinCtl/blob/master/README.md#lin...
No thank you.
WSL2 is fantastic. It is a lightweight Hyper V VM so programs run at native speed. You can do nested virtualization with W11. The file system is ext4 on a virtual HD file so, progams optimised for Linux don't suffer. It even comes with its own Wayland compositor running on top of a high performance GL <-> DX translation layer. It comes with systemd support so one can run regular systemd services like nix daemon.
It, along with the more modern wlroots-based alternative Cage, have become the de-facto Wayland window manager for when you don't actually want to display framed windows, and just want to fork the codebase and display some fullscreen GLES-based graphics in a kiosk instead. These IoT use cases were part of the original motivation for Wayland in the first place.
There should be plenty of alternatives you can run in windowed mode if Weston stops working: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors
KWin does as well (workspace.activeWindow, workspace.windowList).
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/706477/is-there-a-w...
The only distro shipping it right now seems to be KDE neon, whose entire premise is shipping KDE stuff as soon as possible...
DuckDucking it, I couldn't find a solution, but I hope someone can tell me there is.
Outside of things like this (and finding the right screen recording program) I didn't really notice a difference.
Step 1: Right click an open Picture-in-Picture window. In the context menu, select "More Actions" -> "Configure Special Window Settings...". This will populate most of the window settings for you.
Step 2: Click "Add Property..." and select "Window title". The newly added row's text field should read "Picture-in-Picture". Change the dropdown option from "Unimportant" to "Exact Match". (All PiP windows in Firefox use this title and by making it Exact Match the rule shouldn't affect any other Firefox windows.)
Step 3: Click "Add Property..." again and this time select "Keep above other windows". The dropdown in the newly added row should be set to "Apply Initially". Select the "Yes" radio button if it isn't already. (As a note, I think that didn't work for me as I have it set to "Force" rather than "Apply Initially")
Step 4: Click "OK". That's it. No more manually setting Keep Above every time you open a PiP.
Since doing the above it's just worked without issue, though it was annoying that it was broken in the first place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/osjt3p/firefox_wayland...
It's not well documented, but you can do this to get a list of your windows: `wlrctl toplevel list`
And this to get the currently focussed window(s): `wlrctl toplevel list state:focused`
My current Linux installation on desktop is from 2016 and everything was configured years ago. Recently I had to install Linux in Virtualbox and decided to go with KDE. I was overwhelmed with settings not in a good way. Maybe when I was younger I was more enthusiastic and liked it, but now I want reasonable defaults and consistent UI/UX experience.
I'm kidding (and kinda not), it's a valid complaint.
Everybody who remembers the KDE 3->4 transition will probably violently disagree with that. Hopefully that was an educational moment for the dev team and they've actually internalised that lesson.
edit: just realised that 3->4 transition was more than 15 years ago, which makes me feel very old...
For me one of the biggest accomplishments of our community is that people really do stick around. It's very multi-generational. Therefore the memory is there and the lessons do get learned.
Thank you for the conservative evolution of the KDE DE. In my mind the best praise of any major DE release is that there is no reason to fear it, and you've done that. Again.
Thank you for protecting KDE from iconoclast mentalities. This is a difficult thing to do and only hard nosed managerial discipline can achieve this, especially for an open source DE.
Thank you for accommodating compositor-less operation.
Thank you for Konsole. Yakuake is also great and I'm making use of it as well. However, what I appreciate most is that the latter has not disrupting the former. I can have work-a-day Konsole and Yakuake can be used where it works well at the same time. Thank you!
Thank you for not adopting the minimalist, "golden path" mentality. Options have great value to me and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that KDE, almost uniquely among both commercial and open source mainstream DEs, doesn't take them away: KDE is the only conventional DE that doesn't demonstrate contempt for my preferences.
The single-click/double-click activation choice is a excellent example of the thinking that makes KDE awesome. It goes without saying that changing that default must have been a tough decision. Yet you made the pragmatic, correct choice. Thank you for that.
The vestigial voices still beating KDE over the head for the 3->4 issues, despite over a decade of clear evidence that the lessons have long since been learned, are diminishing. They're being replaced by full throated, well deserved praise.
I humbly ask that you hear one concern of mine: X11 is crucial and will remain so for a long time yet. I have absolutely no problem with Wayland and imagine myself adopting it, some day, perhaps even accidentally. In the meantime, please do not neglect the X11 experience. I have yet to see any evidence that you have, but it is a worry for me.
Thank you - From a loyal and deeply appreciative KDE user.
I still have nightmares about that. I ended up moving to i3 as a result of that transition and never looked back, although KDE is my "backup desktop".
That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
Strawberry Player (the fork of Clementine which is the fork of Amarok 1.4) is still going and it is ported to Qt 6 so it works okay with many highdpi environments
From a purely technical perspective perhaps, but overall I don't think so. KDE3 was hugely popular and regularly depolyed. Based on my personal observations (admittedly EU based), it was the single most popular *nix desktop at the time. KDE4 more or less killed that over night and as far as I can tell KDE has never recovered neither marketshare nor the mindshare it had.
On a personal note I went from a huge KDE fan, and someone who deployed and managed KDE3 workstations at a small company, to literally not using it for over a decade.
the perception lasted longer than the reality
Which is the one really important lesson in all of this.
I every now and then use KDE and it keeps looking less and less as a "desktop environment for developers" (read: ugly), and more like a desktop environment that everybody loves. These latest screenshots look fantastic.
KDE can look amazing with a custom theme, why don't they just pick one and make it official?
I quite like the GTK toolkit but I'll never be able to tolerate the default Dark colorscheme. If we're strictly talking about colors, I find Breeze to be more pleasing in Light and Dark mode.
My issue with Breeze aren't the default colors, but rather the theme itself
Mine is here which is still quite WIP https://carlschwan.eu/2023/12/19/announcing-brise-theme/
And there is another one for icons https://anditosan.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/breeze-icons-upda...
Sure, there were ups and downs (KDE4?) but it's not easy to keep this upward trajectory and kept improving things in a OSS project.
Nowadays KDE is definitely my favourite desktop experience, including Windows and macOS (which I feel are getting worse and worse every year).
> Qt has switched to CMake, away from the qmake build system
Found some more information:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-and-cmake-the-past-the-present-and... (2021)
With that negativity aside, I use i3 nowadays but KDE is still always my other desktop. I've been using it since the KDE1 days and have always strongly preferred it over gnome :) Even in i3, Konsole is my console of choice.
(Then logout and choose jwm when typing password)
I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
>Wayland as default
I have plasma installed here and one weird thing I noticed is that if I use the wayland version sometimes text isn't rendered on windows or entire panels flash black rectangles, while if I use the X11 version my mouse speed becomes slower. I wonder if the update addresses these issues. Anyway after trying out several DEs I ended up using Xfce because my mouse feels faster in it.
For me personally, it lets me think of desktops in terms of what is left or right of them, rather than what actual number it is, i.e my Steam desktop is to the right of my browser desktop and to the left of my remote session. If I need to go to the email desktop from where I'm at, it's two scrolls away. I usually leave a little bit of the desktop visible on each virtual desktop to facilitate this.
So, not an accessibility thing for me but an actual preference. People are different. I know, it shocked me too.
> Users who are comfortable with Plasma 5 are unlikely to feel discomfited with Plasma 6
I say yeah !
Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing Gnome, but that's what's comfortable.
Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an environment with actual physics interactions. How light bounces between layered interface components. It's going to be hugely resource-intensive but someday we'll look back on 2D GUIs and DEs like something that pales in comparison to the amazing interfaces of a 3D environment where we can attach virtual surfaces to walls and ceilings and have them follow after us as we move around the office/house with our headsets.
(Someday: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/174)
PS: I'm loving how both KDE and GNOME are pushing a lot of DE behaviors into JS extensions. On a separate front, everything we interact with is like this close to being entirely within a web browser.
Nobody likes what I've said, but I'm prophesying now: DEs will need to go "spatial", and all of /this/ will be in a web browser by 2027.
KDE seems to have this working pretty well, whereas Gnome does not and it isn't clear when they will get there.
Wait... all of this is a lot to take in. HDR progress has gone great on Red Hat's side, but KDE has been working on it just as long (with arguably further progress). VRR has existed on KDE for a while as "Adaptive Sync" and the work that goes into updating GNOME extensions exists mostly because the GNOME developers refuse to make a stable API for it.
GNOME and Red Hat obviously do great work for the community, but these seem like weird examples. To the contrary, with GNOME's fractured extensibility and now-missing system tray, a lot of Windows and MacOS users will probably feel confused booting up GNOME 40. I say all this from a GNOME system myself =P
> Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing"
Holy whiplash, Batman! I disagree so hard my head is spinning.
For one, "the curve" of Spatial Computing is so-far relegated to cheap Android SDKs and $3,500 iPad-killers. Nobody is shipping Johnny-Mnemonic style hardware today, and probably won't be for another decade. Focusing on developing that technology is not only a waste of time, but entirely tangential to the work that goes into making the modern desktop usable. GNOME and KDE's efforts shouldn't be dedicated to a hypothetical userbase that might never exist.
...and on the flip side, a lot of work has gone into "spatializing" Open Source software. OpenXR is the de-facto standard for VR experiences, and is well-supported on Linux clients. With Wayland, the desktop's rendering model is now finally up to a position where someone could feasibly write a foveated window renderer. There are people doing it right now, despite the lack of demand: https://simulavr.com/
There is absolutely nothing to love about that utter atrocity
What?? Plasma/KWin 5.27 already had support for VRR. On Gnome/Mutter, it's still in a merge request (or maybe it's finally been merged recently? not sure but it's definitely not in any released version to my knowledge).
Not sure about partial scanout, but Plasma 6 also enables basic HDR support (although it doesn't seem to work well on my Nvidia machine, SDR-on-HDR looks very washed out).
Gnome is indeed massively ahead in terms of extensions, but I don't know how much of that is due to capabilities vs. market share. See for example Karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel.
From my perspective KDE is much farther ahead in pushing Wayland features. Apart from them currently shipping VRR and HDR, there is also for example long-standing support for XWayland-native scaling that Gnome is just now starting to consider. Or how about implementing server side decoration instead of forcing applications to use something like libdecor?
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...
This one caught my eye:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480122
SUMMARY
If the screen is turn off and then the pc goes to sleep (only possible if the lid is closed because trying to use a shortcut to sleep cause pc screen to turn on), on lid open the screen is black and the pc is unusable (require a reboot).And speaking of kinks, I'm disappointed in the number of posters on Mastodon who are angrily claiming that they will never use KDE again because of issues they run into on the first day of a major release. What did they expect?
And I will repeat: Many thanks to the devs, testers, documenters and all others who make this happen. Well done!
- If my monitor dims due to inactivity then I start using my computer again, the monitor stays dim and does not come back up to the brightness I had it unless I turn off my monitor and turn it back on. I resolved this by just turning off dimming.
- If KDE goes to lockscreen due to inactivity but I start interacting with my computer during the transition, my monitor just stays black and doesn't return to desktop or go to lockscreen.
- My bluetooth headphones disconnect whenever KDE goes to lockscreen.
-I use multiple languages and sometimes my languages will switch randomly despite not hitting the language hotkey and often I will mash my language hotkey and the language still won't change.
Those are just what I remember off the top of my head but I'm maintaining a list somewhere in a notebook.
Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.
You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-contributors:kde.org
Wow, a 5-year-old laptop. Things were so primitive in 2018. Here in my the mighty year of 2024, my computer has....... 16 GB of RAM.
I like the overall experience of gnome. The apps feel nice, the DE feels snappy etc. But the tiling features of KDE make me curious. I like sway, but I recently completely messed up my configuration and it’s a an absolute pain to get back working even halfway decent, so I may as well give a integrated DE a try
Admittedly, this may very well be due to the fact that I didn't quite have the time to configure it to match my tiling WM mappings i've been used to at this point
You can get the gist of it from this Super User discussion: https://superuser.com/questions/1141631/make-windows-10-file...
Judging by the screenshots, the UI remains a mess though. It's really surprising how people can be selectively blind about these things.
Ok...
> Another change to scrolling behavior in this release is that clicking on a scrollbar moves the window to the location clicked, rather than one "page" at a time. ... in order to be a better option for users with RSIs.
This is already done with the middle mouse button. Will people please stop fucking with scroll bars?
Ironic that one paragraph extols the virtues of forty year-old defaults, then the next recommends breaking something that already works.
though why isn't two buttons enough, one for page nav, another for move to point, wonder whether this is configurable globally in KDE
The problem imo is that Wayland is too hard to write your own WM for. People wrote X11 WMs in weekends when they got fed up with the status quo. How many do the same for Wayland?
> How many do the same for Wayland?
A lot, because wlroots provides a decent base to handle all the things you don't want to be handling manually. The ecosystem of simple tiling WMs made with wlroots is quite vibrant.
At first, I was going to point out that wlroots itself says it abstracts the job of a compositor: 'about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.' [0] Would seem to prove the point that too many LOC are needed just to get something running. But really wlroots is from the same group that maintains Wayland [1], so maybe it's like a low-level/high-level access duality common in other software projects.
In my circle of Linux users, a lot of the people that choose KDE do so because they don’t find the desktop layer interesting to hack on, and just want a tool for interacting with Linux.
[0] https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-40/f-40-key-tasks...
[1] https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/branched/latest-F...
If you're referring to Rust, it's just not there yet for anything serious: https://areweguiyet.com/
I'm sure that it will be a reality at some point, but it's not there yet in a format a third party could use without it being obsolete after a few months. I am hopeful, though!
There is even a HN reader written in x86_64 assembly if you want, with fasm assembler (BTW, the version 2 is about to be out of rc).
i'm currently on pop!_os waiting for their new desktop :)
It kind of sounds like something might be going wrong there, and stopping things from showing up onscreen correctly.
currently running gnome/Wayland which is functioning correctly.
it's a real shame because i love KDE :(
Is it using the Nvidia proprietary drivers, or the OSS nouveau ones?
If you're using the proprietary ones, which version?
Sorry for the 20 questions, am just trying to figure out where it might be going wrong. :)
I might give nouveau drivers a go.
The nouveau driver is likely to have performance problems (compared to the official one), but if that's not an issue then it's worth trying. :)
KDE: let's make our panel floating by default to distinguish ourselves visually from Windows! later Microsoft rumored to introduce floating panel in Windows 12.