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KDE beats macOS

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21–30 of 308 posts

Re: KDE beats macOS

#21
post #4

Beats macOS ...at what? Serious, not facetious, question. The only answer I can think of is "running on non-Apple hardware"

Being usable out of the box? With KDE I don't need to go find a 3rd party app for decent window snapping, I don't need a 3rd party app to put files on my Android phone over USB, I don't need a 3rd party app to have the trackpad and scroll wheel mouse directions be "natural" and "unnatural" at the same time, I don't need a 3rd party app to be able to use the volume buttons to change the volume level of a sound device…

These are all very specific complaints. By the numbers, does KDE answer the question "how do I interact with a school/volunteer/work .docx/.ppt/.xlsx file without likely breaking it?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#22

> Linux is great if you don't value your time Continues to be one of my favorite quotes. Yes I can spend endless hours getting arch installed with only the packages I want/need making sure it's totally optimized and then what, every single other part of my workflow now has to work around the limitations of linux. One day perhaps, but for now, macOS will do.

Perhaps you are using Gentoo or any other complicated distro which needs to be configured manually even for basic requirements?

With user-friendliers distros like Ubuntu, you usually are "plug and play", ready to go.

I'd love to Linux 100% for work, but unfortunately as a mobile dev I need Xcode.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#23
post #4

Beats macOS ...at what? Serious, not facetious, question. The only answer I can think of is "running on non-Apple hardware"

Being usable out of the box? With KDE I don't need to go find a 3rd party app for decent window snapping, I don't need a 3rd party app to put files on my Android phone over USB, I don't need a 3rd party app to have the trackpad and scroll wheel mouse directions be "natural" and "unnatural" at the same time, I don't need a 3rd party app to be able to use the volume buttons to change the volume level of a sound device…

None of what you describe here makes Mac "unusable". If your idea of "usability" is not needing to ever install extra software on a machine because it perfectly suits your particular niche set of demands for said "usability", then you are subscribing to an idea of usability that is probably out of sync with what most people would understand the word to mean (especially people on Hacker News who are more likely to tinker with their setups and want to customise things than most).

Also Macs taking a more cautious approach to app access to your filesystem and accessibility privileges is a good thingTM actually?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#24
I wonder. Does KDE still delete and redraw all tray icons when one of them updates? It was distracting as hell last time I used it extensively.

Perhaps that's why the OP needs to hide them.

You can find something to complain about with any DE.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#25
post #20

To be honest I stopped caring what OS I'm running as long as it is not windows. I have a terminal open 99% of the time and I almost never open finder or Gnome Files. pacman or brew? really I don't care. Both install what I want with one command. VS Code is basically the same on every system. Gnome/KDE/MacOS all of them have there pros and cons. Right now what wins for me is the apple silicon. I can develop stuff with…

+1 to this … I’m so over endless discussions individual philosophical and aesthetic preferences in o/s and window managers. As long as I can be productive and not have to ‘fix’ things constantly

Re: KDE beats macOS

#26
At work I use Gnome and at home I use MacOS - I am used to both environments. I am a C++ developer and spend most of my time in a terminal. Of course, it took some time over the years to have everything customized for my needs, but at the moment I feel equally productive on both.

However, if I had to choose one, I will likely stick with Mac though. The performance of the new Apple Silicon chips is amazing and it's going to get even better.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#27
post #6

Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you. If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows. People are getti…

I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives.

At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal.

Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary.

The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work.

Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#28
post #6

Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you. If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows. People are getti…

MacOS is interesting in that I know regular users who have used it for over a decade who still don’t grasp some of its basics.

For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’. That being said, even though the OP is wrong, there’s a massive kernel of truth in that the majority of ordinary Mac users are unaware of this.

Another one is that many regular users cannot distinguish between closing all windows and closing the app. See a regular users desktop and you will often see open but unused apps sitting in their dock because they closed all the windows and didn’t realize they had to do something different to close the app as well.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#29

At work I use Gnome and at home I use MacOS - I am used to both environments. I am a C++ developer and spend most of my time in a terminal. Of course, it took some time over the years to have everything customized for my needs, but at the moment I feel equally productive on both. However, if I had to choose one, I will likely stick with Mac though. The performance of the new Apple Silicon chips is amazing and it's go…

Why would hardware have to dictate your choice of software though ?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#30
post #2

Quoted post unavailable.

Not sure what you mean to imply. I've been using Mac daily at work for three years now, and KDE simply is better. I still prefer Mac over Windows though. Similarly to the article author, a lot of my grievances are about Finder. Either it is very poor as a file manager, or it's so undiscoverable that after all these years I have still not figured it out properly. These are all anecdotes and preferences, obviously. I d…

Any specific grievances? The discoverability argument I don't buy, because the same people that will tinker for hours on a linux distro to learn and set it up, suddenly need things to be in their face or it's not discoverable.
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