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KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

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Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#71
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, relatively speaking, it solves the distribution problem. Distributing to your set of servers is easier than distributing to the set of desktops.

At the cost of a generally worse end user experience and no offline ability. I am glad Apple didn't do that and stayed native for nearly everything. This is a big selling point for me.

> I am glad Apple didn't do that and stayed native for nearly everything. This is a big selling point for me.

Right, but Apple also perfectly exemplifies the problem with that approach - their software is incredibly limited, and can only run on a ridiculously small number of computers. Even if the software is good, which ehhh, but even if it is - there are cons to that approach.

To expand, this also hurts the customer in a lot of direct and non-direct ways. You're forced to buy Apple hardware, and that hardware might not meet your capabilities. This further fuels anti-consumerist anti-repair behavior, because they know that their computers are the only ones you can use.

And, since they create their own market, they kind of have you in golden handcuffs. If their prices go up, which they do and already are high, you're along for the ride.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not better for developers on iOS. There are loads of complaints about the costs imposed on devs and the hoops they have to jump through to publish in the app store.

Linux repositories are objectively worse. Unclear guidelines, zero publishing control, patches against your will, removal of donation links or warnings if you anger the distribution maintainers, having to do this over and over dozens of times, I would take Apple any day. And as you can see, 99.9% of developers took Apple’s route. Market share can only partially explain this, as even tiny platforms like Palm had bette…

> And as you can see, 99.9% of developers took Apple’s route

Um, well no they didn't, because most things are web applications. And most software actually targets Windows. And then most phone software that's big is cross platform.

Apples' model is cool, but it certainly has a lot of drawbacks, and in many ways they did not win. They, too, lost to the web.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When? When the majority of SW dev work became synonymous with web dev. Why? Because that's what web devs are comfortable with. How became this a good thing? When web apps became the easiest way to deploy cross platform.

Also the native UX kits all suck and have done so forever. There i said it. There’s a reason KDE looks better, has better consistency across apps, does theming at the os level better etc. Html/javascript/css for your native app frontend is actually quite reasonable.

The native UX toolkits wouldn't be so shit if everyone wasn't so greedy. We don't need to reinvent a better wheel every 5 years (windows) or force some proprietary garbage nobody cares about (mac).

It just needs to be reasonable, easy to adapt to other platforms, and long-lasting. The web isn't even that good, the competition is just self-destructive to a point it can't be justified.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#74
post #29

Tried this with my mother. I had to rebuild the machine with Windows 11 LTSC afterwards. Which she hates but less than Linux which was totally unusable for her. YMMV but this isn't a real option for a lot of people.

Try again with Ubuntu’s Gnome if you’ll have an opportunity. The “problem” with KDE is that it tries to look like and behave similar to Windows, but it’s not, so older people that remembered how to deal with one UI are confused when what looks similar in reality behaves differently. And it results in frustration.

Gnome, on the other hand, provides a totally different UI, so user immediately identifies that it is different and needs to be learned a bit. But thanks to Gnome being pretty coherent and simple in how UI works, it usually takes very little time to learn and then they just keep using it. I experimented with my parents, father is 70, mother 65, and they both earned default Ubuntu very quickly and don’t have any issues using it, unlike win10+, which constantly raised questions and frustrations that something changed (MS likes to bring idiotic widgets to panels and menus after updates no matter that nobody asked for them).

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#75
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When KDE started, it was strongly influenced by CDE. It became more Windows-y with every major(ish) version, while Windows did not get any (relevant) inspiration from CDE.

Indeed, KDE is like Windows, which is sad, because I don't like the desktop metaphor, yet KDE is the only group that is concerned with usability and improves the system with every release. I actually don't mind the GNOME metaphor... but they make it less and less usable over each release. Philosophically, what they are talking about sounds great, but pragmatically the system is just getting less and less usable. UX c…

Usable and lack of additional functionality are absolutely different things. Gnome is the most usable DE in linux, and a default for major distributions for a reason. It’s simple, it’s coherent, pretty much never breaks and just in general designed to bother you as less as possible so you can just do your work.

KDE tries to satisfy anyone with all kinds of options, but as a result most of such options are half baked and DE starts to fall apart with memory leaks and inconsistency as soon as you’re deviating from default experience enough. I do like KDE’s innovations and attempts to get as maximum performance as possible, but sad truth is that in he last 15 years I’m trying fresh KDE once in a year or two, but have to crawl back to gnome after about a week, as small but annoying problems, memory leaks or inconsistencies result in frustration.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#76
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the cost of a generally worse end user experience and no offline ability. I am glad Apple didn't do that and stayed native for nearly everything. This is a big selling point for me.

> I am glad Apple didn't do that and stayed native for nearly everything. This is a big selling point for me. Right, but Apple also perfectly exemplifies the problem with that approach - their software is incredibly limited, and can only run on a ridiculously small number of computers. Even if the software is good, which ehhh, but even if it is - there are cons to that approach. To expand, this also hurts the custome…

This is a pretty big straw man. While there are cons, you overstate all of those.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#77
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

I read that as "We feel the customer be happy with mediocre"

Yeah... I don't think happy is even a consideration. Due to the lack of choice, the customer will have to content even if the experience is way off.

As long as all the competition is more or less as bad as your product, there's very little incentive to improve on that.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#78
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, KDE is like Windows, which is sad, because I don't like the desktop metaphor, yet KDE is the only group that is concerned with usability and improves the system with every release. I actually don't mind the GNOME metaphor... but they make it less and less usable over each release. Philosophically, what they are talking about sounds great, but pragmatically the system is just getting less and less usable. UX c…

Usable and lack of additional functionality are absolutely different things. Gnome is the most usable DE in linux, and a default for major distributions for a reason. It’s simple, it’s coherent, pretty much never breaks and just in general designed to bother you as less as possible so you can just do your work. KDE tries to satisfy anyone with all kinds of options, but as a result most of such options are half baked…

> general designed to bother you as less as possible so you can just do your work

I have heard this so many times about Gnome yet no one explains how a desktop environment can "bother" a user so that they can't focus on their work. In fact, Gnome decision to show notification at the top middle of screen is the most distracting thing a DE can do.

I agree that plasmashell does have memory related issue but at least it is not part of the compositor (unlike gnome-shell which is the desktop shell and the compositor using mutter library) so that you can just kill it and restart it without having to logout.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#79
post #29

Tried this with my mother. I had to rebuild the machine with Windows 11 LTSC afterwards. Which she hates but less than Linux which was totally unusable for her. YMMV but this isn't a real option for a lot of people.

Try again with Ubuntu’s Gnome if you’ll have an opportunity. The “problem” with KDE is that it tries to look like and behave similar to Windows, but it’s not, so older people that remembered how to deal with one UI are confused when what looks similar in reality behaves differently. And it results in frustration. Gnome, on the other hand, provides a totally different UI, so user immediately identifies that it is diff…

Gnome is just fucking horrible. I considered that but I know she's going to have problems with dragging title bars an accidentally clicking something.

I did just consider buying her a Mac Mini and be done with it. That seems, to this day, the most suitable solution.

Re: KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

#80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been pleasantly surprised at how far I can go using Rider to do .NET development on a Mac. I was able to do pretty much everything, including running SQL Server in a container.

Yeah dude! Did you see linqpad is supported on osx now? I used a Mac for a couple years, last gen Intel, when I was doing mostly node work, but I never really got used to it. One of my coworkers though has been doing full-time .net on a Mac with jetbrains for probably about 2 years now and he said he's just as productive as before at this point.

I hadn't used LINQPad before, thanks for sharing. Going to try it out.
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