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KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

kde.org

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Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#91

Post by monooso »

dapperdrake wrote: post #36
frameset wrote: post #25

I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.

GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when…

Personally I really like GNOME, and don't in any way consider it a "sorry excuse".

It's not perfect, of course, and it may not be to your liking, but that's just personal preference. I don't particularly care for KDE, but I don't go around spouting vitriol about it for no good reason.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#92

Post by bityard »

thefifthsetpin wrote: post #85
dapperdrake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when…

Are there any active gnome 2 forks? That's when I left gnome, too, and I haven't found anything I like as well.

MATE was forked around the time GNOME 3 was released and is still going. https://mate-desktop.org

Some people consider Cinnamon to be a GNOME 2 spiritual successor while still using a lot of GNOME 3 stuff under the hood. https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#93

Post by ak_111 »

pedrogpimenta wrote: post #9
ak_111 wrote: post #6

I am used to having "Emacs key-bindings" on both gnome and Mac (so that for example ctrl-a will always go to the beginning of a textbox no matter the application, such as chrome). For some strange reason this seems to be very hard thing to set up on KDE or am I missing something?

I'm not sure this is the reason or a big reason, but I think this is very difficult to do in Linux, sadly. What makes Linux great is also its biggest handicap, in my opinion, when it comes to User Experience: the fragmentation of UI frameworks and libraries. I imagine having this control between Qt, GTK and other UI libraries and electron-type-apps os difficult if not impossible.

It works perfectly on Gnome (ubuntu) though. There is simple toggle you have to do in one of the standard control panels as well.

I am surprised this issue is not gaining traction with the KDE crowd, as I imagine a substantial part of the userbase are emacs users and used to emacs keybindings.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#94

Post by virtualmic »

setopt wrote: post #12

I used Linux for a long time (since ~2002), but for the past years I've been daily-driving a MacBook. I'm now switching back, and will likely go with either Gnome or KDE. I've used XFCE, i3wm, etc. for years before – and briefly tried Sway too before I switched to Mac – but from what I've read it sounds like the "big" DEs make life easier post-Wayland. Anyone want to share why you currently choose KDE over Gnome?

> Anyone want to share why you currently choose KDE over Gnome?

Just to give you an opposite perspective...I was a long time Kubuntu / KDE Neon user (almost 10 years) and shifted to Gnome couple of years back (Ubuntu 22.04), now running 24.04. It's been very stable and out of the way. I am not sure why people are complaining about UI, for me it's barely visible on my two screens. All open-source and proprietary apps I use run well and without glitch. It took me an hour to get used to the "Gnome" way when I shifted.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#95

Post by mschuster91 »

dapperdrake wrote: post #36
frameset wrote: post #25

I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.

GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when…

GNOME was ... weird in an uncool way even in version 2 if you ask me. The file picker dialog I distinctly 'member being particularly bad.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#96

Post by bovermyer »

With this hitting multiple communications media for me independently over the last few hours, it has me considering whether I can switch from Windows to Linux for my gaming PC again.

Last time I tried, I used Ubuntu, and I experienced problems with several games via Proton (e.g., The Finals, Fields of Mistria, and Civilization VII, among others). I checked ProtonDB, and it looks like those issues may be resolved.

However, I also wonder what people are using to replace iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever on Linux. Or, if they don't use such a thing in the first place, how they handle off-site backups of files and images.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#97

Post by c-hendricks »

wkat4242 wrote: post #67
happymellon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two minds of thought. 1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users. 2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it. I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KD…

KDE looks different enough to windows in its default install though. And you can make it look like whatever you want, that's the best thing about it. Mine is heavily customised.

> KDE looks different enough to windows in its default

Uhhhh it does?

https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png

https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-sta...

https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew...

https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho...

I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#98

Post by WD-42 »

dapperdrake wrote: post #36
frameset wrote: post #25

I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.

GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when…

It’s the default because it’s much easier to provide a consistent desktop with gnome compared to KDE. Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK. Even Firefox uses gtk.

So you can make KDE the default but you’re going to be forced to ship a smattering of gnome/gtk apps anyway with different ui/ux and looks.

On the other hand, you can easily ship a GNOME desktop without even shipping qt libraries at all.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#99

Post by bityard »

I loved the KDE 3.x series, it felt like the future to me. It was _way_ ahead of both Windows and Mac at the time in terms of features and power.

KDE 4 was a dud. Too much of a radical make-over instead of iterating on what worked. Ugly. Very crashy. I'm not sure how close KDE 4 came to killing KDE altogether, but it must have been pretty close.

KDE 5 was a vast improvement over 4, going back to what made 3 so good. Earlier releases left a bit to be desired and still had a few stability issues. Later releases were pretty well refined. I switched (back) to KDE at this point, when I switched to Debian 12 (bookworm) at the same time.

KDE 6 is just a continuation of KDE 5, but using Qt 6 under the hood and defaulting to Wayland. It's very solid, fast, and just gets out of your way so you can do real work with it.

Re: KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

#100

Post by WD-42 »

frameset wrote: post #25

I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.

What’s up with this constant insistence that the Linux desktop should be familiar to windows users? I feel like people are just as likely to be familiar with OSX at this point.

Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.

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