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KDE beats macOS

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Re: KDE beats macOS

#31

Post by KaiserPro »

> KDE beats macOS hands down

"If you've been using KDE for years and are new to OSX." should be appended to the headline.

I'm not going to defend OSX here. It is as obtuse as any other GUI system.

My dad was always a KDE fan, I suspect because he had CDE/CDE like GUIs for a long time, and muscle memory is hard to overcome. I never really liked it, however for the longest time it did have more features and polish than gnome.

I really don't like modern gnome (>3) its a pain in the arse to make it do what I want. However if you use it as the gods of UX intend, then its reasonably friction free.

I've recently come back to windows 10. Its fine, has virtual monitors, keyboard shortcuts and powershell. I imagine that with me bothering to learn WSL it would be really rather quite good.

However I have nothing really against OSX, apart from it insists on stacking windows ontop of each other, which is deeply annoying.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#32

Post by fernandotakai »

funny enough, i just moved back to linux after using macOS for almost a year.

i decided to install KDE just to see what was going on and holy damn, it's SO GOOD. the only thing i installed (and configured) was a tiling window manager (bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/) and that was it.

everything is working perfectly, it looks great and it's suuuper smooth.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#33

Post by panda-giddiness »

The only UI difference I find truly maddening is the inability to open a terminal in the current folder. On other operating systems, I can right click in the empty space to open a terminal in that directory; on macOS, I must instead right click on a subfolder, open a terminal in that subfolder, and then navigate up one directory (`cd ..`)...

...unless the current folder contains no folders, in which case I have to navigate up one directory (via keyboard shortcut -- this cannot be done natively in Finder) and then right click on the target folder (especially annoying if the parent folder contains many directories).

I can only assume that I'm misinformed because the current paradigm makes no goddamn sense.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#34

Post by dcminter »

doix wrote: 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…

> If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense.

In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right?

For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress) user who'd totally bought the "Macs have better usability" myth before that it was astounding.

My father had a lot of trouble getting used to his Android phone (he came to smart phones late) despite a highly technical background, just because a lot of stuff wasn't obviously something you could tap on. He did get used to it, but it was a slog for him to figure out. The death of skeuomorphism was a tragedy and I hope it comes back.

Personally I also miss proper manuals. There's so much software I use where googling around for someone who was trying to solve the same task is a more productive solution than reading the meagre documentation.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#35

Post by licebmi__at__ »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #28
doix wrote: 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. Anoth…

And to add to the point, Alt+’ is not the same as alt+tab, which will switch between all the available windows while the former will only switch between the windows on the current selected application. And it’s also even worse, because Alt+’ as a natural partner of alt+tab won’t even work if you use a different keyboard layout; and it won’t even work if you set an application on a workspace.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#36

Post by goosedragons »

beanjuice wrote: post #21
goosedragons wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a pretty specific complaint.

You can use the web version of Office. You can install Office under Wine. I personally have Office 2010 installed on Linux. It works.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#37

Post by Tsiklon »

dcminter wrote: post #34
doix wrote: 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…

> If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right? For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress)…

Lion was a bit of a stinker in that regard, prior to that there was no “full screen” applications in that more traditional sense, only borderless full screen for video and games - anything else used “smart maximise” where the window size would increase to fit the content (again a bit of a poor choice, but that’s my personal opinion)

Re: KDE beats macOS

#38

Post by doix »

uniqueuid wrote: post #27
doix wrote: 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…

> 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.

Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.

> Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work.

Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

> Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries.

Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt?

> Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides.

This is pretty universal.

> 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.

I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#39

Post by ubercow13 »

panda-giddiness wrote: post #33

The only UI difference I find truly maddening is the inability to open a terminal in the current folder. On other operating systems, I can right click in the empty space to open a terminal in that directory; on macOS, I must instead right click on a subfolder, open a terminal in that subfolder, and then navigate up one directory (`cd ..`)... ...unless the current folder contains no folders, in which case I have to na…

Yeah its annoying. If you enable the pathbar status bar thing in finder, you can right click the current folder which is always visible there and launch the terminal. However if the folder has no contents there is still no way to do it with the keyboard I think.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#40

Post by ggerganov »

izacus wrote: post #29
ggerganov wrote: post #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 go…

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

Ideally it shouldn't. But at the moment, I cannot use Apple Silicon on anything else other than Mac OS and I believe the performance of these chips is unmatched and it will not be anytime soon.
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