Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

KDE beats macOS

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 308 posts

Re: KDE beats macOS

#41

Post by scaredginger »

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 think the key is that macs are optimised for this workflow. As someone who uses the terminal a lot, I often find it difficult to get the information I want from any GUI, compared to piping terminal output through different utilities. After all, if you're talking about consistency, you cannot beat the UNIX philosophy.

However, most people would balk at this workflow. Workflows are just very personal and a reflection of how one thinks. How one thinks is also influenced from what they've used in the past, especially in formative years. Trying to justify why any user interface as unequivocally better than another is an exercise in futility.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#42

Post by yibers »

lampe3 wrote: 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…

Wouls you care to elaborate a bit as to why you would care if the OS you are running os Windows?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#43

Post by jeswin »

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 have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even Gnome due to the accompanying legacy baggage.

Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#44

Post by ethanbond »

doix wrote: post #38
uniqueuid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#45

Post by gary17the »

macOS UI capabilities aside, I have to mention that the latest Kubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) 2022 release with KDE Plasma 5.24 is a fantastic upgrade. The system is snappy, much more so than under the previous Kubuntu 20.04 2020 release. Moreover, the 5.15 Linux kernel seems to be handling huge memory allocations for virtual machines an order of magnitude faster than the previous 5.4 kernel.

If you are tired of macOS, I wholeheartedly recommend giving Kubuntu 22.04 LTS a try. (You can always buy a second GPU and run macOS inside a QEMU virtual machine, 99% stable at native UI speeds with GPU passthrough.)

Re: KDE beats macOS

#46

Post by nl »

lampe3 wrote: 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…

I almost agree with this, except that the shared clipboard between my phone and computer on iOS/MacOS is so useful I'll often switch to my MacBook from my Linux desktop because of it.

Once you've got used to it you just can't go back.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#47

Post by easygenes »

KaiserPro wrote: post #31

> 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…

I have to say that WSL is an absolute nightmare. I just cannot stand it. Not only that, but Microsoft has deeply embedded Hyper-V into Windows, to the point that you can't run another hypervisor. I tried to get away from WSL by using VMware Workstation and found that Hyper-V was still under the hood and bogging down the system. All the documents I could find, including recent official ones from Microsoft, on removing Hyper-V so you could run another hypervisor were incomplete. I eventually got the VMware hypervisor running though, and it is so much better.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#49

Post by sirn »

doix wrote: post #38
uniqueuid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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

On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk.

For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc.

This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#50

Post by vegai_ »

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…

That's a bit silly. I was a Linux user from 1996 to 2015ish, then went to use macbooks almost exclusively. Apple's UI immediately made sense, even if it was remains tad unoptimal for serious use, when comparing to UX masterpieces like i3 and sway.

KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.

Post reply on HN