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?
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.
(Someday: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/174)
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.