> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in.

That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence.

It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago).

There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appealing prospect to me.

> But they didn’t feel familiar to me.

I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc.

Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.

Plasma gets criticized often for having too many configuration options and too many features, which I think is just insane. It works perfectly well out of the box, but it allows you to tinker to your heart's content.

No disagreement here.

I don't use gnome desktops, for similar reasons (although I'm also not the target audience for adopters, as I currently use Linux as my primary desktop environment!)

I use cinnamon, as, for my personal preferences, it strikes the best balance between familiarity, 'prettiness' and functionality of the options I've tried.

I think Cinnamon is really underrated. It has sane defaults, is reasonably performant, and will be familiar to anyone coming from Windows.

In general I feel that Gnome has terrible defaults, and are hostile to the user making changes away from these defaults. It's also less performant than Cinnamon -- animations can lag on my machine for example, and my machine isn't exactly bad.

I think Plasma is nice, and it's certainly more customizable than Cinnamon, but I think this comes at the cost of reliability and an overall feeling of cohesiveness. I also think there's a point where you don't want every right click menu to contain an option which allows you to fundamentally change the functionality of your desktop.

I'd probably be using XFCE or Mate if Cinnamon didn't exist.

What?

You literally said you have only a limited amount of experience with KDE (from 'undefined' time ago), and yet you felt qualified to opine on its suitability for X... now?

What?

Besides an integrated terminal, Dolphin also has a split mode! https://i.imgur.com/4blIFer.png

How does a file manager made by four Dutch guys for free beat Explorer, the file manager of the 99.9% marketshare multi-billion-dollar hegemon OS (which only got a dark mode like yesterday)?

And tabs. And drag-dropping things by accident doesn't simply move/copy files but asks you what you want to do.

Well, Norton Commander[1] had a split view and an integrated terminal in 1984. Shipping a power-user file manager has simply never been a priority for Microsoft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander

The integrated terminal behaves badly with zsh/oh-my-zsh (random memory being printed to screen, extra space on the prompt whenever you switch folders), and sometimes fails to track folders. Should I report these issues?

Of course! The answer to your question is always yes. This is very helpful to OSS developers.

Not too mention whatever passes for a file manager on osx (finder) that looks and acts like it was created by a thirteen year old boy as his first real program. And not even a boy that's going to go on to program for a living at that.

KDE is actually one of the lightest in terms of memory usage of all the DE's.

today. after gnome rewrote the whole thing under "new management"

That was 9 years ago.

that's how long KDE prejudice is going on (and how long gnome is still missing old functionality ;)

As you said, you got a PC with 32GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

What about people who bought a low-to-mid range laptop last year? While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

Tracking "current" desktop hardware is a quick way to get yourself another vista.

Firstly 50MB isn't ".5G", it's 0.05GB (you're out by an order of magnitude).

You're point about not tracking current is relevant though....or at least it is for some domains. When it comes to multimedia authoring you do expect people to running at least current systems because multimedia authoring is hardware heavy processes thus professionals will invest in the hardware to support them. Even weirder is the expectation that you'd want to be running a hardware heavy web-browser while running your hardware heavy authoring tools on those modest systems. That feels like you're making some unfair demands tbh.

As for KDE5, that runs fine on older hardware. I have a 7 year old laptop and KDE flies.

> While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

High memory usage from a browser or multimedia authoring tools is not the fault or responsibility of the desktop environment?

Edit: Or was your point more that the desktop environment should use minimal memory so that the user can have a better experience with their applications? That makes sense, except in this case Ubuntu Studio explicitly states that it’s designed for powerful machines and not ones with more limited resources

If you bought a budget computer do you really expect it to be able to handle running even minor taxing applications. In my experience most people who are buying a budget laptop need a great web browsing experience and maybe an office suite (if they aren't using a cloud one already).

My guess is running a browser with Spotify or YouTube, some social networking tabs, and maybe google docs or office 365 word will not pose any issues.

FWIW I've been running KDE Neon on an older Intel NUC, sporting an i5-4250U and 8GB RAM. For normal usage like surfing the web, writing documents, file management, email and watching YouTube it has behaved very well.

Obviously the CPU is a bit anemic which is noticeable when you do CPU heavy stuff like watching non-h264 videos on YouTube, but otherwise it's been very smooth and functional.

There' no such thing as a "current desktop hardware" in 2020. Specs haven't been changing in like a decade.

That’s not really true, though desktop hardware hasn’t improved anywhere near as much as laptops, where the difference is very substantial. Computer hardware of equivalent cost or high-/low-endness has gotten quite a lot faster (and much more power-efficient); for many sorts of tasks similar CPUs will be four or more times as fast. But it’s really SSDs where the most obvious improvements have occurred, and for most practical computing terms, compare a fast and expensive HDD machine of ten years ago with a cheap SSD machine from now and the modern one will be waaaay faster.

Sample article doing some comparisons: https://www.techspot.com/article/1666-old-1000-cpu-vs-budget...

Yeah, a large reason Vista got lambasted so widely was because netbook form factors were gaining steam at the same time, and Microsoft had built it with the assumption that most new users would be using contemporary desktop-class machines. The old assumption that users would throw out their old equipment and upgrade to something in step with Moore's Law was no longer valid.

According to the steam hardware survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) current desktop hardware is 8GB of RAM or less, that's what half of all users have. There are more people on 4GB or less than there are with with more than 16GB. Your machine is the statistical outlier here and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of everyone else.

Your current desktop hardware.

And you don’t need every desktop environment to handle every use case. If you have limited resources, run something like XFCE.

Amen. Stop fighting the last war.

In Ubuntu Studio's context, one would expect the typical user to have decent RAM as it caters for multimedia which needs a lot of RAM.

Ubuntu's minimum requirements for desktop users is 4GB RAM. I presume that an extra 50MB is acceptable.

This article is about Ubuntu Studio switching to KDE.

> For reference, Ubuntu Studio is created for more powerful computers, is not meant to run on low-powered or older hardware, and is not meant to give an old computer new life. For that reason, from our perspective, the RAM usage between the two desktops is nearly the same.

I'm still rocking a 7 year old Samsung Chronos with 8GB RAM and KDE5 flies.

There used to be a time when the real world footprint between KDE and XFCE was significant but that's not been the case in a long time.

These days the footprint of your average desktop chat client has dwarfed the difference in memory usage between most of the major desktop environments. So if you're looking for places to cut corners that would be the first place I'd suggest looking.

I'm using KDE (Kubuntu 20.04) on four laptops turning 10 this year. They are AMDs first gen APU, so they were nothing fancy when they came out. KDE runs just fine, with animations. Main thing to upgrade was an SSD for a really speedy setup.

That's the one upgrade (SSD) I did too.

To me the problem with bloat is that it makes projects harder to maintain, also more bugs, not so much about ram usage. If the system in place makes sure the codebase is easily understood and adopted by contributors, then by all means, make all the crazy features you can think of.

What KDE can compete with I don't know, but I do know its the only DE I can stand and actually enjoy using. And I compare it not only with Gnome, but Windows and MacOS too. Highly recommend you take a look if you don't know it (recently).

>> "Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in."

You can type cmd + enter in any Explorer address bar and Windows will start a command prompt in that folder. It's not the same, but at least simplifies things.