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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

#131

Post by thewebguyd »

edwcross wrote: post #70

I'm increasingly pessimistic about everyday reach of Linux. Around me, all I see are Windows users, volunteers teaching old people how to use several tools... on Windows. Public institutions relying on Windows, upgrading to Windows 11, doing everything despite Trump, despite Microsoft, despite all of the negatives associated with it. When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones, there'…

Inertia is a hell of a drug. The US failed to break up Microsoft in the 90s, and never took antitrust action against them again after that. So the world built its entire tech infrastructure on top of Windows (as far as endpoints go, web facing servers are another matter).

But,

> When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones,

At least this is changing, although not true "desktop linux," students are mostly given Chromebooks, and grow up on google docs/g workspace so that early familiarity with Windows + Office is dissapearing.

It's not going to be a good thing long term though, I already see it with employees where I work (I'm in IT). We have plenty of younger employees that don't even have computers at home if they aren't gamers. They are familiar with iOS/iPad OS only. Windows + Office is a mystical black box, and file management/file systems are a foreign concept.

That, IMO, makes Linux desktop adoption that much more difficult. At least Windows->Linux you can take a lot of basic concepts with you. MobileOS->Not mobile OS is much more difficult.

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

#133

Post by anthk »

amlib wrote: post #125
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…

> GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. It gutted itself because quite frankly it was anemic at best. I was a heavy KDE 3 user back then and I vastly preferred it compared to gnome 2, but as a long time linux user I also recognize that ALL desktop linux solutions were pretty rough back them. This "gutting" was certainly painful and questionable but what we have today, KDE 6 (it also went…

TBH Gnome 2 (initially) was half-inspired from Mac OS 9. Specially the former spatial mode in Nautilus.

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

#134

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

fooker wrote: post #84
wkat4242 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubuntu isn't really feature complete compared to Ubuntu, for example the installer doesn't allow to create a zfs on root install.

zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it. There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this. If you understand the risks, you can do it yourself.

> zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it.

I don't think that's true. Other than with ZFS-native encryption, which I grant has been less reliable, it's been rock solid for a very long time. And I've run >1PB of postgres databases on it professionally, so I feel fairly comfortable in that assertion.

> There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.

The default Ubuntu installer at least used to support ZFS, which is the point.

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

#135

Post by anthk »

WD-42 wrote: post #112
guerrilla wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to ju…

It’s far from dead. Take a look at the gnome circle apps as a demonstration of how many good applications are being written for gnome these days. I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that to use QT you are still stuck with either C++ or Python, whereas there are a ton of gnome apps being written in JS and Rust now.

>JS

Where's Vala?

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

#137

Post by estebank »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #62
noisy_boy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate, KDE settings are clear but there might be a possibility for a "Advanced Mode" button (with a first-time click warning) on the top-right of the "Quick Settings" screen that opens up when we launch the Settings. That can hide the "risky" stuff (e.g. "Window Management" etc). There might be value in adding a "Lock Panels" options to handle accidental modifications/removal etc.

I agree with the “Advanced Mode” button. That’d solve a great deal of the issues that KDE Settings suffers. On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.

The problem with advanced modes is that it is easy for a chaos monkey to get into them, and at scale that will happen all the time.

A mitigation for advanced modes is to have a big bright red "get me the hell out of this to a normal state" button. Making it easy for a human to get back to the normal steady-state reduces the risk of an advanced mode and gently encourages exploration and experimentation, if it is always trivial to get back to what you're used to. This means that configuration changes can't ever be fully destructive though, which requires quite a bit of design and engineering.

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

#139

Post by morshu9001 »

array_key_first wrote: post #129
morshu9001 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First and biggest challenge is that there's no single default desktop Linux, and even one distro could have different DEs, window servers, etc. Imagine asking for tech support as a newbie, and giving your laptop model and OS and version is still not enough info.

It's completely unavoidable with open source software, we just have to adapt around it.

We do have one main Linux kernel (while other open source like BSD is far less popular on PCs) and a bunch of tools like bash and git that are de facto default. Seems like Linux community actively avoids converging on a default DE though.

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

#140

Post by dessimus »

wkat4242 wrote: post #65
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…

Kubuntu isn't really feature complete compared to Ubuntu, for example the installer doesn't allow to create a zfs on root install.

I feel like the difference is that Kubuntu installer is specifically intended for users wanting the Desktop experience via KDE, whereas the Ubuntu installer can be used for multiple use-cases such as headless Servers or Desktops. Server admins might have reason to run zfs for root, but typically Desktop users are not really needing zfs when they have 1 or maybe 2 disks. There are other filesystems that provide some of the primary features without the overhead of zfs.

If one knows they want/need a zfs root on their Desktop, then they are likely capable of getting the KDE packages setup through the main Ubuntu installer without needing the Kubuntu installer.

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