Why GNOME? Why Didn't KDE Takeover Linux?!?
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- čas přidán 15. 03. 2023
- Both KDE and GNOME have been around on Linux for an incredibly long time but why did GNOME become the face of Linux over the years even though KDE also offers a great experience
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I like KDE, gnome looks nice but I like the huge amount of easy customization that comes with KDE.
gnome feels very.... stiff to me.
@@zzco As soon as you want to customize stuff, you're entering unsupported, sometimes even hostile territory. If the default experience provides what you need, then it's good. That's the GNOME experience in a nutshell.
@@4tado Yeah I like customization, so what?
@@christopheriman4921 i think thats a gnome insult
Since you use settings, dconf editor, extension manager, and tweaks to customize gnome
who cares. Use what you like and please stop seeking validation on the internet.
Last time I looked at QT's custom license it had a lot of nice licensing principles that forced people (like big companies) to legally have to report bugs and submit fixes that the companies create. Honestly, I wish more open source libraries took this route.
That'd make it illegal to use the thing if you cannot contact the parent project, which fails Debian Legal's "desert island test".
I'm so old sKhool that I Kan still remember when it used to be a KomediK running gag that KDE would replaKe all the letter "C"'s with K's.
I also do this, but at the same time I replase Cs that sound like S's, with an S, along with Cs that sound like Ks with a K.
I've been using Gnome almost since day 1. I switched to KDE about two years ago.
Mostly because of two changes. First, the high customizability of Gnome was one of the reasons why I started to use it ages ago. But year after year, it became less customizable and less configurable. Until it reached a breaking point where I could not get basic features working without plugins, and those plugins often broke between versions. (or weren't maintained entirely)
Second and most important: Gnome decided to become a hyrbrid between desktop application and touchscreen-tablet application. I realized that I could display less and less on my screen even though my resolution increased with technology. Buttons got bigger and bigger, spaces became huge to the point where productive use clearly suffered. Now KDE isn't perfect in that regard either, but they didn't embrace it as much and it is still much more compact.
That being said, I can absolutely understand the points given in this video. On the large scheme of things I agree with them.
i remember those same days and they sucked. It was unstable and a mess. I'm glad they decided on reliability and finally got a unified look and feel going. Gnome is great now. I'm glad it is not KDE
Besides Red Hat's early adoption, something that helped GNOME's uptake was Sun's migration to it from CDE. While I think they didn't ship until 2005, they announced in 2001, which was right in the middle of the key points mentioned throughout the video. There was also the US vs. Europe aspect of GNOME vs. KDE, with the former being default on US systems and the latter being seen more often in European systems.
The beauty of Linux community, you will have projects like conky, TDE and PaleMoon that are still maintained today but still looks like they are from 2004. Someday some ppl might make a linux distro clone of WindowsXP, completely with matching Millenium look (hopefully runs on arch)
Well, you can already achieve this with KDE...
I don't know why anyone would want that but you can.
icewm
There's a project that aims to emulate the Windows XP experience using XFCE
There is some Windows 10 ISO that actually looks just like XP.
I know this is not Linux but I have seen attempts to mimic XP's or 7's UI with Linux many times already.
@@allhasreadit is not too hard to make newer versions of Windows look like older ones, because all versions of Windows since Vista don't change that much in the system and just apply new skins and hacks.
I'd say the KDE4 and the idiotic rebranding/redefining what a point 0 release was hurt their momentum more than anything else by miles. Being very very clear about a phenomenally bad idea doesn't make it any less of a bad idea.
I started on Cinnamon with Mint, then moved to KDE with Manjaro. I now use Gnome. At first I just wanted to try it and can't say I liked it right away, but it started to grow on me. What I love the most is how it looks generally the same out of the gate no matter what distro I use it with and that it's different. KDE follows the Windows look and feel, but Gnome is its own thing. It's uniquely Linux
Gnome is massively inspired by Apple and MacOS design.
@@user-xv8xh2ib6p I mean, yes there are similarities and inspiration for sure, but to say massively? I would have to disagree, Gnome is very uniquely Linux. You have to install extensions and modify it heavily to even make it work like MacOS.
@@deultima I didn't say it works like MacOS, I said it looks like MacOS with dock, status bar, and apps menu. And all of these Mac like changes were made after GTK3.
I have both Gnome and KDE installed on a Debian sid. Every morning, I have to decide which one I will be using. And frankly, it's about 50/50. Well, maybe 51 for Gnome and 49 for KDE.
I've using KDE as my desktop environment, and I like it so much, now with the tiling manger built in, it's perfect for my usage.
Ever since my first linux experience in 2004, I've always preferred the feel of KDE over Gnome. And besides, Kate is just the best.
Another Kate appreciator
An irrational hatred of C++ is another reason that GNOME won. Though I imagine there was kind of a vicious cycle involving the license and the fact the GNOME devs hated C++.
well that's certainly not gone away, "just use C bro" has just been replaced with "just use rust bro"
@@somenameidk5278 Rust is really what C++ should have been from the beginning. It’s got a package manager, compiler errors for catching memory safety vulnerabilities, a powerful zero/cost object system, and, thanks to the first feature, is much easier to bootstrap on bare metal than any other language. If C++ had the functionality Rust offers from Day 1, it’s likely Rust wouldn’t even be here.
@@kennystrawnmusic
> If C++ had the functionality Rust offers from Day 1, it’s likely Rust wouldn’t even be here.
I don't think C++ is a bad language. It is just a product of its time. It was created like at least 15 years before Rust so of course there will be some jank in there. Put another way, if C++ was created today it would be so much different than it is now.
Thanks for making this informative video. I didn't know. I never thought about it. I genuinely found this fascinating.
As a community, I think we're really lucky to have multiple massive and tiny open source desktop environments competing with a weird sorta fair rivalry. Ultimately it breeds better code and interesting alternatives.
Gnome applications do not integrate anywhere outside of GNOME in my experience. Also the only integration into KDE of GNOME applications (via theming) is only due to efforts of kde people
I really enjoyed KDE 1, it appeared right after I started using GNU/Linux (I was 15/16 yo), and it made it really usable for everyday use.
However, I started using GNOME, as it was much more polished, in its 1.2/1.4 versions.
When GNOME 2.0 was released, I was appalled at the removal of options and configuration. However, after my initial reaction, as I kept using it, I understood the benefit of having good defaults instead of having to spend many hours to configure.
I was always an OS/2 Workplace Shell fan, and I was one of the few people that actually LOVED the spatial Nautilus (also I tend to remember where things are by position, and having consistently sized and located folders it was really usable for me). It is a SHAME that some of the nice features have been lost since, like being able to drag and drop the current folder from Nautilus :/
Before GNOME3, I was using Compiz with GNOME2, and I was disappointed with 3. However, nowadays it has all the functionality (or even better!) that I enjoyed when using Compiz.
Today's GNU/Linux desktop, using GNOME and Wayland, surpasses by far the user experience on Windows. Using Windows 10/11 (yeah, have to use that at work) feels clunky and backwards.
Along this journey, I've tried KDE few times, but I never really liked the overall feel of the desktop, the feeling that the end user is expected to tweak it to make it usable, with the overwhelming number of settings, doesn't appeal to me. If I want to tinker with something, I already have Emacs for that.
I also used WindowMaker for a while, it also felt very nice, but the GNUStep system didn't have as much momentum as Gnome did.
Also, KDE stands for "Kool Desktop Environment".
I love overview of gnome 42, very efficient to work on. (specifically with track pad gestures).
Kde definitely still is a bit more buggy, but that is to be expected with more features.
The other reason that has actually been said by distro maintainers is the unfortunate release cycle that kde has with their desktop and their tools not releasing together.
Point releases struggle a lot with this.
But when kde breaks, you get a lot more feedback and you'd be more likely to know why it breaks
But when gnome breaks...
You don't know why or what would cause it or how it even happened
Yea
Oh hello there /)
@@SunIsLost (\ hello :D
This is the reason I still use GNOME. I can make the same desktop out of both of them, but only one of them is stable after I'm done customizing. GNOME hasn't broken on me unless I'm messing with GDM.
Which really sucks because KDE's global menu is wayyy better than any global menu hack on GNOME.
Worth noting is the difficulty for lts based distributions to bring consistency on KDE, since it's part release schedule are all offsetted. Gnome is... gnome and (almost) everything ships in one batch, making it very easy to repackage
Kde did that until version 5, then they split for reasons.
I actually remember when I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu with KDE 4.1. The sysadmin at the job I worked at was perplexed why I would use KDE when it's "so buggy." I didn't really have any issues at the time, and still use KDE to this day.
I used kubuntu too, but that kde4 stuff butthurts me from using it, i switched to xfce
new outro: "and.....bugger off"
While the worst bugs were quickly ironed out in KDE 4 development cycle after the infamous first release the absolute worst thing about the version was Baloo file indexing. It's very rare to have any "must be disabled at once!" features on linux desktops out of the box but Baloo file indexing was certainly one. It was a borderline malware with traditional hard disk drives as it slowed down everything to a halt.
This nitpicky, but the indexer of the time was some research project called Nepomuk. Baloo came later as a simplified replacement.
Both are and were terrible though. About as bad as early Pulseaudio.
@@obake6290 Yeah, you are absolutely right! My past experiences were probably so traumatic that I had locked the away memory so I did not recall the Nepomuk by the original name.
@@obake6290 Nepomuk was genuinely weird! Muon too! Blast from the past . . .
this is hilarious because tracker, gnomes indexer, worked wonderfully
Gnome is more for people who are not computer literate. I would recommend it to my grandma for example.
But if you want real control and power over your computer, KDE is what Chads use.
You forgot to mention project Harmony, a replacement of Qt that might have or might have not been a catalyst for Trolltech to actually release Qt as GPL. Or maybe some Trolltech people wanted KDE to be included in distros...
I started at the time of KDE 2.x and for me it was not much different from Gnome, but then when KDE 3.0 was released I fell in love. And I hated distros completely replacing KDE 3.x with KDE 4.0 with no easy option for keeping using 3.x.
nice video brodie!
I have a suggestion: please make a video about gvfs and kio, because no one is talking about how terrible gvfs is in terms of performance for transfering files on SMB/CIFS protocol. on the other hand, kio gives a way better performance on that but no one except dolphin (on kde plasma) is using that.
If you wanna make some tests, try to transfer a large file and then a bunch of small files to SMB/CIFS with at least 1Gbps link on any gtk-based distro that uses gvfs for that. Then, try the same with dolphin on kde plasma. I'm pretty sure you will notice a HUGE difference in there.
Really? I thought gvfs was a Microsoft internal thing only some of their employees have access to.
@@bootmii98 maybe that's another thing with the same name lol
I have to say that my experience with KDE can best be described as "stockholm syndrom". The features are just that good.
It's been _insanely_ buggy for the last couple years (mostly multi-screen related) and it wasn't until 5.27 _beta_ that I felt it was reliable enough that I could remove my backup DE (XFCE). 5.26 was so broken I switched to XFCE at least once a week (and when doing ANYTHING "dangerous" like updating the system) and was pretty much forced to install 5.27 beta _on my main system_ if I wanted to use Plasma anymore on it.
5.27 has been great so far. Bit more crashy, but it recovers on its own and _usually_ doesn't screw with my windows (tiling system makes that a small issue anyway).
KDE 5.27.3 is so good it should be called 5.3
While I don't use KDE I really QT applications. They actually scale correctly on HiDPI, unlike GTK.
I have love and hate relationships with both KDE and gnome since 2000. I go in cycles of about 3 or 4 years using KDE on my main desktop. The last 3 years it been KDE on main systems and I used swaywm on my other computers.
The problem I have with kde is that the theme downloader literally just breaks. Just errors and bugs out. Kind of makes *the* customizable DE hard to customize.
By the way, I use KDE
I liked using Gnome 2 back in the day, but to this day have never been able to get behind Gnome 3... Been a happy KDE 5 user for years now, and have had zero complaints about KDE.
I enjoyed Gnome 2.32 and MATE during the time KDE had the terrible translation phase that the 4.x line was.
Something announced by the team for testing purposes yet somehow Ubuntu and everyone else replaced the perfectly functional 3.5.x packages.
I personally started my Linux Journey with KDE 3.3 at a time where even more gatekeepers existed in the Linux community and asking for help was a sign of weakness or being (for whatever reason) a stupid Windows user as people would label you back then.
I'm glad openSuSE ever since uses KDE as standard desktop and SteamOS 3 does so as well, I just don't like the touch screen/Mac interface that GNOME turned into.
It's just not for me, so yay for Plasma.
Yeah, i stopped using kde with the 4 version, they f'd up a lot of people
KDE really dropped the ball with 4.0. It felt like ages before it became somewhat usable again, and then we were already waiting for version 5, so version 4 didn't get all of the improvements it needed. Everyone else jumped into the infuriating touch interface craze - Ubuntu, Gnome 3, Windows 8 - so KDE would have had a massive chance to provide the default desktop for an actual mouse-and-keyboard PC user, but somehow it never came to be. Especially after KDE 4, the branding got really confusing, which created further problems for adoption.
I started using Linux after KDE 4.0, so I never *directly* understood the extreme hate for KDE 4. When I was experimenting with DEs, it was my runner-up to Gnome.
Of course, then Gnome imploded faster than a supernova with the release of 3.0 and started dragging the GTK ecosystem down with it. At that point I understood. But it looks like the lesson KDE took from the 4.0 fiasco was "use caution making changes", whereas the lesson Gnome took was "double down on everything you've ever done that caused controversy".
I used MATE for a while, but with that team not having the manpower to fork GTK as well they were forced to move on to GTK 3 (or, as I call it "GTK minus"), and that's another difference between Gnome and KDE: the Gnome project had control of their toolkit and has spent the last decade destroying its usefulness. Imagine if KDE had had control of QT and had vandalized it with the release of 4.0.
At this point I'm making the transition to KDE. Unfortunately, a lot of the rough edges that made me choose Gnome 15 years ago are still there, so I've got a fair amount of MATE still frankensteined in (plus qt actually forces GTK3 applications to behave and respect the system theme, so MATE is less broken by GTK3 when KDE is running things!), but the stability of the rough edges tells me that KDE has learned their lesson, at least.
I am a lot more of a fan of the UI/UX of KDE and what you can do with it than Gnome 3 these days. I like the avalanche of settings I guess 🙂
I am very happy with the current state of KDE. Haven't really had any problems with stability or bugs.
I liked gnome 2 over KDE 3 at the time, but didn't really like gnome 3+. Used LXDE and XFCE for a while each, but now pretty settled on KDE.
I'm guessing it's wayland (because it's always wayland) but I get at least one kwin or plasmashell crash a week...
The panel and wallpaper disappear and that makes it hard to logout without killall -u myuser.
@@omfgbunder2008 I have to admit that I haven't switched to Wayland yet. I just haven't had a need to switch yet, and I don't really care about it until I have a real reason to switch. First and foremost, I just want something that works so that I can get on with using it. From what I've read KDE's wayland support seems pretty good compared to some others in terms of features, but I have no idea how stable it is.
@@georgehelyar I recently reinstalled my system and proceeded to base up in KDE Wayland. It is pretty broken, and my Nvidia card def isn't helping the situation. Plasmashell (panel) freezes, having to `pkill plasmashell && nohup plasmashell &` in the terminal every time that happens. kwin_wayland leaking VRAM. Retroarch behaving strangely. Steam freezing. Xwayland applications being 1 frame behind, even if it's not a game (so I don't see the last letter I hit on my keyboard).
Pretty sure that at least half of these are Nvidia exclusive issues. I'm sticking with Wayland (for now at least) as it's not exactly unusable, plus I plan on switching to AMD when I can.
So, the funny thing about those crashes... it only happens on my laptop... my htpc is perfectly fine.
Give wayland a go and see how well it works for you.
KDE Plasma 5.18 and newer versions never crashes! Hold crash argument is gone for me! I hope Plasma 6 never crash :D
Evolution email client for GNOME has always been easier to setup that KMail and it has a backup/restore button that has always worked. It is application features like this that make GNOME more attractive. Also GNOME's ~/.config files are all in that folder whereas KDE is all over the place. Setting up "faux" roaming profiles is easy because you can setup a script that is called from an /etc/xdg/autostart .desktop file allows for a download from a server after login that restores Evolution and copies down any standard ~/.config files.
Long time ago. In the last 10 years almost everyone went to web based email clients. I don't think anything happened to Evolution code base the last decade.
@@llothar68 Where are the almost everyone statistics went to web based email clients?.... Yes, Evolution was complete and stopped requiring further development a long time ago.
I remember a time when both of these DEs were getting a lot of heat. When Gnome came out with gnome 3 it was hated so much Ubuntu decided to make their own DE. Now they both have their positives and negatives, but ultimately KDE is more my style because I can make do almost anything I want it to do vs Gnome where if you don't like the way it works you have to add extensions that will almost certainly break when the next version of Gnome comes out.
Unity was not created because they did not like Gnome but because their plan at that time was to create a "Convertable" Desktop. One where you can use it as mobile (at least tablets) and desktop. Gnome didn't do this until the great turn around in 3.10
I absolutely hate the fact that I have to have an extension to see tray icons
Someone once said that KDE is clearly made by developers and GNOME is clearly made by designers. I thought that summed it up well.
@@llothar68Actually, Canonical _was_ working with GNOME on early versions of GNOME 3, but became disillusioned with the team (of course), and that's why instead of Unity becoming just the Netbook Edition and Ubuntu Light (a never released edition that also would have come with Unity), it became the tool for convergence.
i watch youtube on the tty with the audio coming from my motherboard speaker
Hey could you update your dotfiles i would love to have your awesomewm dots and play with them
Have loved KDE since v3 or so; I even have a patch merged into current KDE - right click on task manager in your panel → configure → behaviour, "When panel is hidden: ☑ Unhide when a window wants attention" ← that's mine because the default is stupid :D
Tried Gnome a few times, and it always felt so primitive and slow - seems to have almost no configurability at all after using KDE for so long, and I guess I haven't tried it since they introduced compositing
Nailed it, I actually remember these days... I've been using Linux for way too long... I vaguely remember some hullabaloo about the licensing of QT when it came to mobile interfaces, there was an attempt to commercialize it and it kind of fell through .... I don't quite remember it's like a vague neuron telling me that there's something about this but now I just can't remember it at all...
But yeah a lot of us boomers were absolutely purists when it came to things like QT vs Gnome.
I love and use KDE nowadays, having previously gone from GNOME 2 to MATE during that project’s very early history. I remember having to try out MATE in Arch, as it wasn’t ready yet on most other platforms and still hadn’t even decided on its program nomenclature yet.
KDE is a lot smoother than it used to be, and while a bit resource intensive, allows for much easier global theming than GNOME has ever offered. Arc-Midnight FTW :D
I've used Arc dark most of my life
How does it compare with arc midnight?
its ram is lighter than xfce now. cpu runs at 1.2% on my ryzen 7 5800u.
If you are thinking about theming you already spend too much nerdy style. Customization yes, but theming no, please no. Picking dark/light style should be enough.
@@llothar68 huh?
No
Just some light/dark theme doesn't cut it
I'm customising the heck out of every application I can using pywal
@@llothar68 theming is customization. what are you saying?
now when you brought it up i can't rest easy anymore. are there video players that work with tty??
Sure. mplayer.
mplayer -vo aa (for white and black ascii art), mplayer -vo caca (for color), mplayer -vo fbdev (framebuf; never tried it).
Fun fuct: SDL1 supports ascii art too. I think they removed it in SDL2.
You asked what DE I use... I started on Gnome 2, with the menu and clock up top. I don't take change well at times, and was upset when it become Gnome 3. About a year ago, I realized I was using extensions to have an application menu in modern Gnome, and I knew Plasma already had that menu. I decided I would give it another try. Now, most of my machines have KDE Plasma (the lower spec ones, and one I use as a server, have XFCE), but I still put the panel and the menu up top like the days of old Gnome.
I started using Linux 1998. In the early days, I liked KDE. Been mostly a GNOME user through the years. Ditched other OSs entirely in 2021 for PopOS on a System76 Lemur Pro where I'm typing this from my GNOME with pop-cosmic desktop.
I have serious question for someone more knowledgeable than I: I seem to remember that back in the day the desktop you chose largely determined which apps you could run and I'm guessing that was a Qt vs GTK thing? Today it doesn't seem to be an issue and when did that change?
Nowadays the only issue you'll have with using different toolkits is themes won't match up unless you do some extra work
You could always run apps of both desktops on both systems. The problem was limited system resources: apps of a different desktop felt much heavier and much slower to start because it had to load the libraries. Back then I only had 128 or 256 MB of RAM... That has not been a problem for a long time. Software in general may have grown a lot, but shared GUI libraries, not so much.
I'm watching through i3, I used KDE from 4.7 to 5.17, I was on GNOME 2 before. I didn't like the workflow and lack of customization of GNOME 3, so I customized KDE to mimic GNOME 2, like a MATE with Qt applications. Then i started with i3 and loved it, tried other WMs but got used to i3 tabs, with a bunch of my loved Qt apps, Firefox, Kitty and Emacs.
I know you talk about DEs at least once a week already but this was still a good topic
I would have called it "KDE 4.0 technology preview". If it was called RC then people would have complained that it's too buggy for an RC.
or beta
Back in my Mac days, Apple would use “d”, “a” and “b” suffixes on version numbers to denote “development”, “alpha” and “beta”. So you might see a version like “1.0d23”, which you would immediately understand as being far from finished, with not even the feature set finalized as yte. The next release, “1.0d24”, might be better. And so on.
It saddens me that the maintainers of my distro of choice (Fedora) are so heavily invested in a DE with a vision I actually hate. KDE is much more respectful of its users, and have such a broad list of high quality applications that got so mature they thrive even in non KDE systems (Krita and Kdenlive to name a few).
Remember having ubuntu 4.10 on my Compac NC400 Notebook...great times
I've bounced around between desktop environments over the years... e16/e17, gnome, kde, xfce have all been my fave at some point. These days, I use gnome - it gets out of my way & lets me actually work, but without a lot of the frustration and minute configuration that a lot of the other environments need.
I guarantee you that kde and xfce do that too if you know how to set it up. In my opinion with less difficulty. I haven't used e16/e17 (no idea what that is) but I have used gnome, kde, xfce, Budgie (basically also gnome), Deepin and Cinnamon. Only KDE worked exactly the way I like it but it is not without flaws (some games break with kwin) like any other DE. The last years I used a tiling window manager and I will remain doing that for the rest of my life unless somebody comes up with a better concept, no more floating wm or full DE for me.
@@peterjansen4826 I guarantee you that I'm way past the age when hopping DE's is actually fun. I'm certain that the other DE's can do what I want them to do because I have used them in that way (even Enlightenment, which is what e16 and e17 are), but I'm also certain that Gnome at its baseline is closest to how I want to do it and requires the least effort to get all the way. DE hopping was fun when Linux was new & exciting to me (which is more years ago than I want to admit), now I just want to get to work. :)
GNOME is easily the most resource-hungry of all the open-source GUI desktop environments.
As soon as you accept the pain that stems from the loss in efficiency and productivity that comes with a barely customizeable UI ..
@@elmariachi5133 I would love to know how endless tweaking with a desktop environment has any real impact on efficiently besides farming karma on r/unixporn
For sure, I am definitely watching you on a TTY.
But no for real I am on Cinnamon with X on Linux Mint.
I love kde, but lately I've fallen for i3 window manager. Customizing everything in the config file really makes it feel like your own environment, not someone else's.
I used to have the cardboard CD jewel case for 5.04!
I switched to Budgie about 6 years ago, one or two Ubuntu versions after it gained official flavor status. I had tested out or tried daily driving several desktops back when I first started with Linux (including KDE 3.5 and even Fluxbox on its own), but generally stuck with GNOME 2. The mess that happened at the launch of GNOME 3 and the fact that my setup at the time was too low-powered to run Unity well (or even once MATE got going, it eventually got a bit too resource-heavy as well), made me switch to LXDE, which I stayed on basically until it got swapped out for LXQt (which I still use on the RPi4).
I do have a feeling that at some point I will end up switching to KDE as my daily, though.
KDE today is much better. I remember the old gnome 2 day. KDE 4.0 is really suck
"or 'cute' for those people out there"...haha love it!
Qtile on ArcoLinux (btw). Little bit of XFCE for displays and notifications.
KDE asks what you like, Gnome tells you what to like.
I've been using linux on my desktop since about 99 or thereabouts. Actual first install was Red Hat, but that was my first home server. First desktop install was with Suse, which defaulted to KDE. I continue to run more less the same, except it's now Opensuse Leap. But, still a KDE desktop.
Over the years, I've looked at a variety of other distros, many of which default to Gnome. Don't know if it's just because I "encountered" KDE first, but I've never much cared for Gnome on those other distros. But, the main attraction for me with KDE is that it seems infinitely customizable. A big part of the reason I've stayed on suse and KDE is I feel 'lost' on the others. One of the best parts of Suse is Yast. I've found nothing like it anywhere else. It all fits me.
The KDE 3-4 switch is one of the few major problems I've had along the way, but I partly induced that myself. When Suse first introduced KDE4, I disliked it, it immediately felt incomplete. So, since I had the option at the time, I reverted back to what had been, for me, an extremely stable, mature desktop with a wealth of widgets, etc,, KDE3. Unfortunately, in a later version upgrade, they removed that KDE3 option and the upgrade process actually left me without a desktop. So, yeah, the KDE3-4 transition wasn't good.
But, I'm not a typical user. With one exception (on a secondary gaming machine), I've never used Windows on my home desktop. The desktop I was running when I stood up that first home server on Red Hat was OS/2 Warp. And before that, DOS.
That being said, what anime figures are in the background?
Also back then the licensing was really crucial for all of us. Not only did we believe that at least on the server level linux was much better than Windows, but also that it was better than Solaris or HPUX in many ways. I guess that proved to be right in the early 2000’s when Oracle did make a Linux port and we could install it on superior x86 systems compared to expensive IBM or HP unices. Back then I was pretty sure that one of the Linux distributions would have taken the throne as the major desktop around 2020. Well I was wrong but at least the Linux kernel more or less rules the world via Android and IOT devices. But I’m old and stubborn, I still using my Linux desktop 25+ years later and it’s getting better each release
KDE is like a no brainer for me. When I was trying out linux, Gnome felt so stiff and gnome tricks were confusing to use and manage.
KDE seems to be popular among older folks lol
Not quite true to say QT is fully under an open license now. If you _want_ to use QT, and specifically a modified QT, in a closed source project, you can get it from the QT authors under an expenive, but non-GPL license that lets you take your version closed. Some people do object to this dual-license option.
This video was focused on the Linux aspect for the most part but maybe I should have been clearer about that
@@BrodieRobertson Nothing in their offered proprietary license would preclude releasing the closed source version for Linux. One of the reasons you might want to pay for the license is to get priority support from the QT Group with making QT work on embedded Linux devices.
I suppose it might be more attractive to pay for a license if you are targeting a non-linux embedded platform, as you could potentially keep the whole thing closed source... From looking at their customer showcase, it looks to be about a 50/50 split between desktop and embedded.
@@lperkins2 When we're talking about Linux most of the usage is open source, once again maybe I could have framed that section a little better
@@BrodieRobertson Agreed. But you raised the argument that part of the KDE/QT hesitancy is because people think it is not libre licensed. While anyone just looking in the debian repos will know it's DFSG-compliant simply because it's in a debian repo, anyone who first hits the QT Group's website will think it isn't, since the splash page of their website is very much soliciting their paid license. In fact, if you go to the Download Try page, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the "free for open source" option.
This makes sense, since from the QT Group's perspective, this is a software project that exists primarily to make them money. Really no different than RHEL is to RedHat, but somehow people are more accepting of IBM/Redhat doing this than QT (despite IBM discontinuing CentOS).
There's also a small, but vocal, contingent that don't care about the licensing per-se, but hates that someone expects to get paid for "free" software. You even covered this in passing with the core-js issue. Again, somehow RedHat and the like get a pass on this, but others don't.
I have plasma mobile on a Pinetab 2 and it's remarkably nice.
I'm watching on OpenSuse with XFCE desktop 👍. I prefer KDE over Gnome.
I've been gnomed 😢
Nokia also makes car tyres and rubber boots (these departments are now separate companies, but used to be the same company).
I've been running Hyprland for a couple of months now. It's a little buggy but that's nothing I haven't dealt with.
I've used KDE ever since it was installed in Caldera Linux (an old Skoll boxed distribution sold at best buy in the 90s). I tried Gnome after that and it just doesn't ... feel right. I can use it but it still to this day just doesn't feel right to me.
I would certainly doubt that KDE is a popular desktop environment, because KDE is the community that develops Plasma, which is a popular desktop environment. ;)
Anyone for Cinnamon? I play a little with KDE, though I don't use most of the options, and am starting to try Gnome; I can see the point of Gnome, but it feels like I have to work out how I'm supposed to do something (though not nearly as bad as with recent versions of OS X). It's commonly thought it's largely a question of past experience; I'm wondering if it's more whether you're verbal or non-verbal (Gnome feels pretty gestural and spatial to me, which is why I'm not so comfortable).
Using KDE and Gnome. KDE on my laptopm with Arch, on desktop Fedora Workstation Gnome, and VM Debian testing KDE :) gnu/linux user since 2003. :)
Now that you've said it, someone is probably going to find a way to set up a framebuffer CZcams client for ttys
The first DE I used was KDE, back in the Kurumin Linux. Good ol' times :')
I like KDE over GNOME all the times, but I started working with KDE since version 5. I didn't know about previous KDE issues with version 4 or license incompatibilities with GPL. Good to know that now, but irrelevant for most recent users
I like KDE more than Gnome, but yes, I have to agree with you that's why Gnome is everywhere. But I'm using Hyprland now. I was fine with KDE with Bismuth until Bismuth started acting weird on me and programs started not respecting my tiling settings.
I started using KDE when version 4 came around on gentoo. I vaguely remember being told it might be beta quality, but I don't remember any big issues. I had seen KDE 3 before, and I thought it looked awful compared to GNOME. KDE 4 was much nicer. I used KDE for years after that. I tried Gnome again when version 40 hit and I liked it. I'm using i3 on my laptop, but would use Hyprland if zoom screen sharing wasn't broken atm. I like pretty much all of them, except for Mate.
I remember using Ubuntu during the Windows XP era around 2007-2008ish because I messed up my XP install royally because of a virus + system restore bricked it so I installed Ubuntu and used it as a daily driver for a while and I got TeamSpeak working so I could chat with my online friends in those days. Also back then CZcams just got HD video play back capabilities and that really chocked my Pentium 4 system that I had at the time. I used the standard Ubuntu 20.04 for my fileserver and it was rock solid. I like both GNOME and KDE as well as XFCE which XUbuntu uses. When I decide to install Linux and dual boot between Windows and Linux I am probably going to run the Nobara project made my the Proton-GE developer Glorious Eggroll and that comes by default with GNOME and there is a KDE variant as well. Interesting history that KDE has.
I used every desktop environment in my laptop! also GNOME is my primary desktop which I most of the time use brcause it's simple and easy to use but also KDE is one of my fauorite desktop envirnment.
I'm historically a KDE person. Right now I'm just using Windows and Android, but I'm going to try putting FreeBSD 14 with KDE on the kid's laptop.
Cinnamon is my daily driven desktop my 2nd fav is Mate. I know these are Gnome variants. In KDE 4.xxx I always had problems with Kwin crashing when I was playing games. This was when I had just started with Linux and was distro hopping and playing with different desktops and trying to find a comfortable setup to daily drive. KDE might be better now but there is no reason for me to switch.
I stopped using KDE when KDE 4 (?) appeared in about 2008 and everything suddenly started to crash. I have never tried it again since.
i've never really questioned the fact that there are two very popular DEs or how this came to be, i guess i just took for granted that there are two big players competing in the space, just like there are for many other things too (shells, terminals, distros, package managers, text editors, and could go on for ages). and i kinda like that part of linux, that almost all components can just be replaced if i want to. including like, even display drivers (nouveau works so much better than nvidia but nvidia has better performance)
"Take over" would be 2 words as a verb. Such a detailed video deserves a proper title.
lol would u like to try again. Takeover is definitely a word spellcheck and a dictionary should help
I can still remember the times as KDE 4.0 came to life. KDE 3 was really good and stable. KDE 4 was just buggy, slow and really a pain to use. After years of macOS I'm currently digging into Linux again. Current KDE is really stable and fast again. But most distros ship GNOME as default nowadays. 🤷♂
When I first started fiddling around with Linux in the early 2000s I only used KDE. I loved it for its customization options. Now that I'm older and don't tinker as much I like Gnome because I can set it and forget it. It works great and even on a 5 year old laptop it runs really well. KDE still has amazing customization and the default applications are better but I just like the out of the box experience that Gnome provides.
I like gnome because it's almost perfect for me out of the box. And then there are extensions if I want some extra conveniences.
I am a new linux user (desktop wise outside of my steam deck I had for months now and if you wanna techincally count android lol) so hearing these stories is always interesting.
@brodie how have you skipped kde 2 and kde 3?
It was big before the flop
Before "patching KDE 2 under BSD"
🤷
I liked KDE1. KDE then kinda sucked for me until very recently. I installed Kubuntu recently and was pleasantly surprised, so it is now the default desktop on my Linux machines -- before that I was using xfce. I did give Gnome a try, but it seems to combine the worst of Apple with the worst of Linux.
It is really hard to separate the gnome desktop from Ubuntu. Unity? That's funny
og unity is based on gtk 2 (now gtk3/4) lmao it's not much different
@@aanjaneya_meaow shut up aanja the troll kid from tg
I mean I used both kde and gnome just to see if it would make a difference for me and honestly it does not. I am not the type of user that is heavy in customization. Although one future I like about kde is it has a better app store. And it caches the apps on restart.
re: night and day difference that wouldn't fly -- to be fair it was a big shift when Ubuntu went to Unity and then a second time when it dropped Unity and went back to Gnome. These were huge shifts in the UX to go from one to the other, but they made it work for the most part. This is why going to KDE as the default wouldn't be that bad since you could just throw a couple panels in place and call it a day pretty much (since they did this with Gnome 3 after Unity :D)
I was going to say this.
When I don't use kde, I like cinnamon or budgie over gnome. I wish system76 would allow other distros to use cosmic, the new version of pop looks like it's going to be good with the full cosmic environment
I have tried KDE on and off for over a decade and I can honestly say that I have never had a stable experience with it (lagging when moving windowses around, parts of the screen turning black at random intervals, full system crashes for no obvious reason, extremely low refresh rate with dual monitors (
Gnome on laptop and kde on desktop. :)
Never met a free desktop I didn't like in some way or another. The two top dogs both make great DEs that out-perform proprietary ones in many categories. I dislike the RAM usage of modern GNOME, and the fatty, real estate consuming GUI. It's pretty, but it takes up a lot of space and resources with little customizability. I'm professionally tied to KDE application use, so it makes sense to run Plasma in a highly customized way that frees up RAM and real estate for apps while keeping a variety of K background services active and accessible. Sure, I've done this with a bare WM and lightweight app selection (miwm + pcmanfm + yabar in under 60 MB RAM), but a large portion of KDE's overhead comes from their background services which I need anyway.
Gnome does not use more Ram than Kde these days ~ 900mb
But more important than that is load average.
@@xperience-evolution Stuff that matters pretty much only to nerds either on a low end system, or squeezing every little bit out of a high end one.
OP's right. The thing between Linux DEs is pretty much entirely a civil war - all of them clearly outperform Windows in resource use and Mac in usability. Linux desktop is just superior, period.
@@chlorobyte_projects did not say anything else. Agree with you completely. Just stated that Gnome does not use more ram than KDE and that if you want to have a lighter DE you should look at load average not (just) ram.
@@xperience-evolution I'm using KDE Plasma 5.26.5 and it eats *435 MB* RAM out of 12 GB at startup and my 15-minute load average on 8 cores with Firefox open right now is 0.35, which comes out to a 4% load average for 15 minutes. That includes lots of KWin animations and several KWin scripts in combo with the Kvantum engine. Gnome absolutely uses more system resources, especially RAM, out of the box - but it's still significantly better than Windows 10/11 or Mac OS/X. I would not, and do not, use either Gnome 3/4 or KDE 5.X on older equipment, I use some other WM and lightweight apps.
@@dustanddeath3985 depends a little on the Distro. Gnome on Pop is much heavier than vanilla Gnome on openSUSE.
KDE the same. But 435mb ram is definitely modified and not normal. If I install KDE neon or Kubuntu (on a machine NOT VM) I get the same Ram consumption out of the box as with Vanilla OS or Ubuntu.
It is all around 850 to 950.
Windows is garbage and should be thrown out a window
Ah, good old brown gnome 2. I enjoyed it so much back then comming from XP.
I am one of those high schoolers and I happen to use kde a DE older than me
Qt licensing is a nightmare, even today. Or at least confusing. Why borher using development solution with 3 license types (commercial, GLP, LGPL) when you have simple and striaightforward GTK?