Over the decades, my primary operating system of choice has changed a few times. As a wee child of six years old, we got out first PC through one of those employer buy-a-PC programs, where an employer would subsidize its employees buying PCs for use in the home. The goal here was simple: if people get comfortable with a computer in their private life, they’ll also get comfortable with it in their professional life. And so, through my mother’s employer, we got a brand new 286 desktop running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0. I still have the massive and detailed manuals and original installation floppies it came with.
So, my first operating system of ‘choice’ was MS-DOS, and to a far lesser extent Windows 3.0. As my childhood progressed, we got progressively better computers, and the new Windows versions that came with it – Windows 95, 98, and yes, even ME, which I remarkably liked just fine. Starting with Windows 95, DOS became an afterthought, and with my schools, too, being entirely Windows-only, my teenage years were all Windows, all the time. So, when I bought my first own, brand new computer – instead of old 386 machines my parents took home from work – right around when Windows XP came out, I bought a totally legal copy of Windows XP from some dude at school that somehow came on a CD-R with a handwritten label but was really totally legit you guys.
I didn’t like Windows XP at all, and immediately started looking for alternatives, trying out Mandrake Linux before discovering something called BeOS – and despite BeOS already being over by that point, I had found my operating system of choice. I tried to make it last as long as the BeOS community would let me, but that wasn’t very long. The next step was a move to the Mac, something that was quite rare in The Netherlands at that time. During that same time, Microsoft released Windows Server 2003, the actually good version of Windows XP, and a vibrant community of people, including myself, started using it as a desktop operating system instead.
I continued using this mix of Mac OS X and Windows – even Vista – for a long time, while having various iterations of Linux installed on the side. I eventually lost interest in Mac OS X because Apple lost interest in it (I think around the Snow Leopard era?), and years later, six or seven years ago or so, I moved to Linux exclusively, fully ditching Windows even for gaming like four or so years ago when Valve’s Proton started picking up steam. Nowadays all my machines run Fedora KDE, which I consider to be by far the best desktop operating system experience you can get today.
Over the last few years or so, I’ve noticed something fun and interesting in how I set up my machines: you can find hints of my operating system history all over my preferred setup and settings. I picked up all kinds of usage patterns and expectations from all those different operating systems, and I’d like to enable as many of those as possible in my computing environment. In a way, my setup is a reflection of the operating systems I used in the past, an archaeological record of my computing history, an evolutionary tree of good traits that survived, and bad traits bred out.
Taking a look at my bare desktop, you’ll instantly pick up on the fact I used to use Mac OS X for a long time. The Mac OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen has been my preferred way of opening and managing running applications since I first got an iBook G4 more than 20 years ago, and to this day I find it far superior to any alternatives. KDE lets me easily recreate a proper dock, without having to resort to any third-party dock applications. I never liked the magnification trick Mac OS X wowed audiences with when it was new, so I don’t use it.
The next dead giveaway I used to be a Mac OS X user a long time ago is the top bar, which shares quite a few elements with the Mac OS X menubar, while also containing elements not found in Mac OS X. I keep the KDE equivalent of a start menu there, a button that brings up my home folder in a KDE folder view, a show desktop button that’s mostly there for aesthetic reasons, KDE’s global menubar widget for that Mac OS X feel, a system tray, the clock, and then a close button that opens up a custom system menu with shutdown/reboot/etc. commands and some shortcuts to system tools.
Another feature coming straight from my days using Mac OS X is KDE’s equivalent of Exposé, called Overview, without which I wouldn’t know how to find a window if my life depended on it. I bind it to the top-left hotcorner for easy access with my mouse, while the bottom-right hotcorner is set to show my desktop (and the reason why I technically don’t really need that show desktop button I mentioned earlier). I fiddled with the hot corner trigger timings so that they fire virtually instantly. Waiting on my computer is so ’90s.
It’s not really possible to see in screenshots, but my stint using BeOS as my main operating system back when that was a thing you could do also shines through, specifically in the way I manage windows. In BeOS, double-clicking a titlebar tab would minimise a window, and right-clicking the tab would send the window to the bottom of the Z-stack. I haven’t maximised a non-video window in several decades, so I find double-clicking a titlebar to maximise a window utterly baffling, and a ridiculous Windows-ism I want nothing to do with. Once again, KDE lets me set this up exactly the way I want, and I genuinely feel lost when I can’t manipulate my windows in this manner.
For the pedantic among us – including myself – I do have to mention that these BeOS window management quirks are, if I have my history straight, originally copied from the classic Mac OS. Be, Inc. was founded by former Apple engineers, after all, and once the AT&T Hobbit processor was cancelled, followed by the failure and cancellation of the BeBox, BeOS positioned itself as a PowerPC Mac OS replacement, before eventually also adding x86 support. However, I never used the classic Mac OS when it was current, so BeOS is where I found and adopted these quirks.
You can also see BeOS represented in a very unexpected place: my terminal colour scheme. BeOS’ terminal had black text on a white background, and while the modern KDE terminal application has additional niceties the BeOS terminal didn’t have – coloured text! – the basic black-on-white is still by far my preferred terminal colour scheme. I definitely unlearned that DOS white-on-black pretty quickly, and thankfully, pretty much any modern terminal emulator allows you to set your own preferred colour scheme.
And yes, there’s some holdovers from Windows in there too. I really like the original, basic Start menu from the Windows 9x days, and I keep that around in my modern KDE desktops; just a simple list of categories with cascading menus, and that’s it. Virtually everything else Microsoft added to the Start menu since has made it worse, and I firmly believe that original design all the way back from 1995 is still an excellent, unobtrusive, yet patently discoverable way of finding applications you don’t use very often. Add in modern tools like KRunner – the always accessible KDE system search tool that prioritises applications – and that’s all I personally need to launch applications that don’t deserve a spot in my dock.
You’ll notice that the red thread running through all of this is KDE Plasma. Out of all the major desktop environments today, KDE is the only one still catering to people who want their graphical user interface to be adaptable to their needs, instead of asking the user to adapt. Windows, macOS, GNOME – they all expect me to mold myself into their predefined shape, whereas I can freely mold KDE to fit my shape.
This goes far beyond just shaping the desktop environment – panels, desktop icons, etc. – itself. One of the most underrated features of KDE is the ability to turn off and edit toolbars, and this feature alone would be enough to draw me towards using KDE. I can’t stress how much I love that I can edit the toolbars of virtually every KDE application to fit my exact needs and wishes, so I don’t have buttons or toolbars I don’t ever use taking up space and distracting me. Add to that the ability to individually turn labels on and off per toolbar item, and you can really make the UI of your applications suit your specific needs and wishes.
Kwrite doesn’t need any toolbars or buttons at all, so all I have enabled are the default window chrome and line numbers. The same applies to my terminal, which just has its window chrome enabled, and nothing else. I changed Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, to move buttons around a bit to better fit my needs, and I added a button to show and hide hidden files, which I weirdly use a lot. Dolphin also allows me to add or remove whatever I want from its context menu, so I remove anything I don’t need to end up with a context menu specifically optimised for me. I extensively modify Kmail and its various sub-windows, since most of the more groupware-like stuff I simply don’t need at all. And so on.
It’s remarkable how KDE has managed to withstand the onslaught of rigid, mobile-inspired UI design with oversized buttons, endless seas of white space, toggles designed for touch instead of cursors, and so on. Whereas all of their competitors seem to be shoehorning touch-optimised UI elements into a cursor-driven environment, KDE still treats the mouse cursor as the primary input, and it shows. KDE still understands that on my desktop or laptop computer, where 99.9% of my input is done with a mouse and keyboard, the UI should reflect that. That means KDE tends to be more dense, show more information, and isn’t afraid to show buttons and other UI elements where it makes sense, as opposed to the trend of hiding everything from the user in favour of oversized buttons and immense amounts of whitespace to accomodate fat fingers that are, in reality, rarely used.
On top of that, KDE doesn’t infantalise its users. It treats its users not as children that need to be protected from themselves, but as grown adults that can make their own informed choices to shape and mold their computers in a way that suits them best. Yes, this means there are a lot of settings panels in KDE, some of which might be quite complex, but KDE trusts its users to be able to handle this responsibility. When using, say, iOS, macOS, or GNOME, I feel like I’m being treated like a child who isn’t yet ready to make their own informed decisions in life, imposing a very “my way or the highway”-style of 1950s parenting. I’m sure this works just fine for millions of people, but I find it condescending, insulting even.
I was reading Carl Svensson’s in-depth critique of GNOME’s file manager recently – a great read – wherein he also linked to one of his earlier articles about the decline of usability in modern software. One part in particular in that article stood out to me; after showing a screenshot of Blender, a by necessity incredibly complex piece of software with a very complex user interface, Svensson nails the problem with, in this case, GNOME’s UI design so well I’m suspecting he’s a carpenter by trade (his emphasis at the end there, not mine):
I honestly can’t see how a program like Blender could possibly be created using Gnome’s guidelines – or indeed toolkit: certain time-tested UI elements aren’t even allowed in Gnome anymore, such as menu bars and hierarchical pull down menus. “Progressive disclosure” and the prevailing interpretation of “navigation structures” means completely replacing certain parts of the interface with others – instead of letting the user decide what’s relevant for them to see at any given moment. “Frequently used actions should be close at hand” – but in a program like Blender, frequently used actions vary profoundly with what kind of project is being worked on and what stage that project is in. I find it unlikely that a developer can make such judgement calls better than a user spending tens of thousands of hours in the program during the span of a career. Then again, “Focus on one situation, one type of experience.” is rather telling. Using software professionally isn’t about having a chic, boutique experience – it’s about getting the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes, that means working with irreducible complexity.
↫ Carl Svensson
And this hits right at the heart of the problem with the type of modern, minimalist, touch-first UI design embodied by GNOME, Windows, and now even macOS: it doesn’t allow for complexity, because the UI wrongfully assumes it’s running on a device with touch input owned by a child. The fact that your human interface guidelines, ostensibly developed for a mouse-first, desktop interface, do not allow for the kinds of complex applications people use to get work done – whether that be a spreadsheet, something like Blender, or even a word processor – should really make you pause and think about what your goals are, and if you might be heading down the wrong path.
This is why I use KDE. It’s the only major environment that respects me as a user, and fully embraces the input method it knows people are using. I’m genuinely baffled by how much animosity there seems to be among certain UI designers towards the mouse, and how desperately they are trying to embrace touch-first UI ideas that simply have no place on a desktop or laptop with a cursor. It feels like they want to be making a phone or tablet UI so bad that they lose all sight of what people are actually using out here in the real world.
This will sound harsh, but that doesn’t make it any less true: nobody uses GNOME or Windows applications on tablets or smartphones (the macOS situation is more complex, of course). I absolutely respect the hard work and love people are putting into making a GNOME or even Plasma-based smartphone, but the reality of the matter is that as it stands right now, I doubt there’s even more than 10000 people using GNOME or KDE Plasma on a smartphone. So why should the millions of people using GNOME or KDE Plasma be forced to use a UI primarily inspired by touch?
KDE seems to, for now at least, understand this, and that makes it the last popular mouse-first desktop environment that trusts its users with settings, complexity where inevitable, and configurability. Everyone else has either succumbed to the lure of infantilising touch interfaces, or is far too niche to serve as a proper alternative.
And that’s why I use KDE.
Addendum I: Obviously, KDE isn’t perfect
All of this being said, KDE is far, far from perfect, and the various KDE contributors I’ve interacted with will be the first to acknowledge this. I want to bring some balance into this article by discussing some of the things KDE definitely needs to work on, and some worrying trends I’m seeing lately that have me mildly worried about where KDE might be going in the future.
First and foremost, especially newer KDE applications seem to not always respect the variety of choices KDE offers. A great example is the global menubar widget; newer applications like Tokodon, Weather, Spectacle, or even the Settings application, do not have a menubar to export, meaning the widget in the top bar remains eerily empty. I understand they want these applications to not have a menubar visible by default, but I think there’s still enough functionality to populate at least a basic menubar to be displayed for those of us using the global menubar widget or who just want a regular menubar attached to the window. This same group of applications also do not allow their toolbars to be hidden or edited, which is another massive regression from the norm.
This is a worrying trend I hope will be halted.
A second major issue is the messy state of KDE’s various theming options. KDE is well-known for its ability to be themed, but the options for it are confusingly spread out, including the oddity where applications and the Plasma desktop elements use different theming engines. You can end up in a situation where you find a good application theme, but then need to hunt to find the accompanying Plasma theme, assuming it exists at all. It all feels a bit disjointed and chaotic, and I know KDE developers agree, because they are working on greatly streamlining this process, including a unified theming engine called Union. Setting a wallpaper presents a similar issue if you want the same wallpaper applied at your SDDM login screen, desktop, and lock screen – you need to use three distinct settings panels to do this.
It also feels like the powerful Plasma widget engine has been collecting some cobwebs and dust bunnies lately. The first-party, included widgets often feel sparse and limited, quite contrary to the rest of KDE, and the third-party widget offerings are, well, varying in quality, to put it diplomatically, and outdated widgets that don’t even function anymore are still listed in the download new widgets dialog. The widgets activated in a default installation – the system tray, the taskbar, and so on – are often in a good state, but everything else definitely needs some love, and perhaps a development sprint or whatever is needed where experienced KDE contributors take stock of what new widgets people might want and then make them.
Finally, the KDE application ecosystem is not as healthy as it could be. Some KDE staples like Kmail can feel quite outdated, and KDE’s own browser, Falkon, which has the potential to be excellent, needs a lot of TLC to be brought up to speed with what users expect of a browser (something that might be important, for no particular reason at all). It also seems like while the GNOME/libadwaita world gets a steady stream of cool, new small applications, it’s a bit more silent on the KDE front in this regard.
There are smaller issues here and there, as there are with any major, complex software project, but these are some of the what I consider to be big ticket items that I personally would love to see some attention diverted towards. Of course, I’m just a user, and in the end, it’s up the KDE project to allocate what I’m sure are fewer resources than they’d like to have.
Addendum II: Actually, GNOME is great
While I’ve said some harsh words about GNOME in this article, I want to stress that this is just my personal opinion, and reflects nothing but my own preference in how I use my computer. While GNOME is simply not suited to my needs, it is an absolutely outstanding desktop environment, created by a team of people who know what they’re doing, who deeply care, and who more often than not receive an entirely undeserved, very nasty, almost personal kind of abuse that goes far beyond merely stating a dislike for GNOME.
GNOME may not be for me, but the Linux (and BSD) world should be deeply thankful for having such an excellent desktop environment as the face of the desktop segment of the market. GNOME is still kilometres ahead of whatever Windows and macOS are doing, and if KDE didn’t exist, I’d happily use GNOME without so much as a single hesitation. A piece of software not suiting your needs doesn’t mean it’s bad or that the people making it are bad people. It just means you shouldn’t be using it.
Those addendum feel really disjointed to the article. Like it had received a load of backlash and you were trying to roll back… But this comment section is (currently) empty. So why not edit the article itself to incorporate those views?
For me, they work fine as addendums. I really feel the article flowed the way Thom wanted it to and, somewhat rightly so, the addendums are a bit disjointed from the article and serve their purpose.
I agree
I disagree
MATE + Wayfire is becoming a great desktop environment for Wayland. I’ve been using it as a daily driver for a while now. There’s a bit more polish to be had but the core desktop is there. I had to package it myself for Debian as the maintainer of Wayfire and MATE has dropped out of Debian.
I never could get along with kde (the de); it’s too mess-up-able for me, where correcting said mess is not quite as easily corrected as could be.
Absolutely love the kde software, though: Okular, kwrite, kdenlive, krita, etc. And those applications all integrate graciously on my xfce setup with theme from the noughties.
On a sidenote, one can contribute financially over at: https://kde.org/donate/
Similar experience here. But the beauty of this is we can all choose vastly different ‘interfaces’ to our machines and there’s something for (almost) everyone.
Masterpiece write-up Thom. I’ve used many UIs, from DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows 11 and even CWM on OpenBSD, and KDE really is the best of the bunch. Thank you!
My big gripe about KDE has always been the KApps. On one hand, if they were intended to be basic, functional apps, I wouldn’t mind. But they seem to have varying levels of complexity and purposes, and I would rather have one clear BEST app included rather than a default that is sort of wonky. Case in point, KMail looks awful, wouldn’t load a basic gmail account, shows a weird “NO HTML MESSAGE” no matter what I click. I uninstalled it.
KWrite too just seems way too complicated when it should be simple and beautiful, a perfect place to open text files and maybe do some basic markdown and save a few notes.
I guess KDE is copying what Apple used to do with iCloud/iPhoto/etc?
But I have been pleasantly surprised at how usable KDE is on even an old Chromebook. Not perfect – still get a weird i915GPU bug where everything freezes momentarily. But better than Gnome on the same hardware.
I have to imagine this is the case of too much baggage and not enough manpower. Some of these KDE programs are rather old and there are an awful lot of them. For better or worse, if this stuff was produced by a for-profit company, it’s highly likely that you’d have far fewer options. On the flip side, because this is open source, you have a lot of options, but those options are in various stages of repair as volunteers come and go and follow their passions. Because of this, it’s likely your favorite program will stick around, but it’s unfair to expect every single KDE program to be well maintained, Just search for Killed by Google to get some perspective, and their market capitalization is 2 trillion dollars, which I assume is more than KDE’s market capitalization.
People forget just how much history KDE has.
Many of the KDE apps were created back when there were few/no other good apps doing those things. For example, KWrite was created back long before there was LibreOffice and there were almost no good word processors on Linux.
In early days I loved KDE, but in recent years I’ve seperated to the point I no longer have a single device running KDE, I’ve just encountered too many odd issues across various platforms. In fairness, it’s probably an App issue as much as KDE itself, but if I don’t get the issues under another manager then I’ve only one logical choice. I suppose if I only had private devices to worry about I’d have another crack, but I need compatibility across many devices for many users, if it works on one it must work on all. I concede it’s been a while, perhaps almost a decade since I last give it a serious trial run. At the moment I have a spread of devices mostly running either MATE or Cinnamon, but that is biased due to Linux Mint being the most common non-MS OS we use. I suppose this defines me as lazy if it works I don’t break it, and if it doesn’t work I’ll just try another rather than do the hard yards!
Given that Spectacle and System Setting ring bells from Phoronix articles about KDE releases, I believe that’s because they’ve been rewritten in KDE’s QML-based convergent mobile/desktop UI framework: Kirigami.
I’m not a fan of Kirigami because, like Apple and SwiftUI, it’s full of “it’s a rewrite” warts. (eg. Just look at the “Window settings for…” dialog under System Settings > Window Management > Window Rules.
It feels like a Breeze-skinned Android app running inside a desktop-remoting client and, once you notice that, you can’t unsee it. Why does it have three different font sizes? Why is the “Detect Window Properties” modal an in-page popup with no ability to be moved to uncover what’s behind it instead of a top-level window? Why does a configurator for a desktop have to be fundamentally built around Yet Another List Widget™? etc. etc. etc.
That in-page modal, specifically, feels like a massive regression. KDE was already doing better than Windows on “people hate modal dialogs” back when I ditched my last Windows XP+Litestep desktop for KDE 2 in 2004 and, looking at it now, every time I see that borderless block, I get the impulse to glance at another window to check if KWin has crashed. (I’m still on X11, pending more universal support for restart/reconnect/crash-recovery among toolkits other than Qt 6.)
The UIs you praise are built in C++ (though Python is also an option) on top of Qt’s QWidget hierarchy, which is treated as “mature” and more or less in maintenance mode because they want to focus on QML and Qt Quick (Kirigami is an alternative to the latter) for customers like In-Vehicle Infotainment vendors.
KDE is seeing more QML-based stuff because we’re seeing more contributors who are unwilling to learn C++. I code in Python because it’s the only way to reconcile “I insist on QWidget UIs” and “I insist on memory-safe APIs”… though Python does have access to stronger static guarantees than QML with the help of MyPy running in Strict mode.
That’s quite a lengthy advertisement. Let me try – Why do I use DWM? Because it sucks less.
I find it absolutely baffling and ridiculous how an adult can need such a feature.
Easy. You have more than one window from the same application, you’ve forgotten that Alt+Tab exists, and your use of an OSX-style dock minimizes the availability of more traditional Windows-y ways to find individual windows, like the on-hover thumbnails from Plasma’s traditional Win9x-style taskbar.
It’s an outgrowth of how, for all that I love it enough that I just bought a Mac Mini G4 to run a hacked Mac OS 9 on, right up to the point when it was replaced by Mac OS X, classic Mac OS struggled with UI design decisions tracing back to how running multiple applications simultaneously began as a hack named Multifinder.
(Basically, classic Mac OS had an active app selector menu in the top-right corner of the screen and then each application was expected to provide its own separate Windows menu, and all an application’s windows were trapped in the same “layer”, like an MDI paradigm without the enclosing parent window.)
In essence, with OS X and beyond, Apple just rested on its laurels with a user base who’d grown used to bad window management, even though relegating legacy applications to Classic Environment meant it was no longer necessary to avoid breaking applications written against Macintosh Toolbox APIs designed in 1984 and hacked into cooperative multitasking in 1987.
(Think of the Multifinder-descended window management in Mac OS 9 being like a stack of VirtualBox VMs running in “seamless” mode. If you’ve never used it, with the help of the VirtualBox Guest Extensions, it lets you run, for example, Windows XP windows “natively” on your Linux desktop by setting the Windows monitor resolution to the same resolution as your host monitor and then dynamically masking out the desktop so it appears as if it’s a rootless/free-floating set of Windows when, really, it’s one window with clever window-shape masking trickery being updated on the fly.)
Fair enough!
It seems like Thom, rather than learn some basic organisational skills and basic OS use, brought over some “legacy incompetence” to Linux desktop and KDE has the feature to deal with that. Kudos to KDE for helping folk with fossilised bad habits.
Thanks for the details about the Classic Mac OS and OS X evolution – I came to OS X late and had previously used Mac OS 9 only two or three times at university. I was aware of the lack of protected memory but not about the multitasking aspect!
Did I kill your cat or something? Why so.much hate and hostility?
Expose is faster and more convenient for me than using the keyboard or taskbar. Why does this offend you so much?
To be fair, Exposé as implemented by Apple is a very polished thing.
I can’t remember which “big white slab with a media remote magnet’d to the side” model of iMac I tried it on at a Future Shop, but I thought it was brilliant that you could pinch the sides of the included mouse while in the middle of some other interaction to zoom-out-and-unstack, allowing dragging-and-dropping to a covered-up window in a single clean motion.
I think you’re over-reacting a bit, Thom! Ask any person from an ethnic minority, or LGBTQIA+, or religious minority, what “hate and hostility” is. I have no idea why you were offended.
It’s possible you’re both talking past each other.
Thom, did you intend “without which I wouldn’t know how to find a window if my life depended on it.” as either hyperbole or to be implicitly qualified with “Given my preference to use a dock instead of a taskbar”?
…because if either of those is true, then you’re probably reacting to a misconception of Athlander’s position based on them reacting to a misconception of yours.
Athlander,
Disregarding the whataboutism, I agree with Thom the unorganized/incompetent comment seems hostile.
On windows 11 I am experiencing a similar problem. The density of applications on the taskbar has been dramatically decreased and loosing application windows is a daily occurrence now. “I must have accidentally closed a window”, so I go open up new command & editor windows only to find out later in the day that my windows were not actually closed, but microsoft programmed windows to hide them to declutter the taskbar. What absolutely confounds me is that windows hides windows underneath a menu even though there’s a lot more space left on the taskbar. This makes multitasking far worse! While having too many windows always used to be a possibility, and admittedly the taskbar looked ugly for it, but in older operating systems I never had a problem of missing windows when so few windows were involved.
Practically every time I use ms-teams it’s a struggle to find the window of the person I’m chatting with because it’s not even being displayed. Arg! Maybe it’s just me, but it just seems like the windows UI got a whole lot worse for multitasking than it used to be.
Alfman,
the “whataboutism” is there to put “hate and hostility” in context. I’m British-Indonesian, and consider myself to be lucky to have been physically assaulted only once for my skin colour, and spat on twice. I’ve been singled out twice by passport control in Sweden and once in Norway, and three times by police in Spain. Verbal abuse has been pretty much a constant. My mother experienced absolutely horrendous hate and hostility when we moved to the UK. My gay friends have been assaulted (physically and verbally), and my partner, who rides a motorcycle, has received online threats of sexual assault from male bikers simply for daring to express an opinion and she’s been regularly insulted in person and online. For Thom to claim “hate and hostility” is an insult to people who genuinely face that. As someone with first-hand and second-hand experience of hate and hostility, I absolutely refuse to let that slide and I would hope Thom reflects on that. Further, my comment was in no way more ‘hostile’ than Thom’s attitude towards people who use Windows out of preference, or X because Wayland doesn’t support some essential (for them) feature.
For the same reason I support Thom’s stand against the Ladybird browser for moral reasons, I take umbrage at Thom’s use of ‘hate and hostility’.
Apologies for the mini-essay.
So… Thom states his preferences, and you find it “absolutely baffling and ridiculous how an adult can need such a feature”, you suggest he learns “some basic organisational skills and basic OS use” to help with “fossilised bad habits”.
In my book that’s uncalled for, insulting, and yes, hostile. I wouldn’t have called it hate but others might see it that way, too. And when called out – you say that such words must be reserved for worse offences, that you say you have been a victim of. You know what, you can nearly always find worse behaviour. But that does not excuse anything. You can’t first go around insulting others and then correct them which words they must use for you.
Alfman,
I would say that the Windows UI has taken steps forwards and backwards for multitasking. The introduction of overdue features like virtual desktops and improved windows snapping are definitely steps in the right direction, but the taskbar has certainly taken steps backwards.
I’m not sure what you mean by “windows hides windows underneath a menu even though there’s more space left on the taskbar” – do you mean a menu on the taskbar when it could be a separate icon?
Athlander,
It doesn’t benefit the discussion IMHO. Anyway moving on…
Yes. I’m probably not calling it by the proper name, but it’s the “…” menu. There’s 5 or 6 cm of empty space and applications are being hidden from view. It’s a stylistic choice, but not a functional one. Older version of windows showed at least double the number of tasks and I don’t see a way to get that back. I complain because It’s hurting productivity. This is one of my gripes with recent versions of windows.
On the topic of work productivity, another gripe I have is VS intellisense overwriting what I type. I’ve been coding forever and have never had so many problems typing in C strings until recent versions of VS screw it up. VS tries to “help” by typing characters for you but more often than not I end up with double quotes up like this “”string””. I like auto-complete, but having features that break code that was typed correctly is so bloody annoying! At least it can be disabled, but it’s like they didn’t even test it.
I’ve got more gripes with the new outlook and azure devops and the list goes on… maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I think MS are changing things just for the sake of change rather than actually making their software better.
cato_minor,
I was calling for a sense of perspective. I’ll concede that my comments could come across as rude and could have been phrased more diplomatically, but to normalise “hate and hostility” down to that level is dangerous and trivialises the concept. It’s disappointing that Thom would resort to that when he’s been a strong supporter of people who really do suffer from hate and hostility.
I am unsure about kde current aesthetics but I tend to like more and more the macos 9, beos, kde 1.x style aesthetics with small 3D icons, slightly 3D feel in controls but not skeumorphism.
Don’t know how it would be called now, but it does calm me and I would like to see it more coming back. Has a robust/solid feel to it. Now I am scared to read a 404 error message in a flat gui button.
Probably just nostalgy !
thomas,
I agree. Flat became the trend, but it was really regressive in terms of recognition of controls. I don’t need/want things to be skeuomorphic, but I do think controls should trigger muscle memory, otherwise it makes you question if/how something is actually going to work.
https://tonsky.me/blog/checkbox/
I don’t think it’s just nostalgia, there’s actual benefit to having predictable controls and representations.
Harsh truth/hot take: Almost all GUI desktops are fine and have been fine since 1993 or so. They all work and I’m almost equally productive in any of them. For linux, KDE is great, so is gnome. I can trust that gnome worked 10 years ago, works today, and will work any random day between now and the next 40 years. I can’t say the same about KDE, sadly. Its hurt me far too often. Been really slow and very bug prone in its adoption of new technologies like Wayland. Forced a digital cashew on my desktop for mysterious reasons. Had extremely strange errors like a non working on screen keyboard. Etc etc.
Gnome more than the alternatives always seems to also have a way to do that obscure thing I only need to do once a year: gui to set up a strange printer, or set up a proxy. Something odd that only has a config in gnome. So I always have gnome as a backup. I can screw up the config for sway or whatever new desktop I’m playing with and I can always revert back to gnome in a moment of crisis.
Exposé is BRILLIANT.
My first contact with a Mac was at the late Mac OS 9, 10.3 days. I remember being impressed. It is still part of my workflow whenever I am using a Mac.
But nothing for me beats the responsiveness and the bloatlessness of openbox, which is my choice when I am running freebsd. With some addons, I get almost an expose-like experience, without any notifications or distractions beyond what I explicitly enable.
For a modern OS, HaikuOS is the best. It respects my screen real estate and it is light.
I just hate that sometimes a 2560×1600 30 inch monitor feels SMALL. It is completely unacceptable.