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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.

It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.

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> It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away

Exactly how I feel about having to use macOS at work, except some of the 'configurations away' are overpriced plugins/third party tools.

Many seem to not want to admit it for some reason, but the truth is that desktop environments are an extremely personal, subjective sort of software. One person's nirvana is another's anathema.

This is why I think it's important that there's a wealth of different desktops available to use that represent a variety of different paradigms, particularly in the context of Linux on the desktop. Desktop Linux represents the ultimate in potential to mold the computer to the user instead of the reverse, and it really bums me out to see suggestions or implications that would-be Linux users should just accept a Windows-ish shape or tiling keyboard-driven shape and stop hoping for something more Mac-like (which as an aside, GNOME is not despite superficial appearances).

> I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them

At least this is an option with Linux

In theory maybe, but in reality it’s a full-time job keeping up with changes from mainline with big projects like KDE, which isn’t very practical if you need to do other things to keep a paycheck coming in.

"Claude, update my project to be compatible with the latest KDE changelog"

Don't forget to add "make no mistakes."

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