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KDE beats macOS

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Re: KDE beats macOS

#91

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

throwntoday wrote: post #9

> 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.

Honestly I use macOS because I like my MacBook Air and having access to a somewhat proper version of Office but all these discussions are weird to me.

Installing Linux takes literally the same amount of time than any other OS and if you are a developer, it just works. It was on every machines at a previous company and well, it worked fine.

To be honest, even Windows mostly works fine nowadays. I’m still puzzled by why the animation of their expose equivalent takes so long but apart from that I don’t remember feeling that an OS was in my way for ages.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#92

Post by spython »

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…

I use forklift as my main file manager, it has a lot of power user features, and a button to open terminal in the current folder is one of them – https://binarynights.com/

Re: KDE beats macOS

#93

Post by jeswin »

sirn wrote: post #85
jeswin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Personally, I found the opposite to be true. Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.

> Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default.

Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background? Social apps and web apps I understand.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#94

Post by masukomi »

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.…

> 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".

You can "just drag", but if you alt/option drag you get a copy operation instead of a move operation.

Sure, using option/alt to get a copy isn't "intuitive", but that wasn't the point. The point was to note that the consistency in macOS is such that even less known things like alt dragging has been consistently implemented essentially everywhere.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#95

Post by interpol_p »

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…

There's a mix, I think. Some of it is what you are used to, and some things just plain make more sense to humans.

I remember when I first came to macOS from Windows (around 2003), these were the things that made me wonder why they were ever done any other way:

- Volumes simply had names! No "C:/" drive or "D:/" drive. Just "Macintosh HD" or whatever name the mounted volume was given. I felt the names were more intuitive than arbitrary "drive letters"

- Installing an app: drag it into /Applications. Uninstalling, delete it from /Applications. Felt way more intuitive than Windows

- File organisation felt more sensible. There was /Library for all my system files, and then ~/Library for all my user level system files. Each one had the same directories, it was really easy to understand

- Not having to install drivers

- Every app appeared to have the same shortcuts and the same common menu items. Preferences was always Cmd+, or App Name -> Preferences... in the menu.

- Drag and drop appeared to work everywhere. The OS clearly indicated via the icon being dragged, previewed things, in a way that Windows never did

- My Mac laptops went to sleep when closing the lid. And woke up instantly when opening the lid. I don't know if you remember Windows laptops in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but they did not sleep consistently, wake up consistently, they would crash, etc.

These were a few of the things I found more intuitive on Mac. There were other things I liked better (but weren't necessarily more intuitive)

Re: KDE beats macOS

#96

Post by tyfon »

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 actually switched to an iphone around 2.5 years ago since teams wouldn't run properly on my old android and the offerings from my company instead of iphone (huawei and samsung) didn't really appeal to me.

Now 2.5 years later I switched back due to not being able to make friends with the apple UI despite trying for that long. It feels so constrained and inconsistent to me.

The pixel phone I got now is a dream in comparison. The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock. The

Switching either way was not really a pain for me as I never go all in on something so I just had to find app replacement.

As a note to the article itself, I also run KDE on arch linux on both my work and private computers and since it matured from the 4.0 transition mess it has just been great I think. Having used linux as my desktop os since ~94-95 I am just a huge question mark when someone puts me down in front of mac os!

Re: KDE beats macOS

#97

Post by paulryanrogers »

tpush wrote: post #63
jeswin wrote: 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…

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.

It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#98

Post by constantlm »

Several of the things listed are false (like the lack of ability to open files with your keyboard, which you can do with cmd-⬇) and app window switching (cmd+~)

Re: KDE beats macOS

#99

Post by oleg_antonyan »

I had to stop the job interview when suddenly they said that I must use Mac. They ship MacBook to you and you have no choice of using Linux or anything else. Corporate policy. It's literally unusable for me after 15+ years on Linux with KDE (mostly). Tried Mac for 4 months at one of the previous jobs but escaped to a comfort zone. Sometimes habits are too strong, and alternative is not appealing enough.

Re: KDE beats macOS

#100

Post by sirn »

jeswin wrote: post #93
sirn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I found the opposite to be true. Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.

> Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background ? Social apps and web apps I understand.

I personally do not like using web apps and usually try to use desktop version whenever possible. Of these examples:

- Obsidian for note taking. Configured to sync with Obsidian Sync.

- OmniFocus as my personal GTD. Configured to sync with Omni Sync Server, and also sync to my phone (though on Linux I use OmniFocus for Web)

- Clockify (Desktop) for time tracking. Required for work.

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