I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
I'm using KDE on Debian / Wayland because I was forced to [0]. I moved to it from from Gnome, which I was forced to use for similar reasons.
I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.
Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.
[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.
i'm in a similar boat -- i miss being able to tap the super key. i don't mind that the defaults are different, but i'm sad that (since it's considered a modifier key) KDE doesn't allow it to be bound on tap. this prevents me from replicating Gnome's behavior.
On Gnome, the Super (Windows) key does an Expose (show windows reduced-size and non-overlapping) and lets you launch applications (and more).
On KDE 5, the Super key brings up the Application Launcher, which is nice. And Super+W (which isn't too painful to type) does an Expose. But it would be nice if there was an option for Super to do an Expose and bring up Application Launcher.
Yeah, the Gnome Super key hit the sweat spot for me too. As you say, all the things you wanted the desktop to do are available from that one easy to reach button - swapping between windows, pick something from the launcher menu and text search the applications. KDE has so many configuration options it can emulate just about everything Gnome does - but it can't mimic that exactly.
Gnome (and systemd) seems to want to emulate macOS mostly, and as user of macOS I'm not sure why you would want to do that. But macOS has nothing that matches Super key exactly - so well done to Gnome for that innovation.
That button makes me consider whether my sway setup is worth it, as sometimes I think Gnome can achieve something similar. And even with less cognitive load, sometimes!
The "Overview" effect does all that. Switch window, switch desktop, launch apps, drag windows to different desktops and monitors, etc. In KDE5 it appears to be in the list under Workspace→Workspace Behavior→Desktop Effects→Window Management. …I think I may have had to edit `kwinrc` to get it to bind to just Meta without another key, though:
> I'm loving Plasma 6 so far. Wayland support is much better!
I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.
I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?
I'd imagine XWayland Xorg emulation is far from perfect so I wouldn't be surprised if games that depend on that would crash.
That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.
The thing that you have to remember about Xwayland is that it is Xorg. It just has a Wayland DDX[0] on the back end rather than a device-specific DDX or one that talks e.g., directly to the modesetting driver.
[0] Device-Dependent X, i.e., the bits of X that talk directly to the display. Contrasted with Device-Independent X (DIX), i.e., the bits that do state tracking and protocol communication with clients.
If a game doesn't work in Wayland, you could always launch it in gamescope[1], which AFAIR doesn't expose WAYLAND_DISPLAY by default, so games should treat it the same as an X11 desktop.
I haven't had anything flat out refuse to work on Wayland, but unfortunately Discord won't work right. It runs, but it can't detect that you're AFK any more, so you stop getting messages on the mobile app. It's a bummer because otherwise I would love to use Wayland.
There's a large amount of robustness improvements, particularly around multi-monitor and docking scenarios with dynamic and fractional DPI. We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor crash and restart.
We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.
We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).
More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.
Performance work.
Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.
Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.
Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.
I installed plasma6 on my Framework 13 running NixOS this morning, and it was the first time in my life that not only did fractional scaling work out-of-the-box, but it automatically picked the appropriate scale! Love when the little things work so well. Thank you!
I'm not sure if it has anything to do with KDE itself or if it's Kubuntu's fault but one small annoyance I've dealt with is how my wacom drawing tablet is mapped to the screen space. I've had to manually map it so that the tablet touch space isn't spread across three monitors and I've also had this setting get reset. I'm really excited to see more support for multiple monitors coming down the pipe. Do you know anything about the tablet issue or is this something I just need to do some more research on?
Actually you can configure all of this with xsetwacom. I don’t remember the exact commands and it’s mildly tricky but after that you get a configuration file that shouldn’t move (or that you can backup).
Super excited to play around with this on my Steam Deck! Wayland support was actually one of the main reasons I left KDE on my primary machine, eventually in favor of Sway. Really glad to see so much progress has been made on that front :)
That RDP screen sharing is very interesting. Does it require an open session attached to a real screen, or is starting headless remote sessions possible?
Interesting, I just posted a question to Reddit about this[1] but I have been testing and using KRdp myself for a while. I'm one of those users who (due to blah blah blah) must use Wayland, but also must have some remote desktop capability (to connext to my Linux GUI environment).
For this reason, I was stuck on Fedora GNOME for a long while, because only they had it.
KRdp[2][3] looks promising, even though (like GNOME) it requires a GUI session to exist first, before you can connect via RDP. But there are ways to deal with that if you really gotta have it.
But this support is not actually implemented in any app in KDE Plasma 6, is it? My understanding is that it is possible, but there is no built-in functionality to take advantage of it. More "you can build an RDP server now that will work on Wayland" than "there is an RDP server that has been released". (I think?)
I believe[1] this is just attaching to an open session.
From what I have read, login sessions require integration with a login manager, and from what I understand that work isn't done yet (this work being a prerequisite).
It seems[2] that gnome is going to support this in a future release (march?)?
I'm sure KDE will have something similar in the works eventually. I currently use xrdp/xorg-xrdp for headless remote login sessions, and while it works ok, I would love to switch to using something more integrated into kde itself.
also in next point Plasma releases we'll focus to make its experience more out of the box, to be able to configure it from System Settings and what not
>We've also introduced technology to allow client apps to stay running should the compositor crash and restart
Sweet this is one of the reasons I gave up on KDE 5 I tried a couple months ago. Some combination of KVM and amdgpu was causing crashes (I think something to do with hotplugging displays and Wayland) and it seemed like everything downstream got nuked as well
It's safer as every program is isolated but it crashes more often because programs are isolated and expect not to be isolated. I often switch back to x11 whenever I try it I think nice it's fast and has bells and whistles but there basics aren't there. It took x11 a LONG time to be usable so I expect the same with Wayland.
Faster, better support for multiple screens with different geometry, safer, and ultimately maintained. Also, at this point, it works really well, and honestly is not a drag on the user. I moved to Wayland last December and have really enjoyed it. I'm using the KDE Neon distribution, and it's really really really nice.
I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)
I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.
It's great to see, though my main gripe with KDE right now is Dolphin, the file manager. It tries to do everything but is just ever so slightly buggy in every way, it can't run as root, and asks to confirm saving twice every single time when editing a networked file. As much as it is less featured and ugly, Nautilus was less annoying to use.
Dolphin is legitimately my favorite KDE program. My experience is that it's a phenomenal productivity tool. Being able to quickly open or close a terminal. How customizable the ordering and appearance and columns are. Easy to manipulate tabs.
I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?
Nah, but I would occasionally like to move things around outside of /home without doing it manually in the terminal. I'm not sure why that's such a problem.
Dolphin can do that! You'll need to install kio-admin and you'll get an option to "open folder as root". After you authenticate, you'll be able to e.g. move files in /etc/
I promise not to tell you "you're doing it wrong" but I would love to know what your use case is. What files are you moving so often, and why? Thank you.
I wonder, why are more people not using Krusader? I understand it is a nuclear bomb for killing mosquitos, but with a bit of tweaking it can be fast and easy to use; plus, when you really need the big guns, you have them right there.
Well open source project leaders don't tend to be CEO likes that are far removed from the actual work. They are usually just regular contributors (well often the most active one) that have taken on the leadership role because someone has to.
Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")
I use Debian Testing which trails release by a couple of versions. I search the bug in the Bugzilla, and if it's not filed, I file the bug. Sometimes it's marked as a duplicate (but additional feedback is useful), sometimes new, but very rarely a duplicate of a closed bug.
So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.
I don't know how much it affects priority, but they certainly accept bugs filed against older versions. Specifying versions is a big part of the form for a new bug, and they let you select versions going way back.
I have a feeling they wouldn't accept bugs filed against NixOS, however, considering the huge number of patches applied.
Which is a problem. NixOS remains by far the least aggravating OS I know, and... yeah. I wish there existed a desktop environment that played well with it.
I second my sibling comment -- just submit a bug. I think you are wrong that they would ignore it just because their context is somewhat different. Linux is full of differences like this.
But also: Isn't one of the main benefits of NixOS that you can fairly painlessly get and try different versions of things? Just see if you can reproduce the bug in the same version of upstream. If so, file the bug with kde, if not, file the bug with NixOS because it's presumably caused by one of the patches.
This concern is a bit overblown here. There are 23 KDE patches at the moment, across multiple packages. kwin itself has 5, plasma-desktop has 4. Each one has an extremely limited scope - mostly one line changes related to paths rather than visible functionality.
If you have a specific issue under nixos, it's going to be fairly easy to see if it's very unlikely to be caused by custom patches.
From my experience, reproducibility is king. If you can give a formula to reproduce a bug, even if it is obscure, it makes it so much easier to track down.
That can be up to and including a downloadable VM image that shows the issue.
They have accepted bugs from NixOS before (there are nearly a 100 marked as "NixOS Linux" at bugs.kde.org), and I don't see any major reason they would stop. It's true there are many patches for the KDE libraries and Plasma, but realistically most of them are fairly "procedural" changes to adapt to non-FHS layouts, etc.
For reference I count about ~66 patch files among the KDE expression in nixpkgs as of today, including Plasma, all libraries, and related apps. Most of them are in the range of 20 lines long, and they are .patch files, i.e. the actual applied diff is smaller than that. The largest patch is barely 190 lines long and it's for Akonadi, mostly rewriting hardcoded FHS paths throughout the codebase.
I agree there are some quirks with most desktop environments on NixOS in my experience but realistically there's a huge amount of stuff in the ecosystem that plays anywhere from well-to-poorly in such environments, and the Linux desktop stack definitely was not designed at a time where this stuff was common. It is what it is, I guess.
FWIW your attitude is correct in general. When you have a bug with a distro package and you haven't root-caused it yourself to a bug in upstream source, the best thing is to report it on the distro tracker. The distro package maintainer can then do that root-causing, and if they determine it's an upstream bug they can forward it to upstream.
This is how it used to work (and still does with enterprise distros, because you might as well use the support contract you paid for). But users these days have gotten savvy enough to start engaging with upstream directly, especially since many upstreams have made it easier to be engaged with by using GitHub etc instead of mailing lists etc.
Sometimes engaging directly with upstream works, as it apparently does with KDE according to other comments in this thread. Sometimes upstream gets annoyed because they only care about their tree, eg systemd devs get annoyed when users report bugs that have long been fixed in master, but still exist in an old stable release that happens to be the latest on some LTS distro. It depends on the project, so when in doubt start with the distro tracker.
I am using KDE on NixOS and IME there are no issues except the occasional screen freeze on X11 with Nvidia cards (and none with Wayland, you read that right!). Filed bugs and merged changes too.
I don't know how long it will take KDE 6 to arrive on Ubuntu LTS, but there have been several networking improvements to KDE Connect in this release (including supporting mDNS and bluetooth for more reliable operation), so possibly it may be better for your use case now?
You can always add the NEON repos to get KDE 6 on Ubuntu LTS. I'm running with that right now on 22.04. Be sure to also add a repo to get newer Pipewire, as that really helps to avoid many papercuts.
> anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time.
And "resolved" like [0] which is a 9 year old regression is marked "resolved upstream" becase KDE devs refuse to implement a workable solution FOR KDE like there used to be in 3.x and 4.x and instead require a perfect solution that will never happen as can be seen by the bug report's age. Not worth my time to report bugs if they will be treated like this.
I'm sure you can find a similar example for any significant FOSS project, including GNOME, but that doesn't mean it is a general stance adopted by developers when a new bug report comes in.
> KDE should probably invest in better defaults if these need tweaking.
We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.
This is an excellent illustration of why "better defaults" is a gateway to endless bikeshedding. One person's "better defaults" are another person's "why?"
The only "better" defaults are those that match what people already know, not necessarily because they're objectively better but because most people will already know how to use them. You literally can't get a learning curve better than "you already know it".
Konsole has had tabs at the bottom for about 25 years now (I don't recall KDE 1.x, but they were definitely there in 2.x). Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who already uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a subset of users who might switch to KDE and expect them at the top?
More importantly, is the position of tabs -- especially one that you can change! -- like, a real, actual problem?
>Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who already uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a subset of users who might switch to KDE and expect them at the top?
In KDE's case the "you can just customize it" works both ways though. They could change the defaults and instead and let old users customize it back to the old way it was, rather than every new user customizing it. It comes across as a pretty weak argument.
The reality is that most users are simply bitterly opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the change is actually an improvement that helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet exist through UI improvements) actually has happened before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised, versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-represented) that is here.
Developers of the project have to balance these concerns as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean every decision and plan in the project is going to revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.
They shouldn't require wasting time to get the old behavior, though, that's indeed alienating, it should instead be saved to user config and preserved on updates
They "of course never arrive" because of course you never implemented the proper match in behavior
But the old users can have it too, that's what configurability is for, just save the state to user config and don't change any such behavior on upgrades, only for fresh installs
Look to Mozilla and Ubuntu to see and organization and a company that "bet the farm" on new users by systematically breaking everything we loved them for.
The problem with these (and many other UX initiatives) is there isn't a fallback for us who used them from the start.
The lack of fallback is a problem, but that's a different one. And there are even more examples of orgs that didn't bet on new users and simply died off (though that didn't stop them from breaking things)
Prioritizing the needs of potential new users may bring you actual new users, but not prioritizing those of existing users may send some of them away. How do you know which group is bigger?
Sure, the group of potential users is massive but not all of them will switch. Meanwhile you're making software worse for people who actually use it and, at least for FOSS software, are usually your biggest advocates, part of the developer base, and one of the most important means through which new users are brought in.
Now you’re assuming that the group that would switch is bigger than the group that appreciates the tabs at the bottom. I doubt that the tabs at the bottom are the main reason people wouldn’t switch to KDE.
Not only this, but who exactly uses Konsole? It's certainly not grandma, who you set up with a KDE laptop. She's not going to know what to do with the command line, and even if she did need to use it for some weird reason one day under your direction, she sure as hell isn't going to open multiple tabs in Konsole.
The people using Konsole are already the highly technical people, and therefore probably not newbie users.
KDE had exactly that back in its 3.x era, actually. It had a first run wizard that allowed you to choose things like whether you open things with a single or a double click, and options were largely organised based on platforms with similar conventions (as in, it had options like "single click selects, double click opens (Windows style)"). It was remarkably friction-free actually, people could just pick the mode that they were already familiar with and that was that. It had all the good parts of "the right default" (i.e. the "right" default was always the one you liked best) and required exactly one click to configure.
Zorin OS takes this approach (and pretty far). At first boot you get to select Windows, Mac, Unity or Zorin style and it shifts a bunch of things around based on that.
It would be nice for KDE to have three presets: Windows, Mac, and Classic (= KDE).
I only very rarely use konsole tabs at all (I prefer multiple windows), but when I do, I appreciate that they're at the bottom of the screen. That tends to be where my attention is when I'm using konsole.
I can't say which position is the "right" one, but I also noticed different distros have different defaults on where the tabs are positioned.
It's cool that KDE lets you do that, but it's a bit annoying actually as it messes with the consistency of KDE. Sure, users can always change their preference to what suits them best, but it would be nice if out of the box all KDEs behaved and looked the same and leave the personalization to the user after installation.
I'm guessing because tabs on top push the terminal down, moving all the text and maybe being distracting while reading since we are mostly reading from the top of the terminal buffer.
People like tabs right next to the area they look at most of the time.
In browsers, that's always at the top. In terminals, depending on if you're a heavy user (and as result, the prompt is at the bottom) or a light user (and the prompt is at the top), you'll likely prefer tabs to be in the same area, too.
I've actually got different settings for taskbar position and terminal tab position between my work ubuntu, personal ubuntu, and personal windows systems.
For me it's a Windows/Mac thing - if you're a Mac user, you're used to having a menu bar at the top, and you're always up around the top, so top tabs feel right.
When I was on Windows, the Start Menu/taskbar was on the bottom, and bottom tabs felt right (as they became available).
I think it took you longer to ask that question than it does to move the tabs to where you want them. Personally I have them on the bottom and like it.
Most useful software that badly needs usability improvements has a group of people that just got used to it, and they will complain bitterly about any attempt to correct UI mistakes. If it’s customizable, they can configure it back after making improvements so it’s useful to everybody else, too. I hate the way gnome is set up, and welcome any updates to KDE with open arms.
> If it’s customizable, they can configure it back after making improvements so it’s useful to everybody else, too.
That is still creating needless work for existing users. Change the default for new users if you must but the update for existing users should be transparent unless they explicitly op into changes.
Heh, in the meantime modern Gnome doesn't have a Taskbar at all, because it "is not ok to distract users with a list of other things they could be doing when they have already selected one task to look at"...
There are merits to the GNOME design philosophy. My Sway workflow and customizations are actually inspired quite a bit by GNOME. I don't use any taskbar or system tray. I don't even have a clock; I open a terminal and check the date command if I want to know the time. I make heavy use of workspaces rather than "minimizing" (Sway calls this the scratchpad or something like that, which I only use if I want to "background" graphical applications). I have absolutely no flashy styling or animations; I simply use nord where I can.
It's not for everyone. It would be next to impossible for someone to sit at my computer and be productive, because I have accumulated my configuration over years, with no real thought into making things that I configured discoverable (I know it's there because I put it there). But it works really well for me. I find the ability setup a workspace how I want for one task, and then switching workspaces to context switch to be very nice.
I do something very similar in KDE with a whole bunch of virtual desktops. Though I do use a taskbar because I like the overview of it but I don't actually use it to switch tasks :)
I always thought Gnome was not very useful for this because workspaces are created on the fly whereas I want to have them spatially oriented in a fixed grid that persists on every boot with the right application tiles in them. And I have hotkeys mapped to each one directly on the numpad (without key combos, I hate those). So my numpad is not a numpad at all but a workspace switcher :P
The problem with the gnome design philosophy is that it only works for you if you agree with them on everything. If you're pretty opinionated yourself (as I am and it sounds like you are too), opinionated software only works well if you have the exact same opinions as its creators. With something as complex as a DE this will run into many mismatches quickly. This is why configurable software is so great if you're not willing to compromise on how you want things.
I absolutely agree that it's nice for this to exist as an option for users who are used to it. I'm a somewhat heavy emacs user, so I'm not at all opposed to esoteric workflows.
But I think it's clearly proven to be a bad design as a default. Discoverability is very important, especially to people who work a lot with a mouse. And using multiple apps at the same time is a very common work flow, one that an always-on-screen task switcher makes much simpler than an alternate view you have to bring up, especially if that alternate view also obscures all of your windows.
I will also say I find workspaces a hard to use UI, as I always lose context when I have to switch workspace, but maybe this is just how my mind works. And the idea of one-task-per-workspace has never worked well for me, as there are several apps that I use in every task, such as chat or email while I'm coding and while doing a presentation and while writing some design. It also seems to require a lot of setup and discipline.
Finally, as a nitpick, moving apps to a different workspace instead of minimizing to taskbar/systray seems like much more work to me.
Personally I'm a huge fan of Win7's grouped taskbar with window previews, along with its window snap support (extended in Win 10).
I'd say workspaces aren't for everyone, and you're right: they require setup and discipline or else the context switching is too disruptive. I think they're good if you can organize them effectively with separate tasks on the different workspaces, such that you don't need to switch between them frequently: this way, you can minimize distractions from other tasks that you're not working on currently, and might not work on for hours or days even.
For the chat and email stuff, as long as you have screen space (or if you don't mind them going to the background sometimes), you can set those windows to be on every workspace. KDE has a thumbtack icon that you can click in the window bar to make that window show on every desktop.
> Finally, as a nitpick, moving apps to a different workspace instead of minimizing to taskbar/systray seems like much more work to me.
I specifically want to reply to this, because it is not at all how I use workspaces. I almost never find myself moving an application from one workspace to another. Instead, I switch to a new workspace before opening the application (causing the application to open on the new workspace), unless I know I want to use the new application at the same time as an application on an existing workspace. Switching workspaces essentially replaces alt+tab in my workflow.
The way I always thought of it is that the taskbar generally just can at best have a limited set of applications listed and takes up precious vertical monitor space, so its mostly limited to the overview/activities since that is the "I want to change apps" mode of the desktop and is just 1 click away (either super or top-left on the desktop).
Then again I am one of the (probably) few people that would probably even do away with the top bar currently still in GNOME and not have anything other than the app visible by default.
I use to be annoyed at the behavior as well when I started using GNOME, but at some point I actually started preferring it and now barely use the taskbar on Windows.
I remembered it as a version of what some Gnome designer claimed, but I tried searching for some statement on the topic and I couldn't find any explicitly mentioning it.
I don’t want to “but, actually” this, but actually…
Gnome does what it does because Gnome is not intended to be the final form of a DE that the user uses. Gnome is intended to be a DE that distros can make their own by adding their own opinionated choices, extensions and modifications on top.
So while you complain about the lack of a vertical taskbar, in actual practice, outside of maybe Fedora users (which is essentially a distro largely designed to be used as a test bed), nearly every other Gnome user does have some form of taskbar because their distro included it, or they did a 1-click install from the Extensions app.
I don't agree. Reading Gnome designers' blogs makes it pretty clear that they strongly believe in these decisions as the best UX. Looking around Gnome reddit there's also plenty of people who like this minimalism and think it's actually superior [2].
That's not to say that the designers are not supportive of the existence of extensions. They clearly do, that's why they make a nice Extensions app in the first place. But they never say "yeah, we made it as barebones as possible to make it easy for extensions". They explain why it's better for users not to have a minimize button on windows [1], or why they've removed the systray to avoid confusion and so on [0].
That not only depends on preference, but also on hardware. When only using laptop display, most of my windows are full screen. However, when using a 32 inch 4K display, I prefer my windows smaller, often having multiple windows side by side, sometimes tiled.
I'm using KDE for 20 years already because it has great miscellaneous apps (though it's less important in 2024), slick integration between components and nice all-encompassing settings app. I do tweak a few things when I boot up a fresh install, but generally, I don't feel the need to do a deep customization, and am not aware of any missed opportunities.
Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish much more and feels more mature and robust too.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole
project and how users reacted to
the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense).
GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them.
And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita.
There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
> GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default:
There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
> Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours,
Yes it does, but it does not have all the tools that Gimp provides.
> and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default
I need to "destructively" modify images more often than non-destructively.
> There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
You can most likely get some similar result if you play around with the curves but it is certainly not as simple or easy as having a dedicated brightness/contrast filter like you can find in other image editing applications. Having that specialization might feel unnecessary for developers who are used to trying to make things more generic, but from a UX perspective it can be very preferable (if your goal is to make an image editing application - from the perspective of a 2D digital painting application, this sort of specialization may indeed feel like UI bloat).
As i mentioned in my original message it isn't so much that you can't do things in Krita, it is more that the stuff that exist are often clunkier and the more you need outside "2D digital painting", the more limitations and clunkiness you face.
Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general.
And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.
It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP.
Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
That actually mirrors my experience perfectly. But nonetheless, the selection and move UI/UX for moving pixel grids and the tooling for manipulating pixels individually is the only feature that forces me to leave Krita and start GIMP every once in a while. I've moved the entire rest of my workflow to Krita many years ago.
Never heard of Krita, just downloaded it. It starts up way slower than Gimp and the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system. Bleh. It's probably busy spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops, and other bloat. Qt/KDE ecosystem apps are slow and memory-hogging compared to their GTK counterparts.
On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second.
> the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system
Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms).
> spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops
The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
With a reasonable amount of effort you can get Qt apps to look good on GNOME. The same often can't be said about GNOME apps on KDE due to recent pushes of libadwaita, among other things, which greatly hinder the ability for a user to apply system themes.
The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving).
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
> IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop.
In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
IMHO The pinacle of the Windows desktop was Windows 2000. Windows XP was ok except for the default bubble gum theme. We don't talk about Windows Vista and Windows 8. Windows 7 was sort-of ok. Windows 10 is was trying to salvage some of the Windows 8 mess with little success. Can't comment on Windows 11 because I'll stick with Windows 10 as long as possible ;)
I agree with this more when you include how the then current versions of MS Office felt to use.
Ribbons might have a place at the absolute entry level of usability, but they'll never replace a well designed menu system that includes keyboard shortcut documentation in the UI within a super information dense presentation.
I hate the way menu bar is detached from the window/app that it applies to in macOS, but over time I've learned to grudgingly appreciate one thing about this design: it forces the apps to have a menu bar, because if you don't, it is such a visual sore point. So even when designers go nuts with UX layout, which seems to be so common these days, they still have to provide access to various things in the menu bar in a way that is mostly consistent across apps, and in any case is easier to find things in (esp. thanks to menu bar search as standard feature).
Who are you targeting as the main user of this software? Most users do not depend on keyboard shortcuts but rather repeatable actions they can use the mouse for. The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users. Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with “regular users”, no body is complaining about the ribbon…
> Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
So this objection is completely manufactured?
> The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users.
It's 0% of the users who are new to the software, and 90% of the users who have used the software for some time. The UI shouldn't be optimized for people who are only going to use the software a few times unless the software is only meant to be used a few times.
But in the case of office software, what you want is affordances that can be eliminated at the user's own pace while they get to know the software over years or decades. Things like indicating the keyboard shortcut next to the menu entry, which is standard for most UI toolkits. Or things like allowing the "ribbon" to be disabled, which I would be really surprised if you could come up with a reasonable opposition to.
It also annoys infrequent users, because you need to remember into which ribbon they stuffed what you want to do and what icon it uses. With a classical menu bar, the organization tends to be more intuitive (in my experience, at least) and you can skim the different menu items to find what you need.
That seems to depend on the specific version of Office, if the screenshots I looked at are to be believed. Office 2016, for example, doesn't seem to have it.
Edit: Maybe this depends on settings rather than versions? Upon further investigation, I've found some screenshots of Word/PowerPoint 2016 that have a search bar and some that don't.
This almost makes me want to try a Mac. Everyone is copying them, they must be pretty good, right?
I just miss it when my apps had main menus, and dialog windows instead of transitions, and it didn't feel like every window was a browser even when they weren't electron apps... and I miss the window borders, and the colored icons, and when themes weren't just light or dark and...
You'll be disappointed. Even Apple isn't adhering to its own Human Interface Guidelines anymore. It might be the least bad option of the current desktop environments, but that doesn't mean much.
As sibling comment says, you'll be disappointed - and worse, unlike on Windows or Linux there will be no way to change things you don't like. With Apple, it's their way or the highway. For example, they just don't do themes at all, and have slowly deprecated or removed even the basic customization features they used to do well (like changing the icon for a folder).
I recently started using a Mac at work and Gnome aping MacOS is the only thing that makes sense.
The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
As a decade old macOS user, I agree. I don’t want to use macOS after Gnome. I like the new one. It’s 45 now, but I think the major update was either 44 or 43.
Yep, GNOME’s closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
Unity was till 2017, it states. Hmm, what does Ubuntu use now? It’s not the Gnome I use on Fedora. I don’t like (and use) Ubuntu, so I was under impression that it uses Unity to this day.
Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default install, however it has official "flavours" that you can choose from, such as KDE (the Kubuntu flavour), Unity, and others.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
>Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented [link]
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
As the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
Me too! Count me in! Mandriva was my first ever Linux distro! It was so long ago that I forgot it happened. I came to think that was Ubuntu, but it came after Mandriva and after Ubuntu I was on Debian, of course. Now it’s Arch on my laptop and Fedora on my desktops.
OpenSuse is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and nice to use out of the box. It’s also fairly close to the bleeding edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy with it.
IMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my taste.
The one I usually install to normal users who do not know computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also thinking about using oST instead.
I think you have this backwards. KDE has been ahead of windows since the Windows Vista era. KDE4 and Plasma (KDE5) are extremely good and have been borrowed from liberally by the commercial desktops for quite some time.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
I was on Gnome on my laptop until January 2024 (was running KDE on the desktop). I have gotten a Mac laptop for reasons and... I stand by my judgement.
I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes
If GNOME would be following Mac trends, we would get more Vala and less JavaScript, and proper developer tools instead of writing XML based layouts by hand.
KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.
Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
Yes, that’s absolutely what makes the difference in the end.
But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what the clients of the software can do here. You can have great connections with the users but if the core libraries you use doesn't help you to deliver the features you promised, they will leave for other solutions that actually deliver in shorter time while you struggle with GTK. This is exactly what is going on with GIMP.
GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time
Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.
Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.
> But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
There are tons of professional and highly successful apps for content creators that use custom made (and often shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what sell the product.
> But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with.
Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.
The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful.
After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita).
[0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries
In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as successful.
There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices. An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework. A competing framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.
> In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as successful.
I disagree here, i'm certain it would be as successful because the GUI framework is not the reason for Krita's success, it is the functionality it provides and how the developers interact with the community. The GUI framework does not have any image manipulation specific functionality (all of that is implemented by the Krita developers) and the community interaction isn't even a technical thing in the first place.
> There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices.
I did not claim that they are interchangeable (though they can be, depending on the program's design), i even explicitly wrote that taking Qt out of Krita would mean almost rewriting the entire program as it relies heavily on it.
What i claimed was that Qt is not the reason for Krita's success and it could have the same success with other mature toolkits. There is nothing special about Qt aside from being around for long enough time to have its functionality "battle tested". This is not unique to Qt though.
> An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework.
This is the case with any toolkit or really any library that has a lot of applications written against it, assuming the developers do not ignore all bug reports and issues the users of their libraries report.
Also since you brought up Maya specifically, Maya used to be based on the Motif toolkit until Maya 2010 (it was changed to Qt in Maya 2011), which by the same logic would mean that up until 2011, using Motif would be great for professional content creation applications since Maya used it too.
You forget about the desktop integration. At the company I work for we also selected Qt, why, because it has very good integration with many desktops. GTK is terrible in this regard (even support for other desktop on GNU/Linux apart from GNOME is not the best, let alone other OSes). And yes also Qt offers a lot more and is also more intuitive to work with and man the documentation it has, just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the most important but the role of a great toolkit to build on is also very important.
> You forget about the desktop integration [...] the documentation it has, just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the most important but the role of a great toolkit to build on is also very important.
I did not forget it, Qt has great integration and documentation but this was not a comparison of the specific features Qt and some other toolkit like Gtk may have. My claim was that Qt isn't something special that would make Krita successful while using anything else would make it less successful.
I didn't bring those things up because they weren't really relevant for my claim. Also FWIW desktop integration for Krita isn't as important as it'd be for some other types of applications - consider that Krita even comes out of the box with its own themes that it uses instead of trying to "blend in" the underlying desktop looks.
In terms of what Krita does, there isn't any functionality that it uses from Qt that couldn't be found in other toolkits like Gtk - or other libraries. It wouldn't be the same way and certainly not with the same code, but Krita could have been written using a different GUI library and framework and even in a different language and still had the same success because the GUI framework it uses is not why it is successful: it is the functionality the program provides (which was written by the Krita developers themselves) and the communication the developers have with the users (which isn't even something technical).
Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector" fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows), compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional scaling (akin to MacOS).
> Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector" fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows), compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional scaling (akin to MacOS).
This isn't unique to Qt though, other widget toolkits can provide that functionality. In fact LCL/Lazarus provides such fractional scaling even for Gtk itself by doing the scaling "manually" when using the Gtk backend.
I came back to KDE after more than 15 years away and the improvement in Kate is astounding. It has features I would never have expected from the basic text editor.
It was such a pity about Amarok :(
That whole "2.0" debacle put me off the entire KDE ecosystem for years. It's great to see them back on track. But there are still no decent music libraries / players on Linux.
+1 for strawberry, coming from Windows and foobar2000, this is the only music player on Linux really up to the task of playing huge music libraries and doing it well.
Checkout Quod Libet. Better than foobar, which I used through wine for ages. It's just about the only GTK app on my KDE boxen and I gladly make the exception.
Well I've been using Linux exclusively for almost 20 years, and the only music player I'm happy with is MusicBee, which is exclusively Windows only. It used to be a nightmare getting it to run on Linux/wine, and it had a number of annoying bugs, but it's pretty solid now if you've got the very latest wine and a slightly older MusicBee.
Yes, Qt Group is profitable. It’s publicly listed and has a market cap of around $2 billion. So not very big compared to a lot of enterprise software vendors, but could be an interesting acquisition target at this price.
For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I’m guessing an acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead where Qt is apparently doing quite well.
GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat, who basically decides everything related to systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
Can you explain that? How is the workflow like Windows?
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
I agree, especially when it comes to window management and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and everyone hated it! (sound familiar?)
For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.
Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.
But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.
Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.
One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
It's great that it works for your workflow. The problem is that GNOME is very opinionated in that the workflows they enable are the right workflows for everyone, and resist any configurability that would actually make it usable for the rest of us.
Of course, one can always use a different DE, but there's always friction in not going with what the distro you're using picked as their default (and tends to support better in practice). I think a lot of GNOME hate is coming from the users who feel that a DE that does not adequately reflect their workflow is being pushed on them so aggressively by their distros.
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
I use Gnome (and Sway, depending on which computer I'm on). I use Gnome because it works great with wayland, and I just need to get work done, and Gnome does a pretty alright job of staying out of the way. KDE's integration with Wayland feels too clunky for me at this point. Plus I get rendering artifacts on the edge of the screen when I use plasma with screen scaling.
I believe improving Wayland support was one of the major goals of Plasma 6. So if it was just the Wayland integration putting you off, then maybe consider trying Plasma again soon.
I experience some random visual bugs occasionally with Wayland, but yes generally it's decent. But I could understand if someone would want a more stable experience.
Isn't it great, that unlike Windows or Mac, we have a choice! We don't have to try to create something for the lowest common denominator of user, and we can find something that works really well for us, individually.
I like its simplicity and the straight forward workflow it provides. Years ago, I used to use KDE and enjoyed it but these days, I want something that is functional while being vanilla and standard as possible and personally, that's what GNOME gives me.
Fair enough. I guess I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't be interested to make the workflow fit better for yourself on a device you spend hours per day using.
It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.
I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a long way to making me happy and productive. And it doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.
You install a distro that includes Gnome. Did your distro choose not to package a taskbar extension? That’s a good hint your distro is not intended to be an end user distro.
Well it's not a hyperbole, my productivity would suffer immensely if I had to use GNOME. And since GNOME doesn't offer much customisation, I couldn't make it work better for me, which is why I use Plasma. That doesn't mean I hate GNOME or something and I'm glad it exists for the people who do like its approach.
In what ways does Gnome hamper your productivity? Are you really using the DE a lot?
Most of my day is spent in applications. I launch an application and that's where I'm spending my time. I'm not using the desktop environment all that much. I really don't find much difference working in Windows, macOS, KDE or Gnome or even iPadOS as far as interacting with the graphical environment goes.
Yes, absolutely. Perhaps not directly with the DE itself, but the DE affects how I work.
On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I know.
GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential. For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system tray without quiting the application, which reduces visual clutter. I know you can add this with an extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.
I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's equivalent is full screen I believe.
I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the ones I can quickly think of.
> On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.
Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.
As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.
Oh, I didn't know that shortcut for minimizing. Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?
I never really understood how to efficiently use virtual desktops or what their benefits are compared to one desktop. Would you mind to explain?
Well, I would imagine that is because you generally only need extensions on KDE for niche things, while GNOME needs extensions for more 'basic' things. Obviously you don't need an extension for a system tray if one already exists by default.
> Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?
Because GNOME developers mindlessly pursue "minimalism" with religious zealotry, finding an outlet for their frustration of not being good enough to work for the Church of Apple.
I think I see one difference - I'm not trying to use each environment the same. My iPad wants everything to be full screen, so that's how I use it (although I have been playing with Stage Manager). Windows has good support for tiling now, so I use that. On Gnome I lean into the workspace stuff. KDE I don't know as well, so I use the mouse for just about everything.
I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE, and all the other systems were still being developed. But then the Electron / web app people would probably still try to pave over everything cool and unique on each system to run one mediocre app everywhere.
I understand that GNOME has a clear way how it wants you to use the desktop, but I don't like that way for the reasons I described. And it's not just a 'different' way, I feel like I lose functionality and flexibility in a lot of regards. Although, I guess it's hard to say for sure since I never used GNOME for an extended period of time.
That's the beauty of different systems. You always lose functionality no matter which way you switch. A Windows user might miss PowerShell + COM on Linux. A Linux user would miss having access to the filesystem on iOS. An iOS user misses the ubiquitous URL scheme for sharing code and data when they switch to Windows or Linux. I still miss Rexx and the object-oriented workplace shell of OS/2.
I'm sure if you gave GNOME an extended trial, you would adapt and find some things you actually prefer.
> This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars.
You not liking something is not the same as it not being "usable." You simply don't like it as much.
Your comment would be a lot less interesting if it were written without hyperbole. It would simply be "I don't like GNOME as much as KDE." And no one would really care about that, it wouldn't be a notable comment.
You're the only one who takes this 'war' seriously. The rest of us here are adults who can appreciate all desktop environments, even if we don't personally like to use them.
My entire point is that both desktops can be appreciated for what they are. I can use KDE or GNOME, I just prefer GNOME. I would never call KDE unusable, because it works just fine for those who like it.
People who go around saying they "can't use GNOME" because it's "not customizable" without ever even trying would be the ones that are not appreciating all desktops, like an adult.
No one here said that GNOME shouldn't be appreciated. Just because I said GNOME is unusable for me personally doesn't mean I can't appreciate it.
I have tried GNOME before, thanks for your assumption, so I know for a fact it's less customisable than Plasma. But less customisation doesn't equal less value anyways, so I don't even know what your point is.
> except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
I honestly love the variety of options, everyone can find something suitable for themselves!
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues.
Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user.
I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared base system should make troubleshooting significantly easier — possibly an exponential reduction in the possible installed permutations. Thanks for the suggestion!
Switching desktop environments on Linux is absolutely trivial and doesn't require a reinstall though (at least in my experience of switching from GNOME to KDE on Ubuntu, which took a couple of minutes to pull down the KDE packages and then logging out and picking Plasma from a dropdown in the login screen - and if I feel like it I can switch back to GNOME anytime).
It's not trivial. Just installing KDE packages on a GNOME install will work and is quite easy, but will lead to some mix / subtle setting issues, it's less clean than just a brand new install.
Installing and running KDE will mess up GTK settings in GNOME for instance. You might end up with the Breeze GTK theme in the GNOME session. Which works, but this is most likely not wanted (even though GNOME looks great with the Breeze theme).
I'd not advise regular users to do this without a warning.
I haven't seen this on my Linux laptop, but TBH some UI elements in GNOME look so weird in Ubuntu 24 that I'm not sure if it's broken or intended (but already did before installing KDE).
Trivial to who? A seasoned Linux nerd? Maybe. A regular, non-tech person? Nope. And that is why there is no year of the linux desktop. And if you expect a regular, non-tech person to be able to master the terminal and type in commands you're delusional.
Trivial in the sense of googling "how to install KDE on Ubuntu", picking a result that looks somewhat recent, and following those steps. It ends up being a handful terminal commands which shouldn't be too hard for anybody who has used a keyboard before. That's how I did it at least. There might be more UI centric options.
Also, trying to chase the elusive 'casual user' is what caused all the GNOME UX mess in the first place I guess. I'm not an 'archetypical' Linux nerd, I hate wasting time with fixing stuff that should "just work", but I'm also expecting a computer to be a professional tool which I can customize to my needs (within reason at least).
Windows is not better at this. Plenty of troubleshooting advice says "Now open the registry editor and..." or "Now open this .ini file and..." or "Now open cmd in admin mode and..."
The ease of the GUI ends when a serious system-level issue arises. This has never not been the case, it's just a matter of how much the documentation expects you to know what's going on, and how much that impacts the first-run experience. If the first-run is good enough, "reinstall" becomes the go-to fix.
I wouldn't expect a non-tech person to even understand the difference between an operating system and a desktop environment and why you can switch the latter while keeping the former. Nor would I expect them to care.
That's just not true at all. The reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop is because it's not installed by default. Even if that isn't the reason, the GPs preference for reinstalling is certainly not. Switching DEs doesn't require reinstalling the OS, it requires searching your distros app store for KDE, and then logging out and selecting "KDE" when you log in again.
You could even switch between them each time you log in, depending on your mood that day.
No, Linux has poor isolation between the base system and application and third-pardty software and poor backwards compatibility (FreeBSD is slightly better in that respect). The only OSS Posix system that getting it right seems to be Haiku.
This is not how people want it though. The want to be able to install any version of any software old or new irrespectively of the base system. Flatpack is close though.
It's funny that you say that, since that was the solution to Windows issues for... decades? Not sure if that's still the case, as I haven't touched it in forever.
Regardless, not sure where you've gotten that impression of Linux. The only times I've reinstalled is when I've gotten a new laptop, and in those cases I just copy my home directory over to the new laptop and everything just works.
The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical; I don't think anyone even remotely knowledgeable would recommend a reinstall in that case. Just a trip to the package manager app and a restart.
I think there are quite a few reasons why the Linux desktop isn't more common, but "need to reinstall to fix issues" certainly isn't one of them.
> The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical
I agree that trying out a new desktop environment by selecting a distro package would not normally require a reinstall.
However, in general installing and removing packages (not specifically a desktop manager), especially custom ones with conflicting dependencies can lead to things being broken without a clear direction forward.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, each broken system tends to be broken in its own way — which makes it hard to find help. Maybe wifi, sound, or BlueTooth get inexplicably flaky. Or power management. It is not hard for me to imagine a situation where a user just gives up and reinstalls.
Reading up on Silverblue (which someone else mentioned) and other technologies like Nix give me hope that things are improving.
why wipe out the hard drive, tho? You can usually just switch DEs just fine, this isn't windows :) long gone are the days where we would have 10 different DEs/WMs installed
Will package managers remove all traces of the old DE? Back in the day, `apt remove kde-desktop` would not reliably reverse the effects of `apt install kde-desktop`.
You can certainly remove packages that were installed as dependencies, even if `apt remove` doesn't do this by default. I think it's `apt autoremove` or `apt purge` (although I haven't used apt in a long time). All of the package managers I've used have a way to do this.
On the other hand, for the average user I don't know why you'd bother. It's not like it's interfering with other stuff you want to do, unless you are extremely tight on hard drive space.
apt doesn't remove the settings in your home directory. So you need to nuke them and reconfigure the entire desktop and switching DEs definitely break stuff due to file type handling and default apps. With Xorg there were other things like styles that got permanently broken unless you hunt for every file that has been changed.
I borked an installation because it had two desktop environments, and even when it works there always seem to be more odd issues than with a clean install.
If you have the time to debug these and straighten them out, it's fine, but given how simple a clean install is these days that's often the easier path.
I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App".
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I’m curious as well, as I missed quite many Gnomes. I used it back in Gnome-2 days, and now it’s 45. I think I accidentally tried it a couple of years back (43, if I’m not wrong) and I like it so much that I use it till this day. Combining with Swaywm on my laptop, but sometimes I think that I like Gnome even more. Which is quite a statement! As I really love Sway and thought that’s the final thing I’ll ever use as a DE.
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
> if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I have to use GNOME) but probably not super common.
Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").
Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators...
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.
That's because what is restarting, if I understand correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is the compositor... it of course does still do compositing under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the display server. So you can't restart it without disconnecting all of the clients... kind of.
Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.
I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.
To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan.
That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
You're right, of course, and I should've been more precise about that given I have looked at doing exactly that myself (main thing stopping me: I was able to switch to my own X11 window manager within a day - it was painful but worked; meanwhile I'd locked up my machine's display hard within 5 minutes of running some DRI/GBM test code and had to reboot)
I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example clients..)
And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol, you can layer any X functionality right back in...
That's why I'm happy the KDE developers and others have acknowledged this is actually a problem and are creating solutions for it, unlike many GNOME developers who say "it's your fault it crashed!"
Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI.
Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful. Huge window handles that make no sense on a desktop without touch, unnecessary extra clicks by hiding things in hamburger menus. Again something handy on a mobile, not a desktop. Almost no customisation.
I recently bought a low-end ASUS Tablet PC with a rather nice 13" OLED screen (Vivobook Slate 13 T3300), and exorcised Windows 11 S from inside it the moment I got it. I then installed the latest Fedora on it, and chose the GNOME spin, because of the supposed touch UI readiness.
I must say, I am not impressed by the UX of the whole setup... which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
Looking forward to trying Plasma Mobile; maybe it can improve on the status quo.
> which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices speifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
It was the fad of that time, when Microsoft also introduced Windows 8 and the "Modern UI" Metro.
But at least they came to their senses, also because no devs bothered to adopt it :) and they still didn't manage to sell any Windows tablets.
I like to keep the Windows install around on small partition as I find at least on Thinkpads the Vantage app on Windows often has firmware and bios updates more available/earlier than on linux but ymmv. Plus is there for random need for windows-only app but maybe not as important.
> they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what?
There was a recent article on here that explained GNOME 2.x was windows-like enough that there was fear Microsoft would come after Linux distributions with patent lawsuits, hence the departure from that style of UI in the next version. KDE on the other hand was made with a patent sharing agreement in place.
Ah that explains a lot. Especially the feel I've always had about it being "change for the sake of change". There was a time when I actually tried to use it for real, I bought a used Surface Pro 3 and traveled with it, so the touch-based UI actually made sense. I wonder if that fear was realistic though. Though I have to admit MS at that time (under Ballmer) was really hostile to Linux.
Edit: The point made in that article seems to be disproven though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493246 . Even Miguel de Icaza said it's nonsense. Can't get more authoritative on Gnome than that.
But it was just too weird with the workspaces on the fly, the huge window decorations (despite touch I would mainly use the pen anyway) and the lack of a real launcher. I used it for about 3 months and got rid of it. It just rubbed me the wrong way constantly and I really couldn't stand the designers' attitude, every time I wanted to change something I ended up googling it and finding some excuse from the devs on why they wouldn't account for it (usually along the lines of "you shouldn't want/need that").
What didn't help was that Linux on the Surface Pro 3 was a huge PITA also. Often the keyboard wouldn't work after having been disconnected, or the pen would stop working, or it would turn on in my bag for some weird reason and be boiling hot, or it would fail to pick up the ethernet of the dock etc. Most of these issues were solved by a reboot but I ended up rebooting a lot to solve all these stupid random problems and I really got sick of that.
But the "Weirdness" of Gnome 3 didn't help. I have a lot of opinions on how stuff must work and tried modifying gnome with plugins to make it work that way, and that led to a lot of issues when updates came out and the plugins weren't updated. Opinionated software just isn't for me. I want options. Lots and lots of options :)
Eventually I moved back to a desktop and gave KDE another try (the last time was in the KDE 4 period and I didn't like it) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything I wanted to change about the default UI had an option in there somewhere to do it. It felt like the developers were reading my mind and pre-empted every wish :3 I've always cherished software packages like that.
And it only kept getting better and better with things like accent colours in the anniversary update. I use a lot of my own theming as well for both my DE and web apps and KDE is really great for that. I was actually planning to make a real theme myself but it's so configurable now that I can really make it pretty much like I want with just some configuration clicks.
I donate monthly to KDE now just because I want them to continue this great work and philosophy.
And you can easily make KDE title bars even smaller by changing the title text size, and use global menu and hide title bar in maximized windows. Massively better use of screen real estate than GNOME. Imo much more "professional" and productive vs GNOME's cartoonish touch screen UI.
Nice.. definitely a bit chonky but distinctive. I like the yellow. Hadn't thought of doing that but I probably would prefer something besides the default blue.
And I don't use laptops, only desktops. Good point also as I have much more screen real estate available. For example I use a 3x3 grid of 9 virtual desktops (with the numpad as a quick-switching pad), something that on Gnome isn't possible without a whole bunch of addons that break with every update :) Because it doesn't allow for virtual desktops in a grid matrix by default and I don't think it's got direct access hotkeys to them either. I really love that I can just configure all that in KDE without having any kind of addon or modification (and many other things I change too).
I'm just not one of those "just use it like it's intended" people. I have my own ideas on how my computer should work. But yes not everyone is me.
When someone says a design is harder to use, you don't get to say "no it isn't because Fitts' Law". If it's harder for someone to use, those are the facts on the ground. You need to adjust your theories to fit the facts, not try to say the facts aren't true so they fit your theories.
The larger target here is the window, so according to this law you should move a window by grabbing the window itself (with either holding alt triggering a widow move mode or something else) rather than wasting space with a bigger, but still much smaller handle
Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.
FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on.
The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate.
Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it.
But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.
They do, but their resources are fairly limited so the methodology is abysmal. See https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change... for an example. They don't so much test with end users as gather anecdotes (and then largely ignore test results that contradict their existing design guidelines anyway).
them being professionals does not imply they're doing a good job. Lots of dumpster fires, across a broad range of industries, were designed by professionals.
Users who prefer the old behavior can toggle it back on in the "Mouse Actions" settings under "Desktop Folder Settings", so it's not going away entirely.
This is really important to me, the fact that it's configurable. The trend in other desktop environments has been to just take away features to lead everybody down "the golden path", but everybody has different preferences. I prefer a set of sensible defaults and a maze of settings to adjust every little thing, than just a blanket "here's how it works, deal with it".
I'm a bit worried that it's now off by default, because this is one behavior I really like about KDE. Just leave the background visible somewhere and you can switch virtual desktops with ease. I know you can just click on the graphical virtual desktop display in the toolbar, but once I became used to it then it became muscle memory and now it's harder to do without it. The reason not making it a default worries me is that sometimes that makes it a nice candidate for "something we can remove that will only affect a minority of users". And it will be a minority of users, because most users won't even know it's an option.
(Author here): Users new to KDE don't know what's up with the feature. They miss a window and suddenly they're on a different virtual desktop. If they connect the behavior they may feel like "ooh, I've discovered a new trick" -- or they may feel like the desktop is unpredictable.
It would be a good candidate for one of those first-use "did you know you can" type things.
I guess I should have stated that I agree that it can be confusing and that it might actually be better to have it turned off by default. I'm just expressing my worry that it will go away entirely soon if no one remembers it. I think I've been traumatized by firefox dropping things randomly, lol.
Thank you, this was exactly my experience when I installed Nobara 39 last month. Took me a good minute to find where turn it off, but I'm glad it's configurable. I agree the default should be off.
I'm in the camp of folks that think it confuses more than it helps. I'm glad there's still the option for those that are used to it, but too much of this kind of thing drives new users a little nuts.
It'd be interesting to provide an on-ramp for folks to progressively explore such things, but doing that accidentally is probably not it.
If you have specific workflow where the golden path is suboptimal, sure. But I would not think that average user has any preferences and for many users Gnome is very reasonable.
Id second this. I used to lose a lot of productivity via desktop tweaking, and have now converted to sticking with gnome defaults (as people have said, gnome really does "stay out of your way").
hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.
I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).
I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)
> Now, KDE upstream has relented on using a single-click to open files and defaults to double-click instead. Distributions like Fedora, Kubuntu, and Manjaro had been changing the upstream default anyway, so KDE developer Nate Graham suggested disabling the feature. ""Distros are closer to users and clearly the feedback they've been getting is that double-click is a better default...Let's admit it and switch to double-click by default ourselves"".
This is great news.
The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11. I don't think this has been a problem lately. There is iirc an icon up top on gnome at least which I don't want in my video but I guess I'm not supposed to be recording my whole display?
I currently don't use my fedora machine much (just ssh into it when I need to) and wsl2 is good enough.
If you haven't tried single click to open before, I would highly recommend it. I used to hate it as well, but going through folders and files is so much faster now that I'm used to it. And if you think about it, a single click to open something is much more consistent UI wise.
Single click to open is great if what you want is to open the folder or file, but what do you use then when you want to select the folder or file without opening it? I've resorted to "vaguely dragging a square around the icon" (to select a group of icons containing just that single icon) on systems with single-click-to-open.
Historically, what you had was single click to select, then something else (usually the Enter key or similar) to open the selected item; this is consistent with for instance drop-down lists (where Enter activates the default button of the dialog box containing the drop-down). Double-click was just a shortcut to "select and then do the default action".
A sibling comment compared to smartphones, which use long-press to select; in my experience, both double-click and long-press can be hard for some people (for instance, I've seen people release the long-press a millisecond too early, causing it to do the single-press action instead of the long-click action).
You can just press CTRL and click the item. And on Plasma specifically, there's a box on the corner of the item with a '+' you can click which only selects the item.
Well, I don't have my desktop set up to use drop down menus, but as far as i remember, it is one click to do the action listed, not double click. Unless you mean older operating systems?
Yes, 'just'. Do you not always have at least one hand on the keyboard?
I'm not familar with Miller columns, but if you're changing the behaviour of your file browser, then I'm not sure why you're suprised single click might not work as intended.
No I don't. And I think that people who aren't developers have workflows where they use the mouse a ton and the keyboard less.
Miller columns have been one of the default views in OSX Finder for about two decades, opening and selecting at the same time is how they are supposed to work. Here's a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7trdpY9MI
I think miller columns was part of KDE file manager for some time, before they decided they were too complicated for developers.
I don't really understand where you would put your hand instead. In your lap? Why not have it on the keyboard?
Ok, I see what you mean by Miller columns now. I guess I wouldn't consider that image preview on ths side 'opened' though. 'Opened' to me would mean launching a dedicated image viewer with that file.
I mean, there's a reason why the default in most operating systems is a double click. Having to combine keyboard and mouse gestures is weird and hard to remember for most users.
When using miller columns in Finder, you will open a folder at the same time as you're selecting it. Files will only preview.
Well, that's why Plasma has that box I mentioned, so you can select without using the keyboard. But selecting multiple files requires you to press CTRL anyways, so I'm not sure why it why you think it would be weird to use CTRL for just one file.
Same here. This is one change that they made that really does not make any sense to me. Also with smartphones being so used these days and they all have this single click mode of doing things, well it would also make more sense to me to keep single click for opening in KDE Plasma.
Smartphones are a really limited input device in a way that desktops are not. IMO it doesn't make a ton of sense to mobile-ize all desktop UX to the minimum smartphones are capable of.
Well, I can understand why KDE made it default since it's the behaviour everybody else expects now. But it's weird that it became standard in the first place.
> The biggest challenge for Wayland for me was I want to be able to record my screen on obs as easily as I can on x11.
We invested a lot of effort in Plasma6 to make screen recording on Wayland as smooth as possible. With OBS (and our native screenshot/recording tool Spectacle) it just "works".
We also developed a mechanism to make screen recording/sharing work for old XWayland clients (to have things like screen sharing work from i.e. the Electron Discord app)
I record lots of dev guides for my dev team using obs. Works great for me on Debian 12 with KDE and Wayland. Full screen too. Webcam working. External usb mic working.
I had to do a double take regarding the single click "issue" because later in the article it is mentioned that scroll bar behavior was changed to accommodate users with RSI.
So what is it KDE? Do you care about RSI or not? I'm no longer a young person anymore, and appreciate any features to prevent RSI. I think its silly to relent on the single click due to "new user pressure".
At least there is still an option for it, I suppose.
Been tinkering with Plasma on my Framework 13 with NixOS and I upgraded to Plasma 6 last night. So far things seem pretty great!
The combined overview (four-finger swipe up) is one of the main things I felt was missing from Gnome and macOS and is really nice! I wish it was a three-finger swipe, but it's KDE, so you know there's probably an option somewhere.
I'm also excited about being able to consume HDR content on my workstation where I have a much nicer monitor, so will have to report back on that.
I really dislike the new default lock screen wallpaper. Not entirely sure why.
Plasma 6 fixes the panel configuration mess, which was pretty buggy. It works flawlessly now while being more intuitive.
The new Breeze theme fixes a lot of the spacing inconsistencies that irked me here and there. It looks much better now.
Fingerprint unlock had some weird bugs as well, which all seem to be ironed out. Very clean and consistent now.
Even the new default sound theme is _super_ nice. I'm a huge fan of the new sound effects across the desktop environment. Seriously, they're so good.
New screen recording stuff just works (Super+R) and the PipeWire setup plays perfectly with OBS. Can record individual windows and it all seems to work as expected.
Still not entirely sure this will replace Sway for the serious workstation multitasking sessions and the advantages that a tiling window manager brings, but it's really a joy on my laptop.
I know a lot of people (rightfully) have their gripes with Wayland, but this feels pretty feature complete to me. The last missing piece I'm personally feeling is remote desktop access, but I admittedly have not done anything there yet. Since screen capture is working perfectly and KDE Connect to control machines remotely from my phone works, I'm guessing the pipes are all in place and I simply need to set things up.
If you're feeling curious, give it a shot! I think it's a fantastic starting point.
How good is wayland support on Nixos currently? Did you have to make a lot of tweaks to your nix configuration?
Last time I tried it a few months ago, albeit with plasma5, it kind of worked, but I had to do many tweaks in my configuration and couldn't figure out settings for coherent scaling for hidpi.
I just installed plasma6 on nixos (using Wayland) and it automatically picked an appropriate fractional scaling for my resolution (150%), and everything works and feels great. No configuration needed.
I can only talk about Gnome wayland with NixOS, but they generally don’t do anything too wild with the configs, and since they have quite bleeding edge packages, it usually works quite well, once it packaged.
KDE has reinvigorated my love for the desktop after years on Mac. I use it on my PC, laptop, and steam deck! I’m a big fan of their apps including Konsole, Kate, and KDEConnect. It’s an all around impressive project and surpasses MacOS and Windows in my opinion, which is remarkable. Really grateful to everyone that works on it.
The other day one of my colleagues was trying to sell me the Apple ecosystem by giving a specific example. He has airpod connected to his mac. As soon as he gets a call, they switch to his iPhone.
He was quite surprised when I told him that the same thing happens with my Asus laptop running Kubuntu, Motorola phone and Oneplus ear buds.
With default settings KDE is very familiar for people coming from Windows (well Windows 10 at least), and runs well for me without any serious errors. The biggest issue for Linux desktop use seems to be outside of the control of KDE/Gnome/Other DE now, which is rock solid support for all the flavours of consumer hardware out there.
MacOS has a fixed hardware target obviously, Microsoft has all the hardware manufactures testing their drivers. The Linux ecosystem simply can't provide the same level of quality. I'm still waiting for hibernate to work on my laptop (using Fedora so I'm getting new kernel versions).
I completely agree with this. As someone who recently switched to Linux from too many years of Windows, the lack of hardware support is frustrating. As I've delved into this world for a few months now, I can clearly see the cases where Windows gets a hardware feature or related through a driver update, but this doesn't happen in Linux for a while because it needs to be integrated into the kernel.
> Breeze is Plasma's default theme and it has been updated for Plasma 6, but it's a subtle change — sort of like repainting a room and changing the color from "flat white" to "eggshell white". It has some changes to spacing that make it feel a little less crowded, and it has >>fewer lines separating UI elements<<.
Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements. This makes the UI so much harder to parse. This trend where everything is flat and visually indistinguishable except for inperceptible differences in shade of grey can't go away soon enough. It's ruined a decade of user interfaces already. Yeah they look pretty, but they're awful to use.
> Please for the love of god don't remove the lines and other distinguishing features between UI elements.
Did you actually look at the screenshots? KDE did not remove separation between elements. However it is now achieved by drawing a single line between two elements, instead of framing every single thing which is extremely ugly.
I also find Kate '6' to be much more pleasant to use, because this separator is still clear enough, but actually uses marginally fewer pixels which is nice on my low-resolution laptop.
I wish they'd at least made it thinner. Some of those screenshots on the release page [1] (Kate, Kdenlive) look awful, the actually useful content (code, clip problem list) is squeezed into a corner by UI elements that are mostly empty. That thing is ridiculous, the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines, and the Clip Problems window is clipped at an 8-item view.
I'm not even going to go into the relevance of touch-enabled devices for a Linux desktop but this is awful even by general standards. The clip problems list is laid down vertically, so pointer movement is primarily on the vertical direction. Even if you don't go through the list, you'll usually go over the window vertically just to get to OK/Abort or one of the buttons in the uperr-right section. Whatever ID gains (in the sense of Fitts' law) one hopes to gain by making the widgets fatter are more than offset by the increase in travel distance due to widget stacking. You get targets that are harder to hit and extra scrolling.
This is a good trade-off on a 6" touch screen, where you're gonna do a lot of scrolling anyway so you get to work on the one factor you can control (pointer resolution), especially as pointer motion isn't constrained to a single plane (thumbs move on the vertical axis, too -- in fact even easier, due to anatomical constraints). I'm gonna go on a limb and say that I suspect the vast majority Plasma users are running laptops and desktops with screens slightly bigger than that and either a trackpad or a mouse.
> the editor window is nearly as tall as a 1080p but it can barely display 20 lines
No it's not 1080p tall? The image is 945 pixels tall, including an extensive box shadow. I'd wager that it's around 800 pixels high. The font also looks significantly bigger (esp taller) than it is on my machine.
Additionally, the search panel is usually not folded out. You can also move it to the side at your discretion (although I don't think the Kate search pane is very well suited to that). In Kate I also remove the toolbar so that I only have the menu bar, since new/open is rare for me (I use the file tree), save is just ctrl+s, and undo/redo is also something I use keyboard shortcuts for.
I don't use Kdenlive, but I don't see the problem for the clip problem list window either. Maybe the buttons on the side might be better located at the bottom, but that's it. The only real problem is that the window should probably be larger than it is on the screenshot, however it looks like you can freely resize it.
Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
No, it's nearly :-) as tall as a 1080p screen. It's 810px (edit: modulo some scaling?) but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the bottom of the screen. Hence "nearly".
> Finally, the things you mention are not related to the theme at all, but instead the layout of individual applications.
Widget size, padding and margins are all part of the theme. I use QtCurve (which is pretty wasteful, too, though nowhere near as bad) and it's far more efficient to use.
A theme that makes better use of available screen space would allow one to keep the toolbar around, and make better use of search features (yes, the search panel is usually not folded out, but if you have to fold it out, search, then scroll or fold it back in to read around a search results, that's not exactly useful).
If you need to disable UI elements to make an application usable, that's not a good design.
> but you also rarely get the full 1080p screen height on a Plasma desktop, since you've got a big panel at the bottom of the screen
The panel is around 50px or so at most, by default it seems to be 44px. And I indeed think the screenshot is scaled, since it looks like it's bigger than on my machine.
I checked out QtCurve on my laptop which still runs KDE 5 (it seems to not be ported to Qt6), and it is indeed a bit more compact than Breeze 5. It's definitely a bit more on the cramped side in my opinion though, as the toolbar buttons have barely any padding at all around them. I definitely don't think it's wasteful, at least.
I agree that the toolbar and search pane are a bit hungry for vertical space in Breeze, but I also don't think most Kate users have the search pane open regularly. Making it more suitable for the sidebar (a la VSCode) might be nice though, but it seems it already does some limited self-rearrangement when horizontally limited (which could look better, granted).
It can be seen that Breeze 6 does save a few pixels here and there at least, without looking cramped in any way.
As for disabling UI elements, I personally think the toolbar in Kate is fundamentally wasteful. The only way it might become useful is when you customize it to contain actions that you do tend to use regularly.
It's very easy to remove toolbars (in Settings menu) and menu bars (Ctrl+M) on Plasma. I managed to remove all of them in certain apps, like Konsole and KWrite, which makes things look way better, indeed.
I use a more compact theme (QtCurve, at least with Plasma 5.27, I'm not sure if it's going to work with Plasma 6). IMHO if I have to disable UI elements to make an application usable, that just means they're too big. That's not a good design.
I accidentally got this, and now it defaults to Wayland which completely broke my workflow. That is because, in Wayland, there is no API to list what windows are on your desktop! [1]
Managed to get back to X11, for some reason the logoff button does not work anymore but at least my monitoring scripts do.
This is the solution as I recall (stolen from reddit post cited at bottom):
Step 1: Right click an open Picture-in-Picture window. In the context menu, select "More Actions" -> "Configure Special Window Settings...". This will populate most of the window settings for you.
Step 2: Click "Add Property..." and select "Window title". The newly added row's text field should read "Picture-in-Picture". Change the dropdown option from "Unimportant" to "Exact Match". (All PiP windows in Firefox use this title and by making it Exact Match the rule shouldn't affect any other Firefox windows.)
Step 3: Click "Add Property..." again and this time select "Keep above other windows". The dropdown in the newly added row should be set to "Apply Initially". Select the "Yes" radio button if it isn't already. (As a note, I think that didn't work for me as I have it set to "Force" rather than "Apply Initially")
Step 4: Click "OK". That's it. No more manually setting Keep Above every time you open a PiP.
Since doing the above it's just worked without issue, though it was annoying that it was broken in the first place.
Maybe I'm missing something, but Picture-in-Picture has worked for years in Wayland Firefox for me. You do have to enable it in `about:preferences`, there's a toggle called: "Enable picture-in-picture video controls"
On which Desktop Environment/wayland compositor? I am pretty sure Firefox Picture in picture works as intented (tiny window, stays on top of things) on GNOME's wayland session, and on Plasma 5.27.x I was able to make it work with a few KWin rules set by GUI (I would love to share the details, but I don't have my Plasma machine with me currently).
What compositor? I use Hyprland and Firefox/Chromium Picture in Picture, and as far as I can tell, works as expected. I just hit the PiP button and it pops the video out into a new tiled window that I can toggle floating if I want. Just tried on a windows machine and, as far as I could tell, it was the same.
Many Wayland compositors provide an API to list the windows. I don't know about Plasma 6, but in Wayland it's up to the compositor to provide such API as far as I know.
Yeah, I think the way you're supposed to do that is you install the kwin script which gives you the option to "connect" to various signals and then communicate the results via dbus to your service / listener (I don't think the script itself can host a dbus service which would be much simpler). One thing I got from looking at this is that KDE's documentation about scripting is either absolutely terrible, insufficient, or non existing.
Yep. The only compositors of any significance that do not use wlroots are Gnome/Mutter and KWin. I guess Weston is also an independent compositor, but I don't think anyone actually uses that.
Weston is mostly used for car entertainment systems, as a replacement for Windows CE.
It, along with the more modern wlroots-based alternative Cage, have become the de-facto Wayland window manager for when you don't actually want to display framed windows, and just want to fork the codebase and display some fullscreen GLES-based graphics in a kiosk instead. These IoT use cases were part of the original motivation for Wayland in the first place.
I'm on proprietary NVIDIA, so haven't actually quite joined the Glorious Wayland Master Race yet. I use Weston on X11 to host Waydroid for my Android game development. Works rather well. I hope Weston development doesn't end up moribund because a few folks like me actually use it.
It's not dead, but it's gotten way more patches upstreamed from the automobile industry than anything desktop related. So any sort of Linux desktop testing is likely very minimal.
Additionally, there is an (experimental) effort by a KDE developer to further generalize KWin's functionality by ripping out most of what it does into a separate wlroots-compatible library - https://github.com/winft/theseus-ship
Wayland is like if every single CSS property needed to be written with both "-moz-" and "-webkit-" prefixes forever, instead of the different CSS engines having any standard properties.
But many Wayland protocols are actually becoming shared. For example, Plasma 6 replaced a "-kde-shell" protocol with the standardized "layer-shell" protocol.
Are there non-tiling window managers that do this? Sway is like, the gold standard and everyone knows about it. But it's also for people who like tiles.
It says a lot about the difficulty of writing great software that it has taken around 15 years to get a list windows out of Wayland. But it looks like wlroots was a tipping point where the ecosystem started to function in a healthy manner.
For real dude... "my logout button doesn't work"? Crazy! I used to love tinkering with linux in college, started with Ubuntu 7.04(?) Feisty Fawn. Today I use Linux Mint 22(?) - what distro do you use that's hands off?
I'm in college and still prioritize stability (at least in day-to-day use). Which doesn't always work out, because yesterday my laptop wouldn't boot...
My brother uses this as well. It didn't work out well for me but it may have just been too soon, I tried to use WSL when it came out. Must be much better and seamless now.
The first WSL was a Linux system call emulator using Windows NT kernel's multi identity features. While it is an impressive feat of engineering showing off NT's strengths, many of the syscalls were missing. The programs had to operate on Windows file system which likes bulk operations and try and fail kind of a pattern. So it was slow.
WSL2 is fantastic. It is a lightweight Hyper V VM so programs run at native speed. You can do nested virtualization with W11. The file system is ext4 on a virtual HD file so, progams optimised for Linux don't suffer. It even comes with its own Wayland compositor running on top of a high performance GL <-> DX translation layer. It comes with systemd support so one can run regular systemd services like nix daemon.
> The nice thing about KDE is that so much is configurable, but finding configuration settings is still a challenge in Plasma 6. For example, the aforementioned setting to scroll virtual desktops is found in the Desktop Folder Settings application, but not in the System Settings application under the Virtual Desktop settings.
My current Linux installation on desktop is from 2016 and everything was configured years ago. Recently I had to install Linux in Virtualbox and decided to go with KDE. I was overwhelmed with settings not in a good way. Maybe when I was younger I was more enthusiastic and liked it, but now I want reasonable defaults and consistent UI/UX experience.
It would be really nice if configuration was scriptable, so that you could have one configuration script, and run it on every new install. Would remove the need to hunt and peck.
KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it". Gotta love the consistency over the some 15 years I've used it.
KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
Everybody who remembers the KDE 3->4 transition will probably violently disagree with that. Hopefully that was an educational moment for the dev team and they've actually internalised that lesson.
edit: just realised that 3->4 transition was more than 15 years ago, which makes me feel very old...
For me one of the biggest accomplishments of our community is that people really do stick around. It's very multi-generational. Therefore the memory is there and the lessons do get learned.
I want to thank you and detail some of the reasons you deserve thanks.
Thank you for the conservative evolution of the KDE DE. In my mind the best praise of any major DE release is that there is no reason to fear it, and you've done that. Again.
Thank you for protecting KDE from iconoclast mentalities. This is a difficult thing to do and only hard nosed managerial discipline can achieve this, especially for an open source DE.
Thank you for accommodating compositor-less operation.
Thank you for Konsole. Yakuake is also great and I'm making use of it as well. However, what I appreciate most is that the latter has not disrupting the former. I can have work-a-day Konsole and Yakuake can be used where it works well at the same time. Thank you!
Thank you for not adopting the minimalist, "golden path" mentality. Options have great value to me and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that KDE, almost uniquely among both commercial and open source mainstream DEs, doesn't take them away: KDE is the only conventional DE that doesn't demonstrate contempt for my preferences.
The single-click/double-click activation choice is a excellent example of the thinking that makes KDE awesome. It goes without saying that changing that default must have been a tough decision. Yet you made the pragmatic, correct choice. Thank you for that.
The vestigial voices still beating KDE over the head for the 3->4 issues, despite over a decade of clear evidence that the lessons have long since been learned, are diminishing. They're being replaced by full throated, well deserved praise.
I humbly ask that you hear one concern of mine: X11 is crucial and will remain so for a long time yet. I have absolutely no problem with Wayland and imagine myself adopting it, some day, perhaps even accidentally. In the meantime, please do not neglect the X11 experience. I have yet to see any evidence that you have, but it is a worry for me.
Thank you - From a loyal and deeply appreciative KDE user.
This is not the only snarky comment about the 3->4 transition, but I feel they are overly harsh. A big problem with that transition was distros jumping to ship pre-release software to users long before the release was ready, which really soured the perception of the new version. There were bugs, but the perception lasted longer than the reality, IMO.
That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
From a purely technical perspective perhaps, but overall I don't think so. KDE3 was hugely popular and regularly depolyed. Based on my personal observations (admittedly EU based), it was the single most popular *nix desktop at the time. KDE4 more or less killed that over night and as far as I can tell KDE has never recovered neither marketshare nor the mindshare it had.
On a personal note I went from a huge KDE fan, and someone who deployed and managed KDE3 workstations at a small company, to literally not using it for over a decade.
the perception lasted longer than the reality
Which is the one really important lesson in all of this.
> That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
Strawberry Player (the fork of Clementine which is the fork of Amarok 1.4) is still going and it is ported to Qt 6 so it works okay with many highdpi environments
KDE team has done a fantastic job in the looks department. Every time I look at the latest release it looks better and better.
I every now and then use KDE and it keeps looking less and less as a "desktop environment for developers" (read: ugly), and more like a desktop environment that everybody loves. These latest screenshots look fantastic.
I've learned to appreciate that if I showed this version to a 20 years younger me who had just gotten into Linux with Fedora, they'd probably find the UI extremely familiar. Meanwhile I have to relearn how to use my iPhone and Macbook every year now...
KDE plasma is the main reason I could switch completely from windows / macos for work and hobbies. Very mature DE that can challenge commercial solutions.
KDE is pretty cool but I just don't get why they're still using their Breeze theme. GNOME got so much more beautiful with the new Adwaita theme. It's time for KDE to redesign their default theme as well, Breeze looks absolutely terrible and outdated, especially the icons, it all feels super cheap and like it was all drawn by some random guy, not a huge project with a UI team.
KDE can look amazing with a custom theme, why don't they just pick one and make it official?
Really? The default GNOME Adwaita theme has been pretty blech in my opinion for a number of years. The update just kinda flattened out the visual identity and kept the same "sickness" looking colors.
I quite like the GTK toolkit but I'll never be able to tolerate the default Dark colorscheme. If we're strictly talking about colors, I find Breeze to be more pleasing in Light and Dark mode.
I have to be honest, anytime I see a major version update I start to have nightmares of the KDE3/4 update.
With that negativity aside, I use i3 nowadays but KDE is still always my other desktop. I've been using it since the KDE1 days and have always strongly preferred it over gnome :) Even in i3, Konsole is my console of choice.
I left big DEs because of the constant overhauls (and because of their slowness). The WM of my choice (jwm) hasn't changed in decade and still being actively maintained and developed.
So much of my workflow depends on X11. I hope we can keep it going. I don't think I could do this on Wayland: using my gpt4-vision toolkit to read my blocked domains list from kagi and xdotool entering the list into Azure Custom Search Api. https://twitter.com/xundecidability/status/17632190171608678...
>do away with the default of using the scroll wheel on the desktop to switch virtual desktops
I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
>Wayland as default
I have plasma installed here and one weird thing I noticed is that if I use the wayland version sometimes text isn't rendered on windows or entire panels flash black rectangles, while if I use the X11 version my mouse speed becomes slower. I wonder if the update addresses these issues. Anyway after trying out several DEs I ended up using Xfce because my mouse feels faster in it.
> I've seen so many apps implement this. It's so odd. If I can bring my cursor to the widget I can probably click on the right item instead of scrolling. The only case I imagine this would be useful would be for accessibility.
For me personally, it lets me think of desktops in terms of what is left or right of them, rather than what actual number it is, i.e my Steam desktop is to the right of my browser desktop and to the left of my remote session. If I need to go to the email desktop from where I'm at, it's two scrolls away. I usually leave a little bit of the desktop visible on each virtual desktop to facilitate this.
So, not an accessibility thing for me but an actual preference. People are different. I know, it shocked me too.
Okay, I am of course excited that KDE is making such fantastic strides forward. How-the-ever, GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling things like PaperWM.
Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing Gnome, but that's what's comfortable.
Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an environment with actual physics interactions. How light bounces between layered interface components. It's going to be hugely resource-intensive but someday we'll look back on 2D GUIs and DEs like something that pales in comparison to the amazing interfaces of a 3D environment where we can attach virtual surfaces to walls and ceilings and have them follow after us as we move around the office/house with our headsets.
PS: I'm loving how both KDE and GNOME are pushing a lot of DE behaviors into JS extensions. On a separate front, everything we interact with is like this close to being entirely within a web browser.
Nobody likes what I've said, but I'm prophesying now: DEs will need to go "spatial", and all of /this/ will be in a web browser by 2027.
My personal UI preferences aside, one place where KDE is ahead of Gnome right now that matters a great deal to me is support for fractional scaling, especially supporting different scaling factors one different displays (laptop vs monitor).
KDE seems to have this working pretty well, whereas Gnome does not and it isn't clear when they will get there.
> GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling things like PaperWM.
Wait... all of this is a lot to take in. HDR progress has gone great on Red Hat's side, but KDE has been working on it just as long (with arguably further progress). VRR has existed on KDE for a while as "Adaptive Sync" and the work that goes into updating GNOME extensions exists mostly because the GNOME developers refuse to make a stable API for it.
GNOME and Red Hat obviously do great work for the community, but these seem like weird examples. To the contrary, with GNOME's fractured extensibility and now-missing system tray, a lot of Windows and MacOS users will probably feel confused booting up GNOME 40. I say all this from a GNOME system myself =P
> Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing"
Holy whiplash, Batman! I disagree so hard my head is spinning.
For one, "the curve" of Spatial Computing is so-far relegated to cheap Android SDKs and $3,500 iPad-killers. Nobody is shipping Johnny-Mnemonic style hardware today, and probably won't be for another decade. Focusing on developing that technology is not only a waste of time, but entirely tangential to the work that goes into making the modern desktop usable. GNOME and KDE's efforts shouldn't be dedicated to a hypothetical userbase that might never exist.
...and on the flip side, a lot of work has gone into "spatializing" Open Source software. OpenXR is the de-facto standard for VR experiences, and is well-supported on Linux clients. With Wayland, the desktop's rendering model is now finally up to a position where someone could feasibly write a foveated window renderer. There are people doing it right now, despite the lack of demand: https://simulavr.com/
> How-the-ever, GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling things like PaperWM.
What?? Plasma/KWin 5.27 already had support for VRR. On Gnome/Mutter, it's still in a merge request (or maybe it's finally been merged recently? not sure but it's definitely not in any released version to my knowledge).
Not sure about partial scanout, but Plasma 6 also enables basic HDR support (although it doesn't seem to work well on my Nvidia machine, SDR-on-HDR looks very washed out).
Gnome is indeed massively ahead in terms of extensions, but I don't know how much of that is due to capabilities vs. market share. See for example Karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel.
From my perspective KDE is much farther ahead in pushing Wayland features. Apart from them currently shipping VRR and HDR, there is also for example long-standing support for XWayland-native scaling that Gnome is just now starting to consider. Or how about implementing server side decoration instead of forcing applications to use something like libdecor?
I was surprised when someone told me that KDE is the biggest open source project in existence after Linux kernel. But indeed it looks like it. They are trying to reinvent the entire desktop computing stack in-house. This is what Apple does but without the corporate. I hope they succeed so I can have my fully free and thus user-centric desktop on par with proprietary offerings.
SUMMARY
If the screen is turn off and then the pc goes to sleep (only possible if the lid is closed because trying to use a shortcut to sleep cause pc screen to turn on), on lid open the screen is black and the pc is unusable (require a reboot).
KDE user here. I'm on Debian so I'm still on 5.27 and will be for a while. That's OK. I like Plasma 5.27 and my only disappointment is that I won't file bug reports if I run into any issues. I don't expect they would be addresses and I prefer that the devs focus on moving 6 along. By the time 6 is on Debian (trixi, hopefully) lots of kinks should be worked out.
And speaking of kinks, I'm disappointed in the number of posters on Mastodon who are angrily claiming that they will never use KDE again because of issues they run into on the first day of a major release. What did they expect?
And I will repeat: Many thanks to the devs, testers, documenters and all others who make this happen. Well done!
I hope this increases stability. KDE takes the startup approach of move fast and break things. For all of their progress in functionality, I have so many annoying bugs that I deal with on a daily basis.
Well allow me to list them off. I'm using Plasma 5.27
- If my monitor dims due to inactivity then I start using my computer again, the monitor stays dim and does not come back up to the brightness I had it unless I turn off my monitor and turn it back on. I resolved this by just turning off dimming.
- If KDE goes to lockscreen due to inactivity but I start interacting with my computer during the transition, my monitor just stays black and doesn't return to desktop or go to lockscreen.
- My bluetooth headphones disconnect whenever KDE goes to lockscreen.
-I use multiple languages and sometimes my languages will switch randomly despite not hitting the language hotkey and often I will mash my language hotkey and the language still won't change.
Those are just what I remember off the top of my head but I'm maintaining a list somewhere in a notebook.
Oh jeez that does sound brutal. I do not experience those issues on my Deb 12 desktop. The lockscreen/dimming/etc stuff specifically works well for me. It’s very responsive to return from lock, if I catch it in the transition I can abort. Wondering if it’s the underlying platform you are on, or a third party plugin or module that could be doing this.
Does anyone have advice on contributing code to the project? I’d love to give back, but it’s a bit daunting, and I’m not the most familiar with c++. Would love to find a smaller place to start.
Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.
I’ve been using Gnome almost exclusively for the past two years, although I also spent significant amounts of time in a tiling WM (Sway).
I like the overall experience of gnome. The apps feel nice, the DE feels snappy etc. But the tiling features of KDE make me curious. I like sway, but I recently completely messed up my configuration and it’s a an absolute pain to get back working even halfway decent, so I may as well give a integrated DE a try
Also consider pop-shell which is a fork of GNOME with tiling built-in. However, I'm not sure about its future since PopOS is switching to COSMIC DE in the next release.
I actually did try the Pop Shell extension with my Fedora installation, but found it to be more cumbersome than helpful.
Admittedly, this may very well be due to the fact that I didn't quite have the time to configure it to match my tiling WM mappings i've been used to at this point
A full-featured columns view, like that of macOS (but also implemented by various file browsers over the years), has an arbitrary number of resizable columns. Perhaps optionally with a preview pane at the end where the last column would otherwise be.
I'm not a Kde user (always used gnome/unity/i3) but enjoyed their release content. I remember finding Kde bloated in the past but I've been getting more curious about it, wishing to try it someday. Hopefully they will have a good tiling window system by then, because I'm too used to i3wm.
I love how Gnome and KDE Plasma diverged. I change desktops every now and then, now I'm feeling like Gnome is just enough desktop and I'm loving it. But I have to say, this news item has me longing for Plasma's configurability again (and wobbly windows). I just love that there is so much choice on Linux!
I'd be very excited if KDE can be the first usable Linux on mobile (usable = with my $banking_app, $messenger_app, etc.). If anyone were to pull it off it'd be KDE.
> Now, KDE upstream has relented on using a single-click to open files and defaults to double-click instead.
Ok...
> Another change to scrolling behavior in this release is that clicking on a scrollbar moves the window to the location clicked, rather than one "page" at a time. ... in order to be a better option for users with RSIs.
This is already done with the middle mouse button. Will people please stop fucking with scroll bars?
Ironic that one paragraph extols the virtues of forty year-old defaults, then the next recommends breaking something that already works.
Mine works perfectly. I use it 100+ times a day, including now to reply you in another tab. If yours doesn't, you might like to buy a new mouse. In any case it isn't a reason to change the default.
I'd say that this isn't an "overhaul", they didn't redesign everything just to make it different, they refined and optimized pretty much every part of the DE to make it more power efficient (QT6, KRunner), more visually pleasing and consistent (Breeze theme), more featureful (HDR support), and of course more stable (countless bug fixes)
Meh, I want a window manager, not a full desktop environment. I want key-combo switching between apps and allowing the apps to be moved and sized. And that's it. No need for special 'start/run' features, for DE-bundled apps, for DE-based widget bars, for DE-based notifications, etc. Get everything out of the way for focusing on the apps and allowing interaction between them only as needed.
The problem imo is that Wayland is too hard to write your own WM for. People wrote X11 WMs in weekends when they got fed up with the status quo. How many do the same for Wayland?
KDE is modular, a significant amount of that can be removed cleanly. It's not quite as modular as LXDE or Xfce mainly because the binaries for Plasma and KWin-Wayland are handling a bit more than expected, but does it really matter on modern hardware that Plasma has a tiny bit of panel-related code loaded into RAM when your panels are disabled? (I'd probably say this is the worst non-modularity, and it's still avoidable if you're willing to swap out plasma for something else)
> How many do the same for Wayland?
A lot, because wlroots provides a decent base to handle all the things you don't want to be handling manually. The ecosystem of simple tiling WMs made with wlroots is quite vibrant.
I stand corrected re my comment about making a compositor.
At first, I was going to point out that wlroots itself says it abstracts the job of a compositor: 'about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.' [0] Would seem to prove the point that too many LOC are needed just to get something running. But really wlroots is from the same group that maintains Wayland [1], so maybe it's like a low-level/high-level access duality common in other software projects.
I am always so conflicted about adopting new desktop environments. Every time I feel like I dump 10-20 hours into it and still end up using my mac more often. This looks so tempting, but I feel fairly confident the outcome will be the same for me. Maybe the only way to achieve this is to get rid of my macbook.
KDE sits in a weird place in my case. If I want something to just get out of the way, I use GNOME. If I want to scratch my geek itch and have a super custom and fancy hacker desktop, I resort to things like i3. KDE doesn't appeal to me as of today. Just my personal anecdote.
I use KDE because it’s stable, has every feature I want, and uses existing metaphors I am familiar with.
In my circle of Linux users, a lot of the people that choose KDE do so because they don’t find the desktop layer interesting to hack on, and just want a tool for interacting with Linux.
Fedora 40 Beta is currently on target to be released March 12[0] and will include KDE Plasma 6 so if anyone is looking to avoid running Rawhide it's only a two week wait for a beta release. It's also possible to install from the most recent build of the pre-beta 40 branch[1]
Is it just me that's a bit disappointed with the rate of change of desktop linux? Particularly the UI side of things? I feel like desktop linux is way behind Mac and even Windows in so many ways. Would love to see modern stripped back kde/gnome alternative: less kitchen sink applications, minimalist power user friendly design sense, 1st class tiling window management, keyboard friendly workflow etc.
I would suggest that nearly every person on this website is a developer. Both C and C++ let you shoot yourself in the foot quite easily, but at least C++ has RAII.
If you're referring to Rust, it's just not there yet for anything serious: https://areweguiyet.com/
I looked into this as well, but both libcosmic and cosmic-applibrary are still a WIP -- that's self-described, as well! There is no, for example, Qt or GTK in the Rust world yet.
I'm sure that it will be a reality at some point, but it's not there yet in a format a third party could use without it being obsolete after a few months. I am hopeful, though!
good luck avoiding c++ software on the desktop. FWIW, c++ has many more features than plain c for improving safety and reliability (for example shared_ptr) if that's your concern.
More the opposite; switching to being copied by Windows 12. Seriously.
KDE: let's make our panel floating by default to distinguish ourselves visually from Windows!
later
Microsoft rumored to introduce floating panel in Windows 12.
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I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871 [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]: https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop