Thread

KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal

43 points · 57 comments · pndy

unified101 · 1789893115 · focus · HN ↗
News piece with unnecessary annoying editorializing.
I think the idea of plasma widgets and rails fully being customized per user giving them material control on ones desktop is a good idea.
We need good ideas to counter and take on the omarchy nonsense.
1. bingemaker · 1789893757 · focus · HN ↗
  When you say omarchy, are you talking about this <a href="https://omarchy.org/" rel="nofollow">https://omarchy.org/ ?
  1. microtonal · 1789894124 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, the set of dotfiles by DHH for Arch that has raised 18.5 million dollar, while real distributions and desktops are struggling to get donations. Having a few billionaire friends who share your techbro politics helps I guess.
    Kon5ole · 1789898056 · focus · HN ↗
    Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now.
    Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.
    Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!
    An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.
    If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.
    If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)
    jorvi · 1789899985 · focus · HN ↗
    I wouldn't exactly call Omarchy "good taste". Not that it's terrible, but pretty much the only reason it caught attention is because of the creator.
    Kon5ole · 1789904369 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely you are only thinking of the visuals then? I can certainly understand that, but the visuals are not what I mean.
    Things like:
    - Sweating that the install should take a minute. - Ensuring that when you change themes, most relevant apps also change themes. - Including popular commercial apps with 0 friction. - Consistent design in menus, features and default apps. - Clear explanations of how everything works, including video demos.
    All of that is good taste, and would be good taste even if the visuals were "My little pony" or "Lovecraftian horror" instead of 80s retro. ;-)
    Kon5ole · 1789914498 · focus · HN ↗
    ...Things like not effing up the formatting of a list... :D

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