https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

I use windows-key and start typing to launch things all the time, and after reading your comment at first I thought I might have developed a habit to pause, but nope. I wonder what the difference is.

My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them. Maybe pro gamers can manage to keep the cursor in every time, but for me I often take 2 or 3 tries to click on something.

This looks like a bug or you changed the default setting, just to be sure in System Setting -> Window Management -> Window Behavior -> is the Window Activation Policy set to click to focus?

"This week Plasma also saw a new Kickoff menu that is a complete rewrite, which is also coming with Plasma 5.21. There have also been many bug fixes, performance improvements, and other ongoing UI refinements."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-KWin...

For instance, margins and paddings seem to be all over the place [1]. At least Gnome gets that part right.

[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Notifications

https://pointieststick.com/

I personally like KDE and it's Breeze Dark theme a lot.

> This week (KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten...)

I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to check on the date, to get an idea of when was "this week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well :-)

Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main page) does indeed change the UI and it now happens to show the date.

Loved the irony...

This all shows that even for people dedicated to it, getting UI/UX right is hard.

Everything is so LARGE and padding between elements is YUGE. The tech is cool and everything seems to work fine, but something about the UI just grates me.

Also, KDE is the most customizable DE of them all, and it has the most powerful features of them all (by far). Given that, all these "but it looks kinda bad!" comments sound insane. It's like choosing a push mower over a motorized because you like the finish on the handle.

... it has been feeling like that for the few years I've been following it.

Went with Plasma first - did not go well. I simply cannot get comfortable with it and general look and feel is not working for me (I prefer defaults and I avoid much tweaking and any 3rd party customization). I settled on Cinnamon, but it was close tie with GNOME which was actually quite refreshing experience for me.

So, to each his own, but I just do not see KDE as "the sanest" default.

IMO, one aspect where Gnome excels is its tight integration of alternative input methods. I remember it being controversial that Gnome blessed ibus over alternative engines, but as a result, setting up CJK input is simple and foolproof. Although I prefer KDE in every other way, I have never managed to get ibus working correctly in that environment.

I have nothing against KDE by any means (I love it, and also really appreciate their initatives like KDEnlive, etc.), but I don't think I've ever gotten Japanese/Chinese input to work in it before. Maybe once, but then I gave up on finding a sane way to easily cycle between the different input types (eg, WinKey+Space).

I have nothing against KDE, but come on. Many of us really do prefer GNOME despite its perceived deficiencies. This is just a matter of personal preference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everaldo_Coelho#Crystal

https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/gs86hj/thumbn...

https://medium.com/elementaryos/a-new-native-file-chooser-19...

Don't know that I agree there.

I actually really like GNOME's workflow on laptop, especially with Pop OS's extensions.

I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and, after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for its money, which was surprising.

Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because it's a bit too configurable. I'm always afraid of getting asked for help because of someone accidentally messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but that "you can configure everything" core will always probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...

that might be subjectively correct to a lot of people, but I find that they are usually set to sane defaults and a lot is disabled by default. Also, I would like to emphasis that the choice of disto kinda matters here as they sometimes change defaults.

I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people’s perception of KDE.

I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi, but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky notes and feed reader without it.

> Debunking: lInUx Is JuSt A kErNeL

Ah yes, countering a meme with another meme. Good one.

I noticed Ubuntu have switched to KDE (or, alternatively, LXDE) as DE for their "Studio" variant. I'm guessing that's mostly because the minimal window decorations for resizing etc makes gnome hard to use, and Studio is for large notebooks or desktops anyway. I think the exercise of patience that was resizing windows on gnome2 has slightly improved, but I'm still speechless as to the loss of the global menu to be replaced by ... a centered clock accompanied by a minimal dot that I found out to display notifications after a while, and nothing else.

I mean I'm glad that F/OSS for desktops still exists at all, but gnome3 is really just a big regression for no reason at all, and I'm starting to get a bit concerned where gnome is heading. It's not that we have a wealth of new desktop apps anyway. Maybe Ubuntu is testing the waters to switch to KDE as well.

The decision by the Ubuntu Studio variants was made by the Ubuntu Studio developers and not by Canonical. The developers are also maintaining Fedora Jam with KDE installed by default too. Unfortunately all the big commercial distros are using GNOME as default DE because RedHat is providing the commercial support for GNOME already and it's easier for them to just make the same choice. So I don't think Ubuntu will switch to KDE anytime soo, even if GNOME developers don't like Ubuntu and make their opinion very public.

For those interested on why artists like Plasma so much, David Revoy made a nice summary: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article783/kubuntu-linux-20-04-fo....

This came up recently with SolveSpace. Two developers spent an amazing amount of time getting scroll wheel zoom right. Discussion here: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/pull/825

Love these guys, they give a crap about usability. BTW next release soon - after a bit more polish. Polish take time and work, but do you really care about the software if you don't spend some time unclogging the toilet?

This is the absolute CORE of the problem with open-source software. Someone becomes the "maintainer" of a project, often through no skill of their own (they just showed up at the right time), which effectively makes them BDFL with infinite veto power. Hard-forks of popular projects are politically unpopular (for good reason), so that isn't an option. Instead, the whole world of software that relies on a package is broken or fixed at the whim of one dude.

That’s a bit unnuanced, isn’t it?

Nobody randomly becomes the maintainer of a big/popular project without having a history of contributing. They were the ones willing to pick up the task of doing free labour for everyone after the last guy didn’t want the job anymore.

As maintainer of a project, their job is to try to respond to bugs, maintain it, improve it and keep it working. All for free.

If somebody submits a low quality or low effort patch which goes against the projects conventions or general strategies or patterns which will over time increase the maintainer’s burden, he is under no obligation to accept that patch.

On the contrary, whoever submits the patch is the one who wants to benefit from all that time invested into the project so far, for his own good. I think it’s absolutely fair to expect/demand that they are also willing to put up some effort when they send in patches and receive feedback.

There are a huge variety of laptops with different size trackpads, different positions, varying levels of palm rejection etc but there's zero customisability around this seemingly simple behaviour.

My Windows dualboot has no such issue and macOS of course (using a MacBook) works fantastically without this limitations.

Fortunately source is there and it is easy to patch (try to set 0%). That's quite common, for example there are several patched libinput on AUR [5].

Does your hardware has firmware palm detection mechanism? Current bug [6] (Palm exclusion zones are not worth it on some hardware).

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-det...

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/blob/f2ba...

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/19...

[4] http://who-t.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-libinput-doesnt-have-l...

[5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=libinput

[6] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/43...

The touchpad is about 7 fingers in width and the palm exclusion zones are a little more than one finger on each side; this is roughly 30% of the trackpad, or 15% each side, certainly bigger than 8% and even that would be too much.

Additionally, although the documentation does state that rejections should only happen for a vertical like movement, it also happens for a completely horizontal one.

My Dell Latitude E7440 follows description and I believe same is true for most of the users. I have to start movement at least diagonally, once it catches further direction does not matter.

It produces no output when running `libinput debug-events`. I've recompiled my version with 0% just to check.

            /* palm edges are 8% of the width on each side */
    -       mm.x = min(8, width * 0.00);
    +       mm.x = min(8, width * 0.08);
            edges = evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
            tp->palm.left_edge = edges.x;
     
    -       mm.x = width - min(8, width * 0.00);
    +       mm.x = width - min(8, width * 0.08);
            edges = evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
            tp->palm.right_edge = edges.x;

    $ yay -G libinput
    $ cd libinput
    $ makepkg -so
    ==> Verifying source file signatures with gpg...
        libinput-1.16.4.tar.xz ... FAILED (unknown public key E23B7E70B467F0BF)
    ==> ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!
    $ gpg --recv-key E23B7E70B467F0BF
    $ makepkg -so
    $ vim src/libinput-1.16.4/src/evdev-mt-touchpad.c 
    $ makepkg -fei

Ultimately, I would prefer that this kind of feature is configurable in userland. Wayland's documentation page mentions that "Data from touchpads showed that almost all palm events during tying on a Lenovo T440 happened in the left-most and right-most 5% of the touchpad. The T440 series has one of the largest touchpads", and this may have been true several years ago, but it's quite common now to have larger and wider form-factor touchpads.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libinput/

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/touchpad...

I'd file a bug though, and see if whatever's wrong can be fixed for every trackpad of that same make/model.

My "issue" is described as expected behaviour in this documentation: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-det... (the "A" event).

Which "Linux" desktop are you referring to?

Personally, I see this change as a regression from the highly configurable synaptics driver.

As you've asked, distribution wise I typically run an Ubuntu LTS with Gnome 3 but rolling releases such as Manjaro and lightweight DE like XFCE are also very nice.

Alas, my white whale is focus-follows-mouse, and I just... can't have it. Not worth abandoning the Mac over, not for me, but.. arrgh.

This maybe would be solved by a window manager that enforces never allowing windows to stack depthwise? Which OSX doesn't have of course. Just size-and-position-hotkey workarounds

In real, XWin-style focus-follows-mouse, the window you mouse over gets the focus, but, isn't pulled to the front. If you click, it gets the front and the focus.

I use Moom, a semi-tile snap-style window wrangler, and a widescreen with three panels. What I want to do is just slide the cursor over and start typing, but I have to remember to click, and often enough I just don't.

The One True Wiki has a nice discussion of the subject: https://wiki.c2.com/?FocusFollowsMouse

Alt-tab didn’t work because its mru usually gets spoiled by other (browser) windows. If only there was a setting that fixed alt-tab mru into a stack. Alt-tab-tab to switch to app which started second may be much better than mru for some workflows, because you can always predict what it does with certainty of 1.

If anyone wonders, here are three from Mac last I used it:

- fn took the place of ctrl on the laptop (but not the full keyboard). Unlike on Dell and Lenovo who also has this problem it could not be remapped neither at boot nor in the OS.

- CMD - tab forced me to think ahead of time if I want to change to the last application or the last window of the same application. I.e. switching between two Safari instances takes a different key combination than switching between Safari and IntelliJ.

- modifier keys worked differently between applications, e.g. selecting to the end of a word was either ctrl-shift, alt-shift or CMD-shift depending on application.

Things that annoy me on windows: - No tabs in explorer. Imagine having a web browser that didn't have tabs, that's how bad this is. - No preview in explorer. Mac has this awesome feature where you press space and it gives a quick overview of most files (not only images but also pdfs, .docx, ...). - No column view. Column view makes it much easier to navigate across directories, and back and forth between subdirectories of a root directory.

That’s a feature, not a bug. I personally hate having to tab through a million browser windows to find the application I need, or having to tab through unrelated applications when looking for a browser window, which is what I have to put up with when using Windows.

KDE does this perfectly however. It defaults to Windows/classic Gnome 2 behaviour but can easily be configured however one wants it.

I don't appreciate the Mac/Gnome way.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

- "Looks great. But there are no mirrors. Isn't that dangerous?"

- "Yeah, but that's not a bug, it's a missing feature. Besides, we don't like mirrors because in all cars they need to be cleaned all the time."

- "Really? Apparently the KDE cars also have mirrors but different technology, and they don't need to be cleaned at all. Also, what's the difference between a bug or missing feature if a lot of people complain about it?"

- "Oh yeah. But honestly we really don't like that people have to clean their mirrors, so we prefer not to have them."

I'm not saying that it's not a nice feature to have, but it's also definitely non-trivial - it's not only thumbnails for images, if you do that people will also demand thumbnails for videos (including, of course, all ancient formats), PDF files, Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents, HTML pages etc. etc. etc.

I do care about this feature just like the author and though I don't have any evidence supporting my thinking, I think nobody enjoys trawling through bunch of weirdly named files (which is typical of how downloaded image files get named by default) looking for that specific picture/icon. After the Gnome 3 debacle where they basically refused to listen to the users and even removed not-so-obscure features like tabbed windows in nautilus (which I noticed is back now), I just didn't have the confidence that raising a feature request would amount to much.

"Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi

That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx.

Now capitalism works, so apple and microsoft apply the money they make to hard/unsexy things like sleep-wake bug fixes and APIs and sane defaults.

But they also bake advertising into their codebase and leech data home to the mothership and prevent you from running all the programs you'd like.

So look at linux as an opportunity.

https://slated.org/the_poetterisation_of_gnu_linux

The more you know.

EDIT: nope, it's more direct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering

a connection the article didn't make clear.

I'm not sure using someone's surname is such a great idea for this purpose. But I now at least understand why. Also their anger at the added complexity being done to Linux and surrounding structures including but not limited to systemd.

But these structures are still in flux. Even if it means a mess along the way.

> "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi

Gandhi (spelled thus) never said that. What he did say (in an article about first-aid treatments for snakebites, weirdly enough), was this:

> We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

-- The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandi, vol. 13, p. 241 (http://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatm...)

Not quite as snappy, admittedly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

I'm not as sure with Macs (and the surrounding culture isn't really eager on such things anyway), but there's a long history of people modding Windows in various ways, that goes back to the DOS days. Of course your customisation is highly unlikely to make it back to MS, but things like WindowBlinds were extremely popular.

My guess is that the author prefers Gnome because yes, it has fewer features, but those feel more polished. KDE is powerful but some less frequently used features felt more like functional prototypes that were thrown somewhere into the nth level of the system settings.

Then again the last time I tried it Gnome had a lot of issues as well, so maybe I'm completely wrong nowadays.

Ended up taking it back for a refund and getting a g703 instead.

Honestly if the "2s Anywhere" had had the setup you described I would have kept it. Logitech tried to explain that middle slick was still there, on the button further back towards the palm rest, but it felt so unnatural and inconvenient. The 502 looks like a nice piece of kit.

Usability is not about how many features a program has. Usually more features make it harder to have good usability.