Plasma 5 is still a little janky, but this has been improved a lot, and should hopefully continue to improve (it has a much more consciously opinionated design team than 4 ever did).

The Linux desktop space is a real mess at the moment, but KDE is the best of the bunch for general, modern computing.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community.

The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach.

I'm a post-3.5 refugee in WindowMaker (and sometimes ratpoison) land, but I honestly think KDE is a big, big deal. It still values customization and still tries to place the user in control of his device, unlike the ahem other guys who seem to be following in Apple's very questionable footsteps.

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

I'm thinking strictly about the customization of the UI, not of "everything else" in System Preferences (e.g. hardware, network and so on). You can set individual icons but you don't have icon themes per se, can't change the UI theme (and I distinctly remember there was an application that did that very well back on 10.4, and 10.5 broke it along with most other efforts), can't change titlebar buttons and so on. E.g. I very much prefer the NeXT arrangement (close button on the right, minimize button on the left), because I really have no use for Maximize on a 27" screen. Good luck with that.

To their credit, though, Apple does at least think twice before pushing changes most of the time. Gnome's latest effort, with the client-side decorations, is maddening. Now every Gnome application has a thick titlebar that's also a toolbar, and every other application doesn't. They supposedly did that in order to save screen space - which could have just as well been done by reducing the thickness of that mammoth title bar Adwaita uses - but the effect seems to me to have been exactly opposite. Surely someone must have seen that the result is inconsistent on any system that runs a single application not included with Gnome -- say, for instance, Firefox! Or Chrome! Or Emacs! Or Thunderbird! Whatever.

I certainly understand that Gnome developers have a vision for their UI, but the uncommunicative way in which they impose it is pretty unpopular among users (like myself) who moved away from Windows or Mac OS a long, long time ago because they wanted more control over their operating system (well, that and no BSODs, which was a common occurrence at the time when I left Windows behind. Did you know Mac users didn't even have preemptive multitasking then? God I feel like a dinosaur now. Get off my lawn.)

How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).

The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

Pretty sure I didn't take OS X as an example of how it's done. In fact, I took it as an example of how it's not done, which is why I find it unpleasant that Gnome is following in their footsteps.

> The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

It's much better when you have your hands on the keyboard. When I have a hand on the mouse already, having to rely on the keyboard is annoying for the same reason why having to rely on the mouse is annoying when you have your hands on the keyboard.

This is NOT true - IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/. It allows you to customize everything right upto the alt-tab behavior [1] and access to D-BUS for core OS behavior [2]

If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ [2] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/937/laine/

> IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/.

Of course I've seen https://extensions.gnome.org/ , Gnome is almost unusable without it. But Gnome extensions aren't supported by the core development team. They can (and do!) break from one release to another.

The barrier for "customizing things" is pretty high, too. E.g. if I want to change my window decorations in KDE, I download a new set of decorations and change it. If I want to change my window decorations in Gnome, I have to install gnome-tweak-tool and that-program-that-removes-the-bloody-client-decorations-crap and now most (but not) all of my apps are going to use the decorations I want. With some glitches. That's not ok.

> If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

I don't need to check out Fedora 22, I can already compile Gnome from their public repos. The showcase for cutting edge Gnome isn't too impressive; it can be boiled down to "we really like tablets and you're going to like them too because two releases from now all our applications are going to look like they're running on a tablet."

IMO downloading extensions to change your OS is not too different from downloading additional software to do the same [1][2].

[1] http://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

[2] http://superuser.com/questions/548146/change-command-tab-to-...

no - Gnome extensions are installed in 5 seconds from a browser. It is very different than the experience of traditional installing.

It is one of those It-Just-Works experiences.

Judging by Firefox Extensions: It just works until it breaks since extensions are usually not part of the core team's responsibility, and the APIs they use may change with every FF/Gnome release. The time it takes me to install something is really not that relevant, as long as it's <10min - what's relevant is the time it takes me to keep it running for the next 5 years at least.

Unity at least has an excuse - it's stated goal is to have the same interface on mobile and desktop, and function well with both touch and mouse.

Windows seems to have the same goal since Sinofsky had its helm and so far I'm not convinced that this goal makes much sense for an OS.

Great. Could you let me know how to change the color of title bars so that it's not a light grey active window on top of light grey inactive windows?

http://imgur.com/iaaBe0n ;-)

Am... I missing a color picker there?

It's the 'invert colors' checkmark, which does do what parent requested - maybe not what he meant though ;-). The inverted colors don't show up in screenshots though.

As an aside, I decided to try out Cinnamon on my Debian box, and I actually found it to be a breath of fresh air. It's a modern approach to the non-bloated Gnome desktop of years ago. Reminded me a bit of when I first used xfce; very clean and straightforward. I feel Gnome and Unity try far too hard to dazzle and stand out, when it reality it all just gets in the way. No comment on KDE since I haven't tried it in a long time.

Some day though I'll go back to straight DWM, my old love.

I have very mixed feelings about some of the stuff Gnome is doing. Some of them are at least interesting from a certain point of view, like sandboxing applications. I get why this would be nice to have in corporate environments, and that brings money to Linux, which Linux does need. I also think it's solving problems at the wrong level for everyone else. (Selective) communication between sandboxed applications seems to be something they have no coherent framework for. Besides, as many Android applications show, savagely enforcing sandboxing has had questionable effects on privacy (as applications that really want your data will happily just request permissions to do everything and refuse to work otherwise). As for the security gains of such an approach, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness they add to an open source environment. What remains is offering additional protection against bugs (that e.g. allow otherwise unauthorized access). But proper desktop sandboxing is so incredibly complex that it's hard not to think a far more efficient approach would be fixing those bugs in the first place.

For better or for worse, they're also experimenting with a lot of new approaches to UI. Which is pretty much how innovation happens -- something that computer desktops could use since everyone else is, at this point, imitating either Mac OS or Windows 95. However, an opt-out solution for users who are happy to encourage innovation, but would rather not be the victim of failed experiments every other release would be nice...

I have positive feelings about the effort of Gnome to sandbox applications. When you want to run closed applications it is obvious why you would want to sandbox. Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception. The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.

> Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception.

Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.

> The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.

I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th... ). Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.

> Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.

It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one.

> I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th.... ).

This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

> Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.

I don't see your point here in regards to this discussion.

> It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. I think sandboxes are easier to realize than, say, a secure browser.

I'm not questioning the advantages that sandboxing seems to have, in general. What I am questioning is the ability of the development team that couldn't fix Gnome panel for several years to write a secure sandboxing solution, even when relying on cgroups & co..

Either way, I'd much rather run sane applications that patch and pray that neither the application, nor the jail, have any really disastrous bugs.

> This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

Your argument about permissions and sandboxing on Android is that they help privacy because you can feed fake or empty data to the application. I never managed to do that on my phone (but didn't try that hard, either) so I thought I'd see if there was any progress in that field. Xprivacy was the first result that showed up.

The way it does that, apparently, is by extending /system/bin/app_process to load a JAR file on startup, thus attaching itself to every process and replacing any method in any class. Yeah, no thanks. I can't wait to have the first catastrophic exploit in the Xposed framework making every single process vulnerable.

I tried a couple of other solutions a while ago, but most of them ended up crashing or freezing applications.

I absolutely don't disagree on your point regarding innovation. A number of people accused Windows 7 of taking UI ideas from KDE, which ultimately greatly improved their OS's usability. Still, a delicate balance needs to be found among innovation, enterprise requirements, and personal/community wants. Thankfully, at least covering the third group, with Linux there are often solutions to these experiments (though they might still end up being rather involved, such as creating your own solutions or moving on to a different window manager entirely). Yet if one doesn't like the Windows 8 UI approach, for example, the only real recourse would be to downgrade and hope things change for the better in the next release.

I wonder if the whole sandboxing thing will go the way of polkit, doing its best when it is disabled.

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU

I think you actually want the default to be pretty vanilla. Opinionated design tends to polarise opinions which means put a lot of people off. KDE - especially now with the "get hot new stuff" interface - is very easy to mod and there are loads of style packs available.

The sort who'll be attracted to a specific look are also more likely not to go with the default IMO. Personally I like my UI like my DE - out of the way.

Well if the vanilla is itself ugly and polarizing, perhaps it's best that a distro take the initiative to make it better. As long as KDE retains its flexibility to make the desktop how you like it, why not try to make it better by default?

Disclosure: I've tried KDE several times, and have never stayed with it more than a few days, due to its wacky ratios of window and icon sizing, and bubbly appearance.

https://www.kde.org/workspaces/plasmadesktop/screenshots/gen... - ugly and polarising? It's a bit "candy" or "fisher price" but as a friendly default I don't think it does so bad.

http://kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=17x18x19x20x21x75... gives an idea of the thinks that are popular for KDE desktop style, decoration, etc..

Mandrake, later Mandriva used to be close to perfect IMO.

Today I guess OpenSUSE is the closest thing to what you describe.

I feel that OpenSUSE has had the best KDE default settings and Kubuntu had the worst defaults.

Mageia - forked from Mandriva - is still actively developed, I believe - but I haven't tried out KDE on it. I think my Fedora 20 install looked pretty slick out of the box, but I don't think very highly of my own taste :)

You mean like happened with Gnome 3 and completely pissed off a large portion of the user base? I'm an advocate for sane defaults, but 'opinionated design' doesn't always nail the mark.