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KDE beats macOS

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Re: KDE beats macOS

#61
post #43

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 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…

Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#62

> 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.

MacOS is great if you don't value your time.

I could spend hours downloading third party apps to add basic functionality like windows snapping or tiling, HDMI volume control, Cm + Opt + T to launch terminal, package managers like brew or I could just use Linux and get all those things out of the box.

See how that argument works?

Re: KDE beats macOS

#63
post #43

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 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…

Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#64

> 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…

Personally windows stacking on top of each other is one of my favorite things. As usual YMMV I guess

Re: KDE beats macOS

#65
I agree.

After using both for a long time, I have to say KDE is less painful and faster in operation.

MacOS has a lot of inconsistent or weird keyboard shortcuts. There's no proper window management, HDMI volume cannot be controlled, can't launch apps like VSCode or Terminal using keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+ Alt + C and Ctrl + Alt + T. The shell takes like 2 seconds to load when opening terminal.

Yes, MacOS is more beautiful OOTB but KDE hands down wins in the workflow and UX department.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or use literally any friendly distro? Fedora, PopOS, Ubuntu require the same amount of work to set up as a macbook. Just because arch takes time to set up (by design) doesn't mean all Linux distros are this needy. Sure, for Fedora you have to add the Flathub repo (1 click on a website) and if you have a nvidia gpu, then you have to enable the RPMFusion repo (also 1 click on a website). I'd argue installing Homebrew r…

Time to set up is comparable, or even better for linux. The issue starts on the longer run, the moment when after one update hibernation stops working or bluetooth has issues and needs to be restarted with rfkill. I fully understand that its not fully linux fault - those are proprietary drivers and so on, but from the user perspective I would love to have a system that just works.

> the moment when after one update hibernation stops working or bluetooth has issues and needs to be restarted with rfkill

I'll hype Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite once again for solving that.

Don't like the new update? Messed up /etc in any way? Tried a questionable third-party RPM and what a surprise, it doesn't do what you wanted? Roll back in a single command, even from the boot screen.

If 'ostree admin' was usable from the GUI [0], showing a screenshot of it would blow the mind of people using other operating systems.

The downside is that upgrading RPMs now requires a reboot, but your apps are going to be Flatpaks (or AppImages, or Podman services) so they don't have that limitation.

[0] Which will hopefully arrive soon to KDE: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/166

Re: KDE beats macOS

#67
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.

> Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit.

This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#68
post #43

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 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…

I'm the opposite. Just the other day I was trying to find if I could keep an application running without any window on KDE Plasma :-)

I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doesn't activate the window).

I think this design decision still makes sense in 2022. On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#69
post #68
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm the opposite. Just the other day I was trying to find if I could keep an application running without any window on KDE Plasma :-) I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doe…

> On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.

Yeah, but the number of apps which require this behavior is far less than those which don't. Hence in my view, not a good reason to default to it.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#70
post #49
post #38

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. 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…

And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.
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