I had been using a keyboard shortcut to switch to the previously-used desktop. When KDE removed it [1], I filed a bug [2]. Hours later, a KDE dev created a new KWin script [3] to replace this functionality, fixing my workflow. THANKS! KDE is awesome!

[1]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3871 [2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481985 [3]: https://invent.kde.org/vladz/switch-to-previous-desktop

I can't believe it, but I badly miss the "Super" (Windows logo) button on KDE not behaving the same was as Gnome. On KDE Ctrl-F9 does the same thing, but after using Gnome that function became "the" way I flipped between hidden Windows. The "Super" button is right place for it, Ctrl-F9 is far too fiddly. The task bar I was brought up in in my Windows / Mac days is just hopeless for task switching in comparison. The rest of KDE (particularly it's configurability) is better than Gnome, of course.

Except for bugs. KDE has so many UI glitches and bugs compared to Gnome. It drives me nuts. I might give Plasma 6 a go, but if the bug situation hasn't improved I will be moving onto something else. These bugs have nothing to do with Wayland per se.

[0] I have a Thinkpad X1 extreme gen 2. A beautiful laptop on paper also in person because it's 4K OLED screen, but I'd never have another one. Charging from the USB-C connector is a lottery - but can be made to work with enough reinsertions. The 4K screen is scratched by the keyboard because the keys touch when closed. On the gen 2 they pushed the external video path through the Nvidia card. You can get an external monitor to work if you hold your head just the right way. With Debian 11 the right was to run Wayland, and only Gnome supported it well. With Debian 12, the right way is to boot using Gnomes display manager (gdm3) with Wayland, wait until the monitor sync's, then login using your KDE Wayland desktop. If for example you use Gnome as your desktop all you get is blank screens. Other combinations all fail in their own unique ways.

1. You can go to System Settings -> Keyboard and there, enable Super key to act as another button.

2. Set the shortcut to that another button.

I'm jealous. I lasted about half an hour on Wayland, but several apps I use still don't work. xtrlock (anti-cat measures) and freetube both wouldn't work, but worse was that games like Dying Light crash almost immediately. On KDE 6 / X11 it's a little better but the game still craters after an hour. Still figuring out why. Maybe it's because the laptop is an AMD ecosystem.

That being said, I recently switched to Wayland again after a hiatus and it seems support keeps improving. I'm not using proprietary NVIDIA drivers currently so that might be it.

[0] Device-Dependent X, i.e., the bits of X that talk directly to the display. Contrasted with Device-Independent X (DIX), i.e., the bits that do state tracking and protocol communication with clients.

I don't know about the other apps/games, but I use freetube all the time on my KDE5/Nvidia/Wayland system and have never had an issue with it. Which distro/gpu/driver version are you on?

[1]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

I have it and works fine on plasma6/wayland.

We've replaced some originally homebrew Wayland protocol extensions with newer extensions maintained by the wider Wayland community. For example, our own panels now use the layer-shell protocol. This improves interoperability, e.g. enabling third-party panels.

We've added initial support for HDR and color management, in particular for games with HDR rendering (we've been learning a lot about the gaming community and their needs from the Steam Deck).

More complete porting of many little quality-of-life workspace and toolkit features and refinements when running in Wayland.

Performance work.

Screen sharing got a revamp, now supporting RDP and the latest portal dialogs when invoked by apps and so on.

Various other compositor-y bits, e.g. support for the Presentation Time frame scheduling extension, which helps video players and game engines.

Some of these got done in Plasma and KDE software itself, some in Qt 6, where we've been a major contributor to the QtWayland module. Some required contributions to the Wayland protocol stack itself, e.g. the modern focus handover protocol.

I feel like this iteration of KDE will finally convince me to move to linux permanently.

For this reason, I was stuck on Fedora GNOME for a long while, because only they had it.

KRdp[2][3] looks promising, even though (like GNOME) it requires a GUI session to exist first, before you can connect via RDP. But there are ways to deal with that if you really gotta have it.

But this support is not actually implemented in any app in KDE Plasma 6, is it? My understanding is that it is possible, but there is no built-in functionality to take advantage of it. More "you can build an RDP server now that will work on Wayland" than "there is an RDP server that has been released". (I think?)

[1]: My reddit question, which also includes how to download and try the KRdp alpha/example thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1b3kc0p/what_ever_happ...

[2]: the project itself doesn't have a lot of info: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp

[3]: the announcement blog has more: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/

From what I have read, login sessions require integration with a login manager, and from what I understand that work isn't done yet (this work being a prerequisite).

It seems[2] that gnome is going to support this in a future release (march?)?

I'm sure KDE will have something similar in the works eventually. I currently use xrdp/xorg-xrdp for headless remote login sessions, and while it works ok, I would love to switch to using something more integrated into kde itself.

[1]: https://discuss.kde.org/t/remote-desktop-using-the-rdp-proto...

[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-RDP-Remote-Login

Sweet this is one of the reasons I gave up on KDE 5 I tried a couple months ago. Some combination of KVM and amdgpu was causing crashes (I think something to do with hotplugging displays and Wayland) and it seemed like everything downstream got nuked as well

I encourage anybody using KDE to occasionally file tickets at bugs.kde.org; Nate is a powerhouse and seems to review all inbound tickets, and anything critical will reliably get worked on within a reasonable period of time. They're also very open to ideas and feedback (that fit into their general UX guidelines.)

I would love to see more distros switch to an opinionated KDE (and also to KDE by default). It's so malleable, and yet most distros just dump the basic default setup on users.

Don't you effectively need to be running Neon, b/c you can only file tickets against the latest version? I have lots of small bugs with Ubuntu LTS (particularly with KDE Connect transfers) - but I assume nobody is interested in those. They're also basically impossible to replicate (ex: "Transfer failed for unknown reason" or "File arrived corrupted for unknown reason")

So, you don't have to use Neon. KDE is a massive project.

Which is a problem. NixOS remains by far the least aggravating OS I know, and... yeah. I wish there existed a desktop environment that played well with it.

But also: Isn't one of the main benefits of NixOS that you can fairly painlessly get and try different versions of things? Just see if you can reproduce the bug in the same version of upstream. If so, file the bug with kde, if not, file the bug with NixOS because it's presumably caused by one of the patches.

If you have a specific issue under nixos, it's going to be fairly easy to see if it's very unlikely to be caused by custom patches.

That can be up to and including a downloadable VM image that shows the issue.

This is how it used to work (and still does with enterprise distros, because you might as well use the support contract you paid for). But users these days have gotten savvy enough to start engaging with upstream directly, especially since many upstreams have made it easier to be engaged with by using GitHub etc instead of mailing lists etc.

Sometimes engaging directly with upstream works, as it apparently does with KDE according to other comments in this thread. Sometimes upstream gets annoyed because they only care about their tree, eg systemd devs get annoyed when users report bugs that have long been fixed in master, but still exist in an old stable release that happens to be the latest on some LTS distro. It depends on the project, so when in doubt start with the distro tracker.

For reference I count about ~66 patch files among the KDE expression in nixpkgs as of today, including Plasma, all libraries, and related apps. Most of them are in the range of 20 lines long, and they are .patch files, i.e. the actual applied diff is smaller than that. The largest patch is barely 190 lines long and it's for Akonadi, mostly rewriting hardcoded FHS paths throughout the codebase.

I agree there are some quirks with most desktop environments on NixOS in my experience but realistically there's a huge amount of stuff in the ecosystem that plays anywhere from well-to-poorly in such environments, and the Linux desktop stack definitely was not designed at a time where this stuff was common. It is what it is, I guess.

Probably Ubuntu 26. The release notes for 24.04 do not mention kde6. It is also likely the 25.04 or 25.10 release will incorporate kde6.

> KDE Frameworks 6 (alpha) 5.247 was updated in the ports tree.

> KDE Plasma Desktop 6 (beta 2) 5.91.0 was updated in the ports tree.

https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-10-2023-12/#_kde_...

I think I can count on one hand having a root file manager would be beneficial. Are you logging into a desktop as root?

Happiness is clicking on a folder with lots of files, hitting forward slash, typing a search term, and instantly finding your file.

Nah, but I would occasionally like to move things around outside of /home without doing it manually in the terminal. I'm not sure why that's such a problem.

See https://invent.kde.org/system/kio-admin for details.

This will be included in dolphin natively in the near future.

Try https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt as an alternative.

It feels native in Plasma/Breeze and is more traditional. I like it.

Looking at it quickly, it doesn't seem to be my cup of tea, but until now I didn't even know it was there to consider.

People don't usually dig in the settings menu unless something is bothering them. If there are great opt-in features they're going to stay off.

We've done that a lot the last couple of years! We've changed many defaults to values that reflect better what the users actually use, based on reviewing what distros do, studies, and opt-in telemetry. A lot of this already happened in the back half of the 5.x era, but 6.0 includes additional changes in this regard.

And you're not wrong, it does help a lot.

The only "better" defaults are those that match what people already know, not necessarily because they're objectively better but because most people will already know how to use them. You literally can't get a learning curve better than "you already know it".

Konsole has had tabs at the bottom for about 25 years now (I don't recall KDE 1.x, but they were definitely there in 2.x). Who do you prioritize in a design? Everyone who already uses KDE, and expects them at the bottom, or a subset of users who might switch to KDE and expect them at the top?

More importantly, is the position of tabs -- especially one that you can change! -- like, a real, actual problem?

It would be nice for KDE to have three presets: Windows, Mac, and Classic (= KDE).

If you want to grow your user base: The latter.

That is the most frustrating thing about some projects:

They take existing users for granted and make a lot of changes to accommodate the new users they envision coming in torrents.

These users of course never arrive and in the meantime they have alienated the old user base.

With KDE you can put the tabs where you want them.

Or, if you want everything to be like in Gnome or Windows or Mac you can just use these.

The reality is that most users are simply bitterly opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the change is actually an improvement that helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet exist through UI improvements) actually has happened before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised, versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-represented) that is here.

Developers of the project have to balance these concerns as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean every decision and plan in the project is going to revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.

But the old users can have it too, that's what configurability is for, just save the state to user config and don't change any such behavior on upgrades, only for fresh installs

The problem with these (and many other UX initiatives) is there isn't a fallback for us who used them from the start.

If there was it wouldn't have been a problem.

Prioritizing the needs of potential new users may bring you actual new users, but not prioritizing those of existing users may send some of them away. How do you know which group is bigger?

Sure, the group of potential users is massive but not all of them will switch. Meanwhile you're making software worse for people who actually use it and, at least for FOSS software, are usually your biggest advocates, part of the developer base, and one of the most important means through which new users are brought in.

The people using Konsole are already the highly technical people, and therefore probably not newbie users.

Also, if this is the only thing that's annoying, KDE won I guess.

It's cool that KDE lets you do that, but it's a bit annoying actually as it messes with the consistency of KDE. Sure, users can always change their preference to what suits them best, but it would be nice if out of the box all KDEs behaved and looked the same and leave the personalization to the user after installation.

It appears the default is Top in Konsole's source.

I wonder if "new tab" button is always visible now too.

Is it a browser tabs vs. taskbar tabs ideology?

When I was on Windows, the Start Menu/taskbar was on the bottom, and bottom tabs felt right (as they became available).

Let's all agree that side tabs are of the devil.

In browsers, that's always at the top. In terminals, depending on if you're a heavy user (and as result, the prompt is at the bottom) or a light user (and the prompt is at the top), you'll likely prefer tabs to be in the same area, too.

I've actually got different settings for taskbar position and terminal tab position between my work ubuntu, personal ubuntu, and personal windows systems.

Gnome does what it does because Gnome is not intended to be the final form of a DE that the user uses. Gnome is intended to be a DE that distros can make their own by adding their own opinionated choices, extensions and modifications on top.

So while you complain about the lack of a vertical taskbar, in actual practice, outside of maybe Fedora users (which is essentially a distro largely designed to be used as a test bed), nearly every other Gnome user does have some form of taskbar because their distro included it, or they did a 1-click install from the Extensions app.

It's not for everyone. It would be next to impossible for someone to sit at my computer and be productive, because I have accumulated my configuration over years, with no real thought into making things that I configured discoverable (I know it's there because I put it there). But it works really well for me. I find the ability setup a workspace how I want for one task, and then switching workspaces to context switch to be very nice.

I always thought Gnome was not very useful for this because workspaces are created on the fly whereas I want to have them spatially oriented in a fixed grid that persists on every boot with the right application tiles in them. And I have hotkeys mapped to each one directly on the numpad (without key combos, I hate those). So my numpad is not a numpad at all but a workspace switcher :P

The problem with the gnome design philosophy is that it only works for you if you agree with them on everything. If you're pretty opinionated yourself (as I am and it sounds like you are too), opinionated software only works well if you have the exact same opinions as its creators. With something as complex as a DE this will run into many mismatches quickly. This is why configurable software is so great if you're not willing to compromise on how you want things.

To configure hotkeys, you have to set some dconf entries manually, with dconf-editor or gsettings from a terminal:

> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-1 "[\"F1\"]"

But I think it's clearly proven to be a bad design as a default. Discoverability is very important, especially to people who work a lot with a mouse. And using multiple apps at the same time is a very common work flow, one that an always-on-screen task switcher makes much simpler than an alternate view you have to bring up, especially if that alternate view also obscures all of your windows.

I will also say I find workspaces a hard to use UI, as I always lose context when I have to switch workspace, but maybe this is just how my mind works. And the idea of one-task-per-workspace has never worked well for me, as there are several apps that I use in every task, such as chat or email while I'm coding and while doing a presentation and while writing some design. It also seems to require a lot of setup and discipline.

Finally, as a nitpick, moving apps to a different workspace instead of minimizing to taskbar/systray seems like much more work to me.

Personally I'm a huge fan of Win7's grouped taskbar with window previews, along with its window snap support (extended in Win 10).

For the chat and email stuff, as long as you have screen space (or if you don't mind them going to the background sometimes), you can set those windows to be on every workspace. KDE has a thumbtack icon that you can click in the window bar to make that window show on every desktop.

it won't suit all workflows of course

The way I always thought of it is that the taskbar generally just can at best have a limited set of applications listed and takes up precious vertical monitor space, so its mostly limited to the overview/activities since that is the "I want to change apps" mode of the desktop and is just 1 click away (either super or top-left on the desktop).

Then again I am one of the (probably) few people that would probably even do away with the top bar currently still in GNOME and not have anything other than the app visible by default.

I use to be annoyed at the behavior as well when I started using GNOME, but at some point I actually started preferring it and now barely use the taskbar on Windows.

KWrite and Dolphin are insane!

I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.

FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.

What is missing, compared to gimp?

And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.

It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.

I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense).

GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).

GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them.

And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita.

There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).

But at least in GNOME 2 all such weird choices were configurable, although in some cases you had to go to GConf to do so.

Oh well, back to GIMP.

On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second.

> the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system

Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms).

> spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops

The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.

I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.

PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.

In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.

The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.

I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.

The pain is very real with Gnome.

It's a very, very poor ape of MacOS.

You're running a pre-release?

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.

I say this as someone who has used the latest versions of KDE and Windows until around the release of Windows 11 (but I have seen that too).

I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.

I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.

I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.

I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome

Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices

Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS

Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)

Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/

I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..

This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.

Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.

The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.

The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.

The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.

These days it's all much of a muchness really.

Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).

In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.

Memories…

I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.

I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes

KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.

But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.

GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.

GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time

Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.

Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.

There are tons of professional and highly successful apps for content creators that use custom made (and often shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what sell the product.

Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.

The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful.

After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita).

[0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries

There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices. An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework. A competing framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.

I disagree here, i'm certain it would be as successful because the GUI framework is not the reason for Krita's success, it is the functionality it provides and how the developers interact with the community. The GUI framework does not have any image manipulation specific functionality (all of that is implemented by the Krita developers) and the community interaction isn't even a technical thing in the first place.

> There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices.

I did not claim that they are interchangeable (though they can be, depending on the program's design), i even explicitly wrote that taking Qt out of Krita would mean almost rewriting the entire program as it relies heavily on it.

What i claimed was that Qt is not the reason for Krita's success and it could have the same success with other mature toolkits. There is nothing special about Qt aside from being around for long enough time to have its functionality "battle tested". This is not unique to Qt though.

> An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework.

This is the case with any toolkit or really any library that has a lot of applications written against it, assuming the developers do not ignore all bug reports and issues the users of their libraries report.

Also since you brought up Maya specifically, Maya used to be based on the Motif toolkit until Maya 2010 (it was changed to Qt in Maya 2011), which by the same logic would mean that up until 2011, using Motif would be great for professional content creation applications since Maya used it too.

I did not forget it, Qt has great integration and documentation but this was not a comparison of the specific features Qt and some other toolkit like Gtk may have. My claim was that Qt isn't something special that would make Krita successful while using anything else would make it less successful.

I didn't bring those things up because they weren't really relevant for my claim. Also FWIW desktop integration for Krita isn't as important as it'd be for some other types of applications - consider that Krita even comes out of the box with its own themes that it uses instead of trying to "blend in" the underlying desktop looks.

In terms of what Krita does, there isn't any functionality that it uses from Qt that couldn't be found in other toolkits like Gtk - or other libraries. It wouldn't be the same way and certainly not with the same code, but Krita could have been written using a different GUI library and framework and even in a different language and still had the same success because the GUI framework it uses is not why it is successful: it is the functionality the program provides (which was written by the Krita developers themselves) and the communication the developers have with the users (which isn't even something technical).

This isn't unique to Qt though, other widget toolkits can provide that functionality. In fact LCL/Lazarus provides such fractional scaling even for Gtk itself by doing the scaling "manually" when using the Gtk backend.

Are they profitable these days?

That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.

For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I’m guessing an acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead where Qt is apparently doing quite well.

Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.

All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.

KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.

The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...

Oh, did you mean the other kind of desktop cube...

[1] https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/cube.webm

For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.

Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.

But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.

Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.

This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.

One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.

Of course, one can always use a different DE, but there's always friction in not going with what the distro you're using picked as their default (and tends to support better in practice). I think a lot of GNOME hate is coming from the users who feel that a DE that does not adequately reflect their workflow is being pushed on them so aggressively by their distros.

There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...

If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.

Gnome just does way too many things I don't want it to do and that can't be disabled.

Yes, I don't like that about GNOME either.

The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.

You install a distro that includes Gnome. Did your distro choose not to package a taskbar extension? That’s a good hint your distro is not intended to be an end user distro.

99% of Gnome users have a taskbar.

1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) -> Click on the window I want.

2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I want.

I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a personal thing.

This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars. GNOME is very usable, and if it's not, you don't know how to use a computer at all.