Is that really a thing? I don’t usually get into discussions about DEs that often, and pretty much never irl. So I haven’t seen any general vibe at all.
Like, my impression of kde vs gnome is that they’re both very geared towards a more general user that’s going to be doing basic things, but with the ability to go more advanced as needed. I kinda assumed they were both going to draw people that are “basic” like the images in the meme for gnome, with cinnamon users also being in that range, where something like xfce would be for folks that want a bit more modularity and “hackiness”.
I’m not being a smartass, I just don’t really know if there’s more to the meme than just a bit of fun or not.
I’ve come to the conclusion that even gnome has too many features for me. It would be fine if they were all perfect, but it’s software, so…
Off the top of my head:
Language doesn’t switch fast enough when I use ibus to type Chinese. The fact that I need to concern myself with my input method because choosing Chinese actually only types in Latin characters by default is lol
Can’t use the file manager to mess with files or folders owned by root. Text editor similarly sucks, I actually sudo gedit because it just works. It is a Gnome issue because vscodium just asks me to put in my password to save the file.
When I alt tab or super key out of a wine game, going back into it will have the alt key pressed down (not sure which key combination, but it’s an issue)
I use KDE plasma because I’m new to Linux but also want something minimal system-wise. I love the programs and the interface. Maybe my opinion would be different if I spent more time with other DE’s or used it as my daily driver, but I’m sold on it now.
GNOME is definitely more user-friendly for someone who is moving over from Windows/Mac. I wouldn’t recommend KDE to someone who is just going to stick to using one-click apps.
The lack of even the most basic customisation of Gnome ia mind-blowing to me. Why do i need to install a gnome shell extension for even the most basic functionality that even MacOs has!?
Needing a GPU might be hyperbole, but no, it’ll still be slow on older hardware. It looks lightweight on neofetch since, at rest, the RAM will appear as low as XFCE’s, but it’s not nearly as snappy.
Actually I tried out KDE Plasma on my grandmother’s budget laptop from about the same time. It was a little too slow with default settings, but once I killed the animations (can be done in Settings app) it ran pretty well. It ran a whole hell of a lot better than the Windows it came with.
I also tested KDE vs XFCE in my old gaming computer, and I actually managed to get slightly less RAM usage in KDE than XFCE, so long as no plugins were used.
Both systems were tested with Debian 12. On the gaming PC, I actually used the XFCE iso, so it was installed first.
So depending on how your distro ships the default KDE Plasma settings or how you set it up, it actually can be a lightweight option compared with XFCE.
It’s all relative. Ubuntu desktop is minimal compared to Windows, and I’ve found KDE to run much better than default Ubuntu. It’s lightweight for how much it offers.
In my experience, it strongly depends. In my team at work, the biggest Linux nerd is on GNOME, basically because he doesn’t care where his TMUX session runs.
And I’m the guy with the most elaborate desktop workflow (tiling and 40+ virtual desktops among other aspects) and I wouldn’t want to use anything but KDE, because nothing else has as many features + customizability to support me in that workflow.
But yeah, both of us started out on such mainstream desktops, then spent multiple years checking out all other desktops and eventually found different paths back to the mainstream.
The philosophies of the two DEs are diametrically opposed. For example KDE will let you customize everything, they’d even let you customize their mothers of they could, while GNOME won’t let you customize anything, at least not without extensions that break every time GNOME updates.
KDE devs are also a lot less opinionated than GNOME devs. If they could, GNOME devs would question the use case of your clothes, conclude they’re useless and then strip you naked. KDE devs will be fine with whatever you’re wearing.
Now as you may have gathered I definitely prefer one over the other, but I do recognize some people may like GNOME for its simplicity, looks, flow and I even heard some like the lack of customization because it prevents them from getting distracted with tinkering. All in all use case depends on what you want to do with it, tho hopefully Cosmic DE beats the shit outta GNOME devs those damn pricks.
Don’t quote me on it, but I think they just scale to match the panel height, so I’d you shrink the panel the icons should shrink as well. I’ve used the xp style taskbar instead for a long time tho, so I’m not certain…
No you're right, it's mostly stereotypes that don't have any real world importance. From my intermediate POV, it comes down to GNOME being a resource hog which the 1337 H4X0Rz don't like. But with most modern systems having more than enough resources to spare, you're not likely to notice unless you're the sort to always have one eye on the system monitor pegged to your desktop. It's an argument for the sake of an argument. I use KDE btw.
It’s a different philosophy. KDE gives you a default setting, and all the options you need to fuck it up customize it.
Gnome gives you the default and an API for extensions to customize it. Install one of the big ones like V-Shell and you’ll have more options than you know what to do with.
I installed them. I installed them all. They’re formatted, every single one of them. And not just the laptops, but the PCs and the tablets too. They’re like animals, and I forced it on them like Windows users. I HATE THEM.
Plenty of old apps still run fine. I’ve got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I’m reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.
You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn’t have separate admin permissions) but often they work.
Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have the NTVDM component that’s required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It’s an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.
A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.
it often was hit or miss with games though. I remember some games from 95/98 to run on 2000, then not on XP, somehow on Vista and 7, but not on 10. And other games ran on XP, but not Vista and 7…
The disc copy of Fallout 3 will not install on new windows due to games for windows no longer working. At least last time I tried to install it that was the case.
It’s usually the apps themselves doing weird things - Using undocumented APIs, expecting the system to be set up in a particular way, relying on bugs in the OS, etc. Windows tries, and actually emulates old bugs for popular apps so they continue to work, but it can’t be bug-compatible forever.
Apps/games that work on XP should mostly work on newer versions as long as you set them to run with Windows XP compatibility (in the settings of the EXE), but there’s definitely edge cases.
Drivers are definitely out. Some games are really iffy. Especially from the Win 9x era, where they’d do stupid things like look for a 9 in the version string of Windows, or get the amount of RAM as a 32 bit signed int, so refuses to install if you have 4GB RAM or more.
We had a lot of dodgy old DOS programs that were fine under Win98, but XP broke them.
True story, Linux sees MIME types, so if Hot.Chick.Blows.Brother.mp4 is a virus, it shows up with a Windows (MZ) binary icon, not a media icon 😉… unlike Windows which only recognizes extensions 😒.
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, also decided that file extensions should be hidden by default. So you won’t even see that you downloaded TaylorSwift_1989_TaylorsVersion.exe instead of TaylorSwift_1989_TaylorsVersion.mp3 unless you changed that setting ahead of time.
Wait… Real?? I guess its always been a part of the first round of changes I’ve always made to Windows. Crazy how much I’ve normalized fighting the software I use.
Anyway, that’s wild. What a just bad and unsafe decision.
See, this is mostly because of 2 things. One, when changing filenames, users make the stupid mistake of changing the extension as well (having no extension that is), which of course, in Windows, it means the file won’t be recognized as a media file. Two, blind you from the truth - you don’t want users that can think, that’s not what our bysiness is about 😏. Also the reason behind why Windows has less and less options and people that want to change something have to revert to registery hacks to do so.
And this only gets worse, since audio file tags (and I believe video files as well 🤔) include album art nowadays, so it has an icon that is the album art… exe’s also have custom icons, so 🤷…
My memory is fuzzy and I don’t know the correct words to research it, but I am pretty sure that depends on the DE.
Either KDE Plasma (dolphin) or GNOME (nautilus) uses the extension iirc. Maybe that changed though.
That’s not a Linux thing. It’s just whatever desktop shell you chose to use and various shells behave in various ways. The reason this might be safer in most Linux distros is that you’re discouraged from executing things under a privileged user which means that malware can’t make significant changest to your system easily. If you do the same in windows, you’d be just as safe.
Not exactly… I mean, yes, you’re right about the privileges thing, but Windows has a lot more security holes than Linux (or any POSIX based OS for that matter). The root of the problem, as always is the distant Windows relative, DOS… no user space notion whatsoever… and Windows NT has dragged these issues for decades now, all because MS made (bought) DOS and distributed it.
As an anecdote, the only games that I play that require more fixing than pasting something into the launch options or using another version of Proton are VR games. Half Life: Alyx somehow works perfectly fine. Otherwise the devs forget to tick the box in their anticheat to allow Linux.
It’s the most stable distro I’ve used so far. Manjaro just seems like it’s a ticking time bomb just waiting for borked o’clock to come. I couldn’t get Nvidia drivers working on fedorat all. Ubuntu was just slow as ass. I don’t know why. But it was just fucked from junk street. I’ve given it a go a few times. Just slow wet ass. Kali is snappy and clean but not meant to be a daily driver. Not would I use it as one.
Mint works. It’s relatively snappy. I like the gui. It’s customizabe.
At least you can roll back the drivers on a computer.
It’s even more infuriating when a TV manufacturer rolls out an update with “bug fixes and improvements”, and you know full well that if they broke ARC again, there is no going back to the old version.
The creator of this video also did in-depth reviews of music notation software. After reviewing the free and open source MuseScore he took over the design lead of the project, and it has become considerably better.
There is no one devoloping for x11 anymore, it is abandonware and dead (even if still usefully sometimes) wayland isn’t the new shiny thing but it has been getting devoloped so so slowly and getting little support, because the focus on x11. Death of x11 is better for everyone
Is something like barrier/synergy already working with wayland?
I wanted to try it so badly, but controlling multiple computers with one set of keyboard & mouse is quite essential to my workflow.
Also, does X forwarding over ssh work in some way?
Like, can I open remote GUI programs over ssh on my wayland, like on X11? And less important for me, but still, also the other way round?
Thanks upfront!
I have some FOMO here, but last time I checked wayland couldn’t provide me those things, I need for work :-(
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