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Ten Years of Kubuntu

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Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#11

Post by weland »

m_mueller wrote: post #9
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community. The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach. I'm a post-3.5 r…

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

I'm thinking strictly about the customization of the UI, not of "everything else" in System Preferences (e.g. hardware, network and so on). You can set individual icons but you don't have icon themes per se, can't change the UI theme (and I distinctly remember there was an application that did that very well back on 10.4, and 10.5 broke it along with most other efforts), can't change titlebar buttons and so on. E.g. I very much prefer the NeXT arrangement (close button on the right, minimize button on the left), because I really have no use for Maximize on a 27" screen. Good luck with that.

To their credit, though, Apple does at least think twice before pushing changes most of the time. Gnome's latest effort, with the client-side decorations, is maddening. Now every Gnome application has a thick titlebar that's also a toolbar, and every other application doesn't. They supposedly did that in order to save screen space - which could have just as well been done by reducing the thickness of that mammoth title bar Adwaita uses - but the effect seems to me to have been exactly opposite. Surely someone must have seen that the result is inconsistent on any system that runs a single application not included with Gnome -- say, for instance, Firefox! Or Chrome! Or Emacs! Or Thunderbird! Whatever.

I certainly understand that Gnome developers have a vision for their UI, but the uncommunicative way in which they impose it is pretty unpopular among users (like myself) who moved away from Windows or Mac OS a long, long time ago because they wanted more control over their operating system (well, that and no BSODs, which was a common occurrence at the time when I left Windows behind. Did you know Mac users didn't even have preemptive multitasking then? God I feel like a dinosaur now. Get off my lawn.)

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#12

Post by collyw »

eitally wrote: post #3

I haven't tried in about two years, but I tried every six months for a few years before that (basically every time Ubuntu pushed a new release I'd try Kubuntu first). I really wanted the advanced configurability of KDE compared to Gnome and then Unity ... but something always either didn't work or just frustrated me to no end and I reverted to Ubuntu. A lot of my friends have switched to Arch now, which similarly see…

I agree, I run Manajaro, which is an Arch spin off. It seems stripped down in the same way that Ubuntu was when it first started getting popular.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#13

Post by m_mueller »

vacri wrote: post #10
m_mueller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

Unity at least has an excuse - it's stated goal is to have the same interface on mobile and desktop, and function well with both touch and mouse.

Windows seems to have the same goal since Sinofsky had its helm and so far I'm not convinced that this goal makes much sense for an OS.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#14

Post by TallGuyShort »

reitanqild wrote: post #4
flavor8 wrote: post #2

KDE is a great platform, but most of the prominent distros ship with near-default style settings, which are ugly (just look at the 15.04 screenshots, linked from the article). It would be nice if an opinionated design team (similar to the elementary guys) shipped a KDE based distro which was meticulously styled out of the box.

Mandrake, later Mandriva used to be close to perfect IMO. Today I guess OpenSUSE is the closest thing to what you describe.

Mageia - forked from Mandriva - is still actively developed, I believe - but I haven't tried out KDE on it. I think my Fedora 20 install looked pretty slick out of the box, but I don't think very highly of my own taste :)

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#15

Post by voteapathy »

weland wrote: post #8
bananaoomarang wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plasma 5 is still a little janky, but this has been improved a lot, and should hopefully continue to improve (it has a much more consciously opinionated design team than 4 ever did). The Linux desktop space is a real mess at the moment, but KDE is the best of the bunch for general, modern computing.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community. The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach. I'm a post-3.5 r…

As an aside, I decided to try out Cinnamon on my Debian box, and I actually found it to be a breath of fresh air. It's a modern approach to the non-bloated Gnome desktop of years ago. Reminded me a bit of when I first used xfce; very clean and straightforward. I feel Gnome and Unity try far too hard to dazzle and stand out, when it reality it all just gets in the way. No comment on KDE since I haven't tried it in a long time.

Some day though I'll go back to straight DWM, my old love.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#16

Post by baldfat »

reitanqild wrote: post #4
flavor8 wrote: post #2

KDE is a great platform, but most of the prominent distros ship with near-default style settings, which are ugly (just look at the 15.04 screenshots, linked from the article). It would be nice if an opinionated design team (similar to the elementary guys) shipped a KDE based distro which was meticulously styled out of the box.

Mandrake, later Mandriva used to be close to perfect IMO. Today I guess OpenSUSE is the closest thing to what you describe.

I feel that OpenSUSE has had the best KDE default settings and Kubuntu had the worst defaults.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#17

Post by giancarlostoro »

joshuapants wrote: post #7
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

I enjoy Kubuntu and use it's cousin / child, Netrunner. Ships with all (most anyway) the things I wish Kubuntu shipped with, but a little extra I don't want, but that's ok, it's easier to remove things (Firefox addons) than waiting for the updates and what not. It even lets me use the "Windows Key" to open the KDE Menu, or at least their version of it, which is something I'm all too accustomed to from Windows. Been r…

I never quite warmed up to KDE. I think the problem was that it was a "Windows-like" interface but it never felt quite the same as Windows. I found it easier to adapt to GNOME, precisely because it was different than what I was used to. I did try the beta of Kubuntu with Plasma 5, however, and it seemed nice. I'll have to try it again sometime.

I started with KDE but then I fell in love with Gnome after KDE4 was too buggy to run for me, it was almost like the Vista fiasco, you needed a graphics card just to run a desktop environment, so I moved to Gnome and fell in love with how customizable it was. Then Gnome 3 came out, and my love for Gnome died, all that I loved had been taken out, I understand plug-ins and all, but Gnome was amazing out of the box, then I ran back to KDE my first love, ah this should be a movie or something, but now if anything goes wrong I may consider LXQt, seems promising enough. I don't know why people get religiously stuck to desktop environments, sometimes you just need to move on.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#18

Post by weland »

voteapathy wrote: post #15
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community. The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach. I'm a post-3.5 r…

As an aside, I decided to try out Cinnamon on my Debian box, and I actually found it to be a breath of fresh air. It's a modern approach to the non-bloated Gnome desktop of years ago. Reminded me a bit of when I first used xfce; very clean and straightforward. I feel Gnome and Unity try far too hard to dazzle and stand out, when it reality it all just gets in the way. No comment on KDE since I haven't tried it in a l…

I have very mixed feelings about some of the stuff Gnome is doing. Some of them are at least interesting from a certain point of view, like sandboxing applications. I get why this would be nice to have in corporate environments, and that brings money to Linux, which Linux does need. I also think it's solving problems at the wrong level for everyone else. (Selective) communication between sandboxed applications seems to be something they have no coherent framework for. Besides, as many Android applications show, savagely enforcing sandboxing has had questionable effects on privacy (as applications that really want your data will happily just request permissions to do everything and refuse to work otherwise). As for the security gains of such an approach, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness they add to an open source environment. What remains is offering additional protection against bugs (that e.g. allow otherwise unauthorized access). But proper desktop sandboxing is so incredibly complex that it's hard not to think a far more efficient approach would be fixing those bugs in the first place.

For better or for worse, they're also experimenting with a lot of new approaches to UI. Which is pretty much how innovation happens -- something that computer desktops could use since everyone else is, at this point, imitating either Mac OS or Windows 95. However, an opt-out solution for users who are happy to encourage innovation, but would rather not be the victim of failed experiments every other release would be nice...

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#19

Post by zanny »

Kubuntu is in a great place today. Five years ago KDE developers were pretty fragmented between Mandrivia, Suse, Fedora, and Kubuntu. Today, thanks to Blue Systems adopting Kubuntu and the general decline of most other KDE spins (Suse lost its commercial support, Mandrivia died and got forked a bunch, Fedora continues to be Gnome-first in a good way) my impressions from the ML and general developer mindshare is that Kubuntu is becoming the KDE distro for the betterment of the platform, because then you don't end up with all this wasted effort making an 80% great experience on every different package manager, fs layout, login manager, and init stack. Kubuntu CI is pretty much the only place one should go to develop KDE software and that means Kubuntu and Netrunner are always going to be the core KDE distros.

And that is not bad. Desktop environments in my view do a lot better when they have a blessed implementation. Cinnamon, Unity, and even Enlightenment have seen resounding success because they are developed for single distros and that focus lets them dodge the semantics of their environment and get to the good stuff.

Kubuntu 15.04 is looking to be the first release of the distro I can be proud of as something to show the uninitiated and get them excited about using it. The bugs are falling down by the dozen each day and all the best of Linux is ready for the release, its going to be a blast in my book.

Re: Ten Years of Kubuntu

#20

Post by retroafroman »

flavor8 wrote: post #2

KDE is a great platform, but most of the prominent distros ship with near-default style settings, which are ugly (just look at the 15.04 screenshots, linked from the article). It would be nice if an opinionated design team (similar to the elementary guys) shipped a KDE based distro which was meticulously styled out of the box.

You mean like happened with Gnome 3 and completely pissed off a large portion of the user base? I'm an advocate for sane defaults, but 'opinionated design' doesn't always nail the mark.
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