Going off topic a little but it’s my thread. I am very concerned about Rust. Not so much the language itself but the fanatical highly vocal cult that is shouting from the rooftops that of course everything must be rewritten in Rust asap. This has caused me to start investigating Free and OpenBSD. Reading on the OpenBSD forum, I have learned a lot about memory safety in C and how those devs pride themselves on their code quality and doing things correctly. It seems to me that it’s better to slowly transition over time rather than have so called AI rewrite large code bases in Rust. But I don’t know anything. My language ability stops with python although lately I have been dabbling with learning C a tiny little piece at a time. Again, I’m just a dumb amateur with no qaulifications but I like to think I possess a little common sense. I should probably start another thread about GNU core utilities being replaced with Rust and a different license.
I think that is a valid concern. I believe it was first conceived by Mozilla because there was a severe shortage of C/C++ developers with the required skills at the time Firefox was being rewritten leading to the need for a more robust scripting language that behaves like a high level programming language.
Considering how Mozilla has been funded (by taxpayers) and how they chose to spend their money over time, it seems Rust is more of a justification to continue receiving grants and funding. Which is probably why the previous president came out with a mandate that Rust was the future and we needed to move it into the computing ecosystem as soon as possible.
They both seemed to be scouting talent to integrate Rust into their ecosystem along with DragonflyBSD. This was 10 years ago, I think. It may already be done.
Is nwg-dock in the repos?
Yes. extra
It’s nwg-dock-hyprland
Ope you said that, and I missed it
From userland, I’ve noticed generally I like Qt apps, but don’t like GTK apps. (I know nothing about the toolkits themselves.) This is largely consistency of interface, but also a difference in usability starting from totally unfamiliar. But… single interface? while that would be personally convenient if the winner was Qt, how would I feel if the winner was GTK?
As to the plethora of desktops, linux is already really just two – Plasma and Gnome, which are so unlike that if there were but one (which might be an eventual consequence of a single toolkit), half the users would jump ship. All the other DEs are, proportionally, minor to fringe, but one of them would pick up all those former users… and I think the situation would be worse than before, with an angry chasm between the two large camps, rather than the inconvenience of two major toolkits.
[Myself, I loathe Gnome to where if it were the only choice, I prefer Win10.]
I don’t recall who posted this where, but I found it very interesting.
The thought of being stuck with the GTK file picker…
I may never sleep again.
It’s atrocious.
I hate how it functions when typing a folder name. Thunar/Dolphin’s functionality when typing a folder name within is MUCH better.
All this Gnome hate…lol
I wouldn’t say I hate Gnome. I actually liked it for a while. Then I saw what was in charge of the effort behind it and how flimsy it was and I just didn’t think I could rely on it. (I mean they hired a shaman to be their CEO)
On the flip side, while I think QT is superior, I think the thing holding it back is the design department. QT apps just don’t look that modern. Most users are visual creatures. They don’t care if something is technically superior if it doesn’t look good.
That said I am slowly becoming a big fan of KDE.
I remember your statement going all the way back to when Steve Jobs released the failed Lisa. Repeat for the Macintosh. Followed by Microsoft Windows 1.0, the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Tandy’s Deskmate, and probably a few others that I don’t remember or had never seen.
Time to bring back the old teletype machines? With paper tape punch/readers?
50000% true.
Windows UI is a mess. Linux DE wars are pointless.
Give a normie DE environment (KDE, XFCE, Gnome). Does not matter which one. Let say KDE. Install those KDE on 10 distinctively different distros (Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, Open SUSE, Fedora, Void, Open Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Chimera Linux)
Ok we got then distros here, let’s add Kubuntu to the list and Free BSD (which is not Linux but UNIX)!! Because why not
Now
Now ask the normie can he / she differ somehow between those systems just by using them? There is no fucking way in hell he can just by using them.
Ok, he may found default KDE 5 looks tinny bit different from KDE 6, but I doubt that. Give him an XFCE and that chance is way below 0.
Linux tools and desktops are more coherent than windows one ever was or will be.
All that Linux desktop wars came from our habits and frankly boils down to them.
I started Linux when gnome 2 and kde3 were a thing. I used those two use alternately with emphasize on gnome 2
Then KDE4 came and horribly sucked, then gnome two get worsened, so I looked on XFCE.
In the end, Gnome 3 came, and that shit sucks balls deep. So even porn stars were terrified.
I’m permanently on XFCE since 4.8.0. Never looked back. Is that mean XFCE is the best desktop send here by Good Almighty him self? NO! So maybe KDE? Nope. Gnome? You guess that. No.
You will praise and use what you are accustomed to.
The point Is, all that environment are perfectly useful and coherent.
From my and only mine perspective / point of view.
KDE? Way too robust and complex, yet It is an awesome desktop.
Gnome? Once you learn key bindings, fastest and cleanest to work desktop ever. No stupid plugins and extensions needed. Not even one. There is only one condition to make it work smoothly, you have to have petabyte of ram in quantum computer. Why the fuck so heavy, when it is so minimalistic.
Xfce? Best middle ground. No BS distractions. If You want your XFCE minimalistic, there is no problem to achieve that. You want it to be extensive, no problem! You can make from it a full desktop without over-bloating it.
I like LXQT more than XFCE, but that is because I took time to configure it. I do not like how GTK is not as configurable as far as colors and themes and QT. KDE is a bit bloated, but highly configurable, Gnome is rock solid, but not as configurable out of the box.
I use KDE Plasma 6. It works and is highly configurable. Bloated? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I tried Gnome, XFCE, LXQT, Cinnamon, Mate, and always ended up at Plasma.
When a Windows user tells me he wants Linux installed, odds are he wants it to look and feel like Windows. Plasma 6 allows me to make it look like whatever version of Windows he wants. There are plenty of themes available, from Windows 3.1 to Windows 11. 99.99% of Windows users don’t care about assorted desktop environments. They just want something that is familiar to them. The last one I did requested I make it look like Windows XP. I loaded several XP themes to provide a choice of colors. He was happy.
I suspect most Windows users can’t tell one DE from another and really don’t care.
I have wondered that myself @DungeonCrawler. If Rust is a good thing to work towards, great. But the fanatical overtones confuse me. Hoping to learn more from reading in here over time.
Super fun thread. New Linux user coming from the OSX/MacOS world; not willing own unrepairable/unupgradable computers for top dollar, as well as concerned about screen watching AI’s becoming the norm.
Used Ubuntu/Gnome previously, and it without knowing any backgorund on the org that I know now, it didn’t have any daily driver features I used as a normal course of work. Didn’t like it. My computers are work tools, not an ideology (minimalist at all costs for i.e.). Strangely enough, I found myself liking Xfce better than Gnome somehow. Don’t know why.
I’m another Lunduke Mandriva convert, and KDE just had the tools I use built in. Bloated? If one is used to minimal, I can sure see that. But I just don’t tax my computers hard, and I found KDE super usable right out of the box. I probably should install another instance and try to use only the gui to see how a point and clicker would fare, as I did the majority of work through konsole. But anyway, for a work took KDE has been amazing.
@bero , epic article. I laughed over it. Very well written and I resonated with it and your comments as well.
Forgive the noob doing alot of reading (and commenting);
Indeed, this was why I found KDE refreshing. It included what I wanted/was trying to do/accomplish.
Interestingly, came from Mac, right at home in KDE 
And this is why I’m here. I wanted to transition for a long time, but was aware that some Linux distros were super woke; didn’t know where to turn. But was unwilling to accept soldered-on everything, serialized parts (nearly reparable), & Apple Intelligence w/ no opt-out
Also, as much as I enjoy poking fun at other DE’s, I’m grateful for the variety, and even more grateful we have (as I understand) 1 dev working on the OM Gnome option.
Actually, my experience doing tech support is that what is good for advanced users is also good for novice users. “Why can’t I find $_Function??!” was the single loudest cry of dismay, usually because that part of the interface was hidden for the sake of “simplicity”. [glares at Windows… I should not need 3rd party config tools to get at quite ordinary settings]
Further, what’s hidden from the novice, they can never learn to do.
So yes, we all deserve to have nice things.
I don’t care that it looks the same, but I want it to function at least as well as WinXP. That’s my baseline; every Windows before or after is in some way deficient (or outright annoying) as an everyday desktop. KDE, with minimal tweaking, has close enough to the same functionality that I don’t have to think about it, and better, I am not constantly annoyed by it. I can hand a Plasma desktop to any Windows user and they won’t be baffled or lost.
Back in prehistoric times with Mandrake 7.2/KDE 2.0, I fussed and tweaked and eventually got it to a nice desktop… and was highly amused to note that I’d accidentally recreated Win95.
When I do an installation and the user wants it to look and feel like Windows version whatever, I try to get the functionality as close as possible to Windows.
Getting users acclimated to Linux applications is a different matter. Especially when they insist that LibreOffice must do everything exactly as Microsoft Office or Outlook. One user blamed Linux because he was unable to log into his bank accounts. Turned out that he was using Brave “out of the box” without adjusting the privacy and security settings for that particular banking website. I had to show him how to do that. Over on Windows, he must have forgotten that he had adjusted Brave’s security and privacy for the bank’s website. Or perhaps he turned it off globally for all websites because his bank’s telephone “tech support” told him to do that. Now that he was on Linux, just like that, they didn’t want to go there. Bad PR? Either way, I didn’t look into what he had Brave set for on Windows.
I hate tech support for financial websites. Their advice seems to always be, “just turn everything off.” Can I say this without getting into trouble?