We could do well with change on the desktop, but very little of the change I've seen during the past 10+ years is actually benefiting the user. Even on Linux, the changes happening are stuff like bugfixes and reducing jank; small incremental improvements that have already been done, but are just getting their final round of polish.
All the other changes I see are just shuffling around the UI, which doesn't really help anyone. And even newer features are either so marginal as to not matter, or can't be trusted to stick around. Why bother to learn a new UI, when all that does is get you back to square 1, and it might not even stick around? I'd be much more interested in tweaking my DE if I could be confident in knowing that those tweaks will persist and not cause other problems down the line, but I have no such assurance.
I don't blame the casuals for hating UI updates. I myself went to Linux to get a more cohesive and stable experience. If we're going to make changes, we need to not break workflows that already exist. New features and workflows need to either not be in the way for established users, or opt-in until they're established and known good. Doing anything else is user hostile, and by this time, given how much we know users don't like changing UI, dare I say, evil.
KDE is an experiment to pack 20 big things in a bag that can only hold 5 things. Then add one more thing in next release. And make every pixel clickable.
KDE 6's out of box experience is really good. You can tweak it to your heart's content, but you don't need to. It's not "every pixel clickable" unless you deliberately made it so. Older versions of KDE were more like you describe.
Yeah, they're hidden in three-level deep burger menus. Konsole and KWrite are particularly egregious.
There is a middle ground between GNOME's minimalist wasteland and KDE's kitchen sink. And yet for some reason, the patch to add smart copy/paste to Konsole, like most modern terminals have and default to, has been stuck for years waiting for approval from the design team just to add a checkbox hidden in the settings.
This might sound heretic but maybe running mostly GNOME apps on a KDE desktop might be an interesting "best of both worlds" situation to investigate...
Telaneo · · focus · HN ↗
All the other changes I see are just shuffling around the UI, which doesn't really help anyone. And even newer features are either so marginal as to not matter, or can't be trusted to stick around. Why bother to learn a new UI, when all that does is get you back to square 1, and it might not even stick around? I'd be much more interested in tweaking my DE if I could be confident in knowing that those tweaks will persist and not cause other problems down the line, but I have no such assurance.
I don't blame the casuals for hating UI updates. I myself went to Linux to get a more cohesive and stable experience. If we're going to make changes, we need to not break workflows that already exist. New features and workflows need to either not be in the way for established users, or opt-in until they're established and known good. Doing anything else is user hostile, and by this time, given how much we know users don't like changing UI, dare I say, evil.
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
xeyownt · · focus · HN ↗
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
neutronicus · · focus · HN ↗
Feels like my work box, except it isn't constantly showing me ads and pegging 2 cores with an anti-malware process of some kind.
endemic · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
I suppose some power users like that they can really do everything with it.
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
vconnor · · focus · HN ↗
There is a middle ground between GNOME's minimalist wasteland and KDE's kitchen sink. And yet for some reason, the patch to add smart copy/paste to Konsole, like most modern terminals have and default to, has been stuck for years waiting for approval from the design team just to add a checkbox hidden in the settings.
amlib · · focus · HN ↗