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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

#151
post #21

I use KDE on my home PC since about a 15 years, exclusively. I like it a lot but it still has some rough edges here and there. For example, the network config interface is a bit messy. Sure you can configure many things with it, but it's hard to understand). Dolphin is the best file manager I have ever used, nothing come close nowadays (I have tested windows and macs). The desktop configuration is quite nice and the…

yeah dolphin is great software!

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

#152
post #98

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…

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.

> Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK.

As I wrote above, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?

Then there are the "quality" apps that have always been on the Qt / KDE side of the fence: Kdenlive, FreeCAD, Krita, Scribus, qBittorrent, Qt Creator, Dolphin... And that's free software. It is a slam dunk for Qt on the commercial side.

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

#153
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome? Don't worry, they will tell you." It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

Not surprising, when gnome it's already the default everywhere. GNOME is polarizing with its feature minimalism and non-traditional desktop, and many people therefore are unhappy it's the default choice in all the big distros.

Gnome is just plain not the best choice for default. More people are better served with KDE for instance.

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

#154
post #141

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…

"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome? Don't worry, they will tell you." It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

Please. The only thing that's stayed constant through GNOME's history is that the developers have been rooting for other Linux projects to fail, like when System76 announced they were starting COSMIC (since completed and released) [0][1].

> It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem.

Also, parent comment wasn't "shitting on" GNOME. They were criticizing the design, the first time user experience, and the decisions of downstream projects on which software to center. You are kinda shitting on other users though, IMO, by reframing valid criticisms of GNOME in terms of personal attacks.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221004085739/https://twitter.c...

[1] https://system76.com/cosmic

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

#155
post #99

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.…

The 4.x series was the one where the ideas still making Plasma so powerful were seeded. While I loved KDE 3 the design for 4 seemed revolutionary. Too bad it was alpha/beta quality up until the 4.6 release years later. I fared through all the bugs, crashes and performance issues with a young student's determination (while running Fluxbox on the side) but I can very well understand people doing serious work had limite…

It's a story that's very similar to Windows Vista. It gets a lot of hate for breaking stuff at the time it was originally released, but the reason it broke stuff is because it put in a new foundation for later releases to build upon. The later releases were better because of the breakage. Something something gotta breaks some eggs to make an omelette something something.

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

#156
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome? Don't worry, they will tell you." It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

That's a wild anecdote. I avoided KDE for YEARS because the guy that got me into desktop Linux told me it was terrible and I took his advice as a given. He and the folks he introduced me to all talked massive shit about KDE, and they used Gnome. This was back around the time Gnome 3 came out. Oh and when I switched to Plasma two years ago, a GNOME user I used to be friends with came out of the woodwork to tell me how…

To be fair, the transition to KDE 4 was super painful. It was basically the Python 3 moment for KDE but worse because they removed a lot of features and gave you a buggy mess instead.

Considering Gnome 3 released like three years after that it makes sense that he you would have discouraged you from using KDE.

It took KDE many years to recover from that. Of course using Gnome 3 instead is a bit extreme. Even broken KDE 4 was probably preferable to that. He should have recommended Xfce or something.

KDE these days is pretty amazing and for sure worth checking out. Though I sometimes still mourn the greatness that was KDE 3.5 even to this day and I am rocking Cinnamon these days.

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

#157
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome? Don't worry, they will tell you." It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

Not surprising, when gnome it's already the default everywhere. GNOME is polarizing with its feature minimalism and non-traditional desktop, and many people therefore are unhappy it's the default choice in all the big distros.

Then why are not other distros that provide other defaults "big". Why do people use distros that lack the features that they want?

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

#158

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…

As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.

I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 on my work laptop. With that come all the gnome package updates and such.

I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?

I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.

I look it up, stumble on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4, 7 years old issue -- I can already tell this is gonna be a joy; scroll down some, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4#note_1..., and audibly groan.

> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?

Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!

But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.

And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.

I'm moving to KDE, thank you very much.

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

#159
post #141

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…

"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome? Don't worry, they will tell you." It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.

I respect all other DE's and window managers, I only hate Gnome.

And I only hate it for being the default option. I believe it hasn't gotten its position based on technical merit or user preference but because Ubuntu is pushing it at such, plus I also hate Ubuntu and the company behind it.

Like if people genuinely like Gnome, I don't understand it but that is fine, we are all different. I would just love to see more fair play.

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

#160
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yeah, Cinnamon is amazing. Traditional desktop and just works.
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