KDE Plasma made getting back to desktop Linux after 15 years of macOS an easy task. Despite GNOME often being described as closer to macOS and Plasma closer to Windows I've found that no DE comes close to the configurability and polish that Plasma has. Congratulations!
Same experience here. I was getting fed up with every new gnome release taking away more features and at the same time was missing the niceties of macOS. Decided to give plasma a try and it quickly turn into my daily driver. No need for gnome tweaks, or even confit files, right-click whatever I want to change and there’s a setting to change it!
And here! I switched from Mac to a Framework with Ubuntu/GNOME six months ago. Switched to Fedora/KDE Plasma this week and it's been so much better--everything is so much more discoverable.
That said, Dolphin just got a bug where it crashes during thumbnail generation, and I'm seeing artifacts in Wayland with fractional scaling, but the KDE bug system is very visible and easy to navigate, so that I'm pretty confident these will be fixed soon. (I did know what I was getting into when I left Apple for the Wild West.)
gnome is not closer to macOS. sadly gnome is coopted into making bad decisions under the guise of copying macOS.
As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics.
So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.
Oooh, coopted? That makes sense. I've always felt like Gnome's direction is exactly the pathetic outcome that would occur when 20 devs in a trenchcoat try to act like Steve Jobs, but I never dug into the specifics.
GNOME started down their current path through a combination of Easel (started by the people who designed the Macintosh) designing nautilus and icon sets and trying to get the desktop to be more cohesive and Sun pushing hard on accessibility which also meant making things clear and consistent. Those influences were boiled down into the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines which all apps are supposed to follow.
The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.
yeah. gnome become this mess exactly by the time most laptops OEM were jumping in on the netbook fad... and some of them started to ship laptops boasting linux in the marketing campaign, because, well, they needed something that ran well on low powered 2003 devices with little batteries. most used ubuntu, which was ubuntu the company's goal at the time btw.
then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app
Gnome introduced a hard-dependency on systemd (and later denied it / claimed it had been an accident) in what looked very much like a deliberate move to force distros to ship systemd.
Not parent , GNOME is not a community project, there seems to be one or a few big ego persons that do not even use GNOME and that push a "vision".
Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible.
Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff.
But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.
Their relentless push of design choices that I find intolerable is what eventually drove me to ditch Gtk in favor of Qt for my personal projects, and leave Xfce in favor of Plasma on my desktop. What a relief it has been. It's important to me that my UI be something I actually want to use.
I always preferred Qt over GTK just from quality POV, if you are not a C++ hater then Qt is perfect for cross platform professional looking apps.
And about this designers forcing their shit on users, I hit lately a issue with GTK apps where the windows of the app and popups are hard coded and you can't resize them. Because of my bad eyes I use a giant font size and this apps are unusable (I need to research if is possible to trick this windows at runtiem that they are allowed to resize)
I will always love KDE! When I first used it, I said to myself, "How is this free!?"
I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo.
I just wish they had enough resources. KDE is the hope for the future of free software. I hope Valve can help them become mainstream. Just waiting for the day a big corpo will appear and make Linux compete with macOS and Apple's hardware directly.
Thats what happens when you allow engineers to do engineering stuff. I just wish there was a way to turn projects such as kde into commercial success stories, without compromising open source, privacy and tech. If financed properly kde and similar projects can survive long term.
Incorrect. The open source license is LGPL. If you dynamically link you can even keep your app code proprietary. If you want to statically link Qt then your code must be LGPL, but that also doesn't prevent you from selling the product.
If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.
That's interesting. I expect for most common purposes LGPL and dynamic linking are probably fine, but it's good that there is a workaround for static linking.
Apple's mergeable libraries are basically dynamic libraries, but I expect on Apple platforms you'd have to provide the library source anyway since it won't be included in the OS. Of course I've never figured out how to download the LGPL source code from an iOS app - presumably there is a way other than just searching for it via google or github?
Apparently distributing object files for relinking on incompatible Unices used to be a fairly common practice in the early 90s[1], although I don’t know if it was ever done for LGPL compliance.
Yeah, I am mistaken but you do have to give away source to your product because of the viral nature of the LPGL. So it's not completely free to do what you want. And I've always been suspicious of the dynamic linking loophole.
The so-called dynamic linking loophole applies to the GPL, not the LGPL. An LGPL library can be linked and distributed with a closed source program if the end user is able to replace the library with a build of their own.
The loophole you're referring to involves creating a generic plugin interface that allows the program to use any library as long as it meets the requirements of the plugin system. If the program can function even when no plugins are present, the program cannot be said to be derivative of any plugin; it's the plugins that depend on the program, not vice versa. Therefore, you could for example develop an open source plugin that extends the functionality of your program and depends on GPL'd components and distribute that plugin binary and its source code with your closed source application.
Free as in keeping the source to your product closed-source. Otherwise you have to buy a license if you want to keep it close-source while statically linking it.
The terrible part is where if you pay for a commercial license to use it in a proprietary application, you can't stand within 50 feet of the LGPL version.
“Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, or use Licensed Software for creation of any such software.
So you can't use KDE to write a program that links against the proprietary QT libraries.
I think what it's saying is that you can't use licensed Qt to create software that uses both it and OSS Qt, not that you can't use software that uses OSS Qt to create software that uses licensed Qt.
KDE was created with open source Qt. As in, the developers that wrote KDE used the LGPL version of Qt.
To repeat myself, “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt.
Oh goodness, I'm so sorry you had to repeat yourself.. The reason I started my question by saying "forgive me if I'm missing something obvious" is because I'm no expert on licensing issues and was asking a genuine question.
I think you have a different definition of "open source" than I do at least. LGPL is (IMHO) a true open source license.
I agree though that some licensing changes would really help them grow. I think they've hurt long term adoption in exchange for short term revenue. I don't blame them, baby needs new shoes after all, but as a huge fan of Qt I would love to see them become a standard. The product is good enough that they deserve it, but the license can be a bit scary for people who aren't already familiar with it.
Qt's site does seem to be trying to scare you into believing that you can't possibly comply with the LGPL and you really really should buy the commercial license, for your own sake.
LGPL isn't really that onerous though..
However, new modules in Qt 6 and any rewrites of modules Qt 5-> 6are now GPL, which is rather copy-left and will spread to the rest of your code.
>However, new modules in Qt 6 and any rewrites of modules Qt 5-> 6are now GPL
That's very surprising, it would make upgrading from Qt 5 to Qt 6 a no-no for the small companies who use Qt LGPL. I'm sure they want to keep developer mindshare. Which LGPL Qt 5 modules became GPL in Qt 6?
caveat is that, quite a few pieces here and there are not LGPL, and it's not so easy for beginners to figure out how to do it the right way, I was one of them.
> charge premium for those who need your professional service to make profits
How exactly does that work? Why would the company invest a lot in the library if they can just offer professional services without it? For example, KDAB already offer professional services around Qt and do not need to spend much in R&D.
I remember being so impressed using KDE Konqueror for the first time where the filer and browser were seamlessly integrated in one style of window -- this was a big deal and not imitated enough.
That was technically impressive no doubt, but I think it was itself probably inspired by Windows' explorer.exe, which used to work the same way: you could enter an HTTP address in the file explorer address bar and suddenly it became a web browser.
Konqueror took it a bit further though by supporting other schemes like FTP, SFTP, and anything else that had a KIO[1] implementation.
Using the SFTP KIO backend was awesome. Was super impressed being able to copy/paste files between tabs in Konqueror, with both tabs being SFTP servers! FUSE is still catching up.
I think Konqueror also supported man:// URLs, and those man pages were always nicely formatted.
dunno if it was inspired or obvious, but I remember the Konqueror window didn't flicker or the icons change jarringly when going from filesystem to web.... That's what made all the difference.
But it was a long time ago, and I might be mistaken.
After 20 years and a hundred dozen frameworks, Qt's C++ widget SDK is still the best designed API I have worked with. I haven't worked with it in years, but it was a great time.
Slightly off-topic, but related to Qt's LGPL license: how are random users actually supposed to obtain the source code to an LGPL library that is included with an app distributed in binary form?
For example, in Safari>Help>Acknowledgments there's lots of licensing information, including a lengthy LGPL section of fine print, but they really don't make it obvious how to get the LGPL source code. (It does seem to be on github, but there is no mention of that in the text.)
And I really have no idea how to download the GPL/LGPL source code from a random iOS app.
Shouldn't there be a download button or something for each GPL or LGPL component? (Maybe from the internet archive or gnu.org or something that is expected to persist longer than the average github/gitlab/bitbucket/sourceforge/etc. repo?)
I did the research for the requirements to use Qt LGPL before (NOTE: idk if all these things are required, maybe the Qt Company is exaggerating when they claim all these things are required, someone more familiar with LGPL please chime in).
1. Product manual must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL
2. Graphical software (desktop or terminal) must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL. Usually this goes in Help -> About/Acknowledgements.
3. If the customer requests the source code, you must provide it on request. They can contact you and you mail them a USB flash drive or download link. Most companies seem to pre-emptively place the source on their website and include a link to it.
4. You must allow the user to rebuild/replace the Qt libraries your program uses, including instructions on how to do this if it's not trivial.
So in your case, simply email the developer and request the LGPL source code and instructions on how to build/replace the product's LGPL libraries.
How would I find out their email address if it's not listed?
Occasionally I've tried contacting the developer via the "app support" link in the app store. Much of the time it's broken. Other times no contact information is provided. And of the times that there was actually a way to contact the developer, I've only rarely been able to get a response.
The good ol’ days when the internet was the battleground for harmless religious wars to decide spaces vs tabs, vim vs emacs, braces vs indentation, static vs dynamic typing, OOP vs FP, Windows vs Mac!
Now it’s all donkeys and elephants, trolls and partisans.
the harmless discussions were boring filler for the interesting ones. but we lost them all.
The discussion GPL vs the corps. The corps wanted to use linux for free and make money. they won when linus gave up and added "tainted" message. now everyone just skin the reference implementation and ship a vulnerable modem or iot and we like that.
Google and samsung ships billions of android devices *with no source code for most of the system* and we think that is fine and that android is open source and that linux is healthy when all it does is host a bunch of binary blobs for every piece of the hardware.
then we had discussions on hosted GPL vs the corps. Where the corps won again when we all gave up and came up with the agpl compromise. aws business model is "bigger Cpanel, with more OSS software we get for free". They sold RH business model to everyone who thought RHEL was too expensive, by charging even more. genius.
yea.. well.. gpl/etc fight was lost. On the upside, we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole. Through usage of gpl software, even in non-compliant way, were created a whole lot of companies (and jobs) and products that are widely used. Without it we might have had 1% of current selection and it would have been based on vxworks and totally locked down.
no, i don't assume that we would have been using dead/dated tech. There probably would have been new tech, but much less of it. Open source lowered threshold for developing new solutions, both boxed and *aaS. I worked in a bunch of startups, mostly in network and security areas. Without open source most of them wouldn't have been possible or not viable
