KDE was the first desktop environment I really stuck with on Linux, previously I'd just used Blackbox and whatever apps seemed to work. For me, it peaked around KDE 3.2 - it felt like a nicely structured, object-oriented system. You could open up KOffice documents in tabs in Konqueror alongside web pages, thanks to KParts. Every address bar and file dialog could connect to any protocol, thanks to KIO. KMail and KNode were functional and consistent. KDevelop was very nice, for someone coming from a Visual C++ background. And Atlatik stole more hours than I can remember.
I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.
Same here. First Linux desktop I ever used was running KDE 1. I kept using KDE for years, up to 3.x, because it was just incredibly integrated, fast, and functional. I cannot shake the feeling that it was engineered, or at least directed by a single competent person with a vision. I don't know if that's true, but KDE 1 to 3 had that "single mind" feeling, as opposed to "designed by committee."
After that, I moved to OS X for various reasons, until recently when the latest OS X 10.11 and 10.12 drifted so far away from the original OS X concept as to turn me away.
As a newly returned Linux user, I tried Gnome Shell in Ubuntu, but recycled its bytes in a couple of days. Then I tried the latest KDE 5, which was even worse, an ungodly monstrosity. I briefly toyed with the idea of using a supposedly modern fork of KDE 3 (http://www.trinitydesktop.org) but then settled for Cinnamon on Mint.
Still, KDE 3 was definitely some sort of pinnacle in desktop computing. Maybe the Trinity guys are not entirely crazy!
I still use several components of KDE3 via the Trinity projects.
So, if they are crazy, they're a kind of crazy I dearly love :)
(The components do, for what it's worth to anyone out there considering using some of Trinity, play nicely with others. I stopped using KDE/Trinity as the actual desktop in favor of i3, but still use a ton of the KDE/Trinity applications.)
I don't know what happened to KDE and Gnome. They used to dominate, now many people look at them as jokes.
I seriously prefer Unity over both of them in their current incarnations and that's something I never thought I would have said when Unity first came out.
Old Gnome and new Gnome are very different. The old Gnome is now Mate. Also Cinnamon from Linux Mint has captured a large portion of the user base. There is Unity that comes by default with Ubuntu and many people(like me) are too lazy to switch. And finally, there is up and coming Pantheon from elementary OS.
Same here, KIO was incredibly useful. As a young dev, I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I still have fond memories of KDE in the early years before flashy looks became a must have feature.
KIO is very much still alive, and in frequent use for me at least. Treating remote folders over SSH straight in my favorite file manager is pretty indeed.
> I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive.
I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled.
On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
Not sure this is a fair comparison. It works with basically any KDE app, for any protocol that has a KIO slave. There certainly must be a lot of confusion for users that don't understand why it doesn't work in random non-KDE apps they've installed, or the command line, but I suspect very few of them are typing in SSH URLs anyway. At the same time, Windows doesn't accept an SFTP URL in a file open dialog.
Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.
The UNC paths in Windows are very much a Windows-ism. They work perfectly when you're in an all Windows environment, but there's no consideration to speaking non-Windows protocols.
The key problem I have with KIO is that it's doing something that should be done at a lower level so that every application can benefit.
As I see it, there are three classes of apps on Linux when it comes to file handling:
* Apps that can open remote files using one set of protocols (KIO-enabled apps).
* Apps that can open remote files using a different set of protocols (things that reinvent this wheel, like emacs in your example).
* Apps that can only work on local files.
So we get a situation where I can open a file on an SMB server using Kate, but I can't open the same file in Sublime Text. It makes for a terrible user experience.
The Mac makes it easy to mount filesystems, but it's kludgey compared to using UNC paths in Windows. This is the one feature that I really miss from Windows.
Sure, totally agree that it'd be great if this was a low level feature of the OS that seamlessly integrated with any possible GUI for authentication from readline and up. But we could sit here all day and enumerate ways in which open source operating systems and desktop environments are less integrated than others.
All I was saying originally was that KDE was the first Linux environment I used which came close to the level of broad support and integration you get from something like Windows, and in some cases it went beyond.
That also only works for the windows file sharing protocol. It's not even close to what KIO provided with it's protocol agnostic support. The windows UNC paths also only work on windows with windows apps. It's not a fair comparison.
The real win would be the Plan 9 filesystem protocols which had the same feature but at the file system protocol level.
same. 3.x was my default environment for so long. it was nice to have all the basic working well out of the box, instead of having all the apps talking a different dialect, especially on how they talked to the clipboard.
Yes, KDE 3.2 was a huge enhancement over 3.1. I had a slow PC and 3.1 was awfully sluggish, but 3.2 seemed to run fine on it from a Live CD (probably Knoppix). It took an awfully long time for KDE 3.2 to hit Debian unstable---I remember reading debian-kde archives on the edge of my seat...
Amarok 1.4 was the best audio player ever. My most beloved feature - changing queue position of song in a playlist with mousewheel. Second - could reorganize your files by Artis/Album/Song.mp3.
I remember having my friends over for parties and when they saw Amarok - instantly wanted to try Linux. It was, imo, the killer app of Linux.
When I switched to Windows 7 - tried to customize foobar2000 to make it feel like Amarok, but it wasn't the same. :/
Careful when using Clementine. It reorganized all my music collection, and it took me several months to revert all those changes.
It is partly my fault because I wasn't careful what I was doing. But I never thought a media player would do such extensive reorganization on file level.
That's how everything is with Apple: you use their software and their walled-garden. If you want to do anything at all, big or small, differently than how Apple wants you to do it, then Apple stuff is simply not for you. With Apple, it's all-or-nothing.
So really, if you're an Apple user, you have no business even joining discussions like this about non-Apple software or anything that runs on a non-Apple platform. You're basically trolling.
Yeah that takes me back to sitting in front of a huge ass 19" CRT monitor, setting up computers in a networked school class, running Mandrake Linux with KDE 1.x something.
Gotta say KDE was pretty cool then. Back then I kinda hoped Gnome would just give up and the developers focus on working on KDE instead .. but no, that's not the Linux way of things :)
I'm looking at KDE 1 and thinking it actually looks better than the latest and greatest. Aesthetically I think KDE really went downhill.
KDE 1 might not look modern, but at least the design is well thought out, consistent and not full of strangely balanced UI elements with either too much or too little whitespace.
KDE seems to either appeal to people or turn them away completely. While I appreciate all the hard work the developers have put into KDE, I have always found it to be down right ugly, regardless of version.
I actually just went back to Linux after 11 years of macOS and I can't say Gnome 3 does it for me either. 10.6 was my favorite version of OS X and I think that OS has been going mostly downhill from there.
When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured.
If you want a DE that is almost as lightweight as MATE, but has a more modern feel I would recommend Cinnamon[1]. There is also a Fedora spin if you prefer that to Debian based distros.
I've been using Cinnamon as my DE for about a year now and I absolutely love it. The biggest thing that made me switch is the fact that it just works. GNOME would shit the bed every time I docked my computer into its docking station, Cinnamon handles it just fine and can even remember my monitor configurations.
Isn't cinnamon a little cpu/gpu heavy, and therefore power hungry? I tried it a year or so ago and it ate my battery for breakfast (and iirc it was pretty RAM heavy too, but my memory might be failing me here) - switching back to xmonad sorted everything out. Happy to be told I'm wrong, Cinnamon was very pretty and it'd be a nice option for tasks where my xmonad setup gets stuck on (Arduino/Processing and fullscreen VLC)
You might find LXDE to be a good choice, it is quite lightweight and I have had success with it for both of these. Extending the desktop across multiple monitors was a bit tricky though, but this was about 3 years ago so that may have improved.
The macOS issues have forced me to just not be too dependent on the DE that much. I use the hot keys to open apps (command + spacebar), and 3 finger swipe to activate app switching [1]. Other than that, what is most important to me is HiDPI rendering and seamless multi-monitor support. For the most part this works in macOS and is still hit and miss in Linux unfortunately.
[1] I'm not sure the last time I opened Finder. It's easier to manage files from the terminal.
I don't think KDE looks particularly good, but it works for me (usability wise, and it's not ugly enough to constantly barf - some details look quite nice, but the big picture kidna doesn't).
Gtk on the other hand I can't really handle. Both Gnome and Unity look not that different on a basic level, but aren't nearly as usable to me as KDE (personally I find many design features in both of them also more ugly).
Other DEs just look worse.
I recently tried Qubes (3.2) on a laptop and was amazed how ugly it is. There are literally dozens of window decorations in Xfce, and all of them look like shit. Practically nothing changed there since half a decade ago when I last used Xfce. Even some obvious graphical bugs persisted!
Color scheme support is also universally bad in Linux land (or maybe generally? Windows is poor here, too. OSX I don't know). Wrong combinations of colors (dark grey text on slightly darker background? A pleasure!), apps just not using the color scheme, inverted colors in some apps/places etc.
Some "DEs" don't try and just admit design failure. Eg. i3 which I'm using on some laptops since a couple years. It doesn't even have any design to speak of. I only use it, because it works extraordinarily well for me.
</rant>
Don't even get me started on font rendering. I know it's an utterly difficult topic, and that a lot of work went into it to improve it (and some of this is fairly recent). Still, the font rendering quality is often still rather underwhelming. And in past times, or on older or misconfigured distros (F23 on Qubes for example) the quality is just heinous.
I use KDE (in fact typing this in Kubuntu Xenial) but my main criticism is that KDE would definitely not pass a hallway testing.
Here's an example: switch the desktop theme to oxygen. Suddenly, something as mundane as switching airplane mode on and off with the default panels becomes crazy difficult because you can't see the images next to the check box (oh and for some reason all check boxes look like square radio buttons now).
I'm sure KDE works great for the people who have used it for years but they don't have newcomers complaining about usability or they don't listen to newcomers complaining about usability.
I completely switched to GNU/Linux when 3.0 came out. It was quite unstable, not very polished but extremely promising. With the further releases it always gots better and with 3.5 it was almost completely stable and polished, only details had to be improved. Everything was so integrated and with some easy configurations it could look so damn beautiful for the time.
Then was 4.0 and everything was destroyed. It was extremely unstable, missed so many features, gots ugly and everything new felt only wrong :-(
I left the club at 4.3 or so and bought my first mac where i am still caged. Tried 5.8 some weeks ago and still can't live with it, so sad... :-(
Apropos Qubes and xfce, the award for the most useless battery indicator definitely goes to xfce. They still only have a tiny static tray icon with three or four different images; the battery looks "four fifths full" all the time. To actually know the battery state you have to hover the mouse over it for a couple seconds.
This makes me fairly certain that whoever did this never used it.
- The battery is actually at 30 % in this shot (how'd you know?)
- The black box next to the battery is actually the netvm nm-applet (edit: actually it's the tray of the Qubes VM Manager; looks like nm-applet vanished - again)
- The drowned-in-white-box speaker symbol is the pulseaudio applet
- These are the "neatest" window decorations I could find
Xfce and cinnamon are the only DEs that have reliably supported multiple batteries correctly. I agree the icon itself needs to be fixed, but having two or more batteries on gnome or kde results in a situation where it is literally impossible to figure out what is going on.
I've never used KDE on a machine with multiple batteries, can't really comment on that. In fact I almost exclusively use i3 and i3pystatus, the latter has no problems with multiple batteries.
Now while trying Qubes I have that twitching in my typing hand to just make i3 work better with QVM, because seriously - xfce is... not nice to use.
Design failure. It doesn't have any design. It's has no window decorations - except an optional 1 px border line - and the title bar has no controls, and is simply text on a solid background.
This makes it what people normally call ugly, unpolished. Nonetheless it works very well. While doing that it doesn't look very well though.
IOW: I don't see it as big problem, because that absence of design / uglyness is a nameplate feature of it. Like a command line interface - it's ugly, but works.
In fact, looking at xfce right now again, I'm inclined to say that the simplicity of i3 would look better - design-wise - than what xfce offers.
KDE is a as ugly, as you configure it to be ;) Really, you can change so many aspects of the UI, that it's kind of pointless to complain that you don't like how it looks.
I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but there nothing wrong with the look as such. The, maybe controversial, problem is that the substance isn't there. Things you expect, or strive for, in modern application development like developers tools, multimedia support, security features, adoption, distribution etc. isn't up to the task. It seem like whenever Linux desktop technologies get good enough to go somewhere they reinvent themselves under a slightly different paradigm.
I've used KDE when I used Linux as my main OS (I've since moved it into VM and use mostly command line). Not because it looked nice (it didn't), but the customization options were far ahead of Gnome (not to mention Gnome2 felt like Windows 95).
And to this day Gnome has the worst "Settings Panel" I've seen. Windows 95 included. It's just.. horrible.
Those are desktops are quite riced. My experience is that it often looks good in screenshots, but then end up being constant fight to get all aspects of your DE to adhere to your now pimped desktop experience.
https://imgur.com/T5AMpdG is a good example of bad design. White space is all over the place. Distance between icon and icon description is too short. Distance between search box and icon grid is too long compared to distance of menu bar. I could go on...
Gnome (or is it Unity?) I have in my Fedora looks nice. Visually much beter than KDE. But it's like 50% empty space. Which is really, really bad. These screenshots look fine to me at the first glance.
Number 3 is actually pretty good. Of cause it's all a matter of personal taste. Personally I'm not to keen on the whole flat look, it makes it less obvious which UI part are clickable.
I'm probably not a good person to consult on these things, because I actually think the default fvwm was pretty good.
> Personally I'm not to keen on the whole flat look, it makes it less obvious which UI part are clickable.
I also don't get this why material design and flat look is so popular. I want my icons and UI elements to be visible not blend together in a awful mess and cartoonish colors. No one says that we should go back to the 90s designs but its a terrible fad, specially in the linux themes.
What's wrong with Unity? And where did they admit it was bad? It does the job, it doesn't need a lot of RAM, it's good-looking, stays out of the way. By far the best experience I've had as a developer on desktop Linux.
Do you have an example of the well thought out or consistent design? It looks very generic to me; that is, not questioning the design mistakes of the 80s and 90s like using `ctrl` for terminal and UI shortcuts.
That was my initial thought, too. But then I started thinking we should get the perspective of someone who grew up with Windows 7 rather than Windows 3.11. It could just be nostalgia talking.
Compared to the classic desktop environments like CDE or Windows 3.0/3.1 I find more modern ones too distracting, as if they try to make you to focus on them rather than on what you actually want to do. I just miss the no-nonsense, non-gimmicky look and feel of these classic, well-engineered desktop environments.
I think Unity isn't too bad about screen real estate and mostly staying out of the way, and I like the Cinnamon throw back a great deal. But what I like most of all is chucking the entire desktop metaphor into the bin and using a tiling window manager with a simple status bar and a launcher like dmenu. It's the biggest upgrade I've ever made to my computer interface, and ever since I made the move I find real desktop environments to be universally gimmicky.
I was involved with the KDE project when CMake had just been introduced. The reason for the switch to CMake (which by that time was still quite new) was that the auto*hell had become so messy that only three developers would even dare touch it to add new dependencies or compile flags etc., which is insane for a project the scale of KDE. OTOH, most developers are comfortable doing these things themselves in CMake. That's not to say there aren't parts of CMake that are still only understood by select people (hello cross compilation).
Looking across history, it seems like the GUI side of _nix had something of a seismic event somewhere around 2007. A event that has still not settled down to this day.
Yeah it was their response to Vista with dwm and other fancy UI things. Yet here we are at the end of 2016 and Wayland still isn't quite there and gnome went some weird direction with everything. I hate how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen for gnome. Cinnamon is really nice albeit a little bloat with options. That isn't really a bad thing though imho.
> Desktop environments have been desperately trying to look like a phone interface ever since.
Not the first time I've read this on HN, so I will quote my last answer to that[0]
"I doubt the plausibility of that timeline - the original iPhone was announced in January 2007, KDE 4.0Alpha1 was released in May 2007[1]."
The iPhone only got released in June of 2007, so KDE4 preceded the iPhone, unless you are suggesting the KDE devs were inspired by the iPhone announcement.
KDE is the one large DE which didn't try to look like a phone interface. The OP erred slightly by implying that all DEs have been trying to look like phones. If anything, KDE4 tried to look a lot like Vista/Aero and Win7 (which IMO isn't a bad thing for Vista; that OS didn't work too great, but it was IMO the best-looking Windows UI ever).
Gnome3 came out quite some time after the iPhone, and was definitely part of the trend to tabletize all UIs.
Also, it wasn't just KDE that eschewed this new trend; most of the smaller Linux ones did too, plus the Gnome2 derivatives MATE & Cinnamon which have only been trying to look like Gnome2.
I dunno. I think there's been exactly one recent gui revolution, and that was OS X in 2001. After that it was all jellybeans and minimal windows. One could probably argue that OS X didn't create a trend as much as rode the wave of a trend (something Apple is great at) - but either way, that's how I see the origin of both gnome, kde and MS vista.
The problem, which both gnome and kde tried to tackle, is to end up with a consistent vision for all apps. If one looks at BeOS, Amiga OS or maybe even QNX - they all have a more consistent gui experience than probably any Linux gui.
Partly that is because, like windows, every Linux distribution will need to support apps that are made for the "wrong" de - no one project manage to reinvent all applications.
And non-trivial gui applications really need to be reinvented to work well in a new ux paradigm. I'm talking about apps like gimp, blender, krita - and probably all the office packages and smaller apps like abiword.
I'm guessing that the goal has too often landed on a consistent look rather than on a consistent experience - and so one has never taken full-fledged, best-of-breed apps and adapted them to a strong vision, but rather taken a handful of "ok apps" and then written the rest from scratch. Obviously not being able to invest the ~decades of work many apps already have.
It's not all doom and gloom - for example we have chrome and modern safari as sane browsers thanks to this hubris-or-bust mindset (that led to the webkit browser engine).
Sadly, it's true. KDE was the last old and great desktop. So many things went wrong with the v4 rewrite I kissed KDE good bye, and moved to GNOME just to be let down again with the switch from v2 to v3. Nowadays Win7 is the best desktop, and I see no alternative :(
That's interesting, my experience has been the opposite. I've had multiple people inquire about my KDE5 Breeze-themed desktop because of how nice it looks.
I'm curious, what is your favorite desktop ever? What does KDE5 do wrong, and could it be fixed with a theme?
Brilliant. I remember using KDE 1 on an old Elonex laptop and on a 486 (my first experience of Linux). I remember it reaching the very configurable 3.5 series before I abandoned it and went to GNOME2, and then on to OSX...
But I have very fond memories of KDE 1. It seemed very similar to CDE on UNIX boxes. Really simple, and no needless bells or whistles.
I am tempted to install this again and use it on my RPi3 if source is available. That'll beat using WindowMaker or Blackbox on it like I do currently.
Those memories, KDE 1 was my first glimpse into the world of Linux on SuSE Linux 6.3 I think.
Many things were weird too me though, Kppp for example didn't support ISDN4Linux. Also connection on demand was not perfect, it would connect without the need. But that is another topic for another time.
Oh man. I had already forgot about ISDN4Linux. Spent two weeks just getting the ISDN working, writing scripts, compiling the kernel. Imagine nowadays spending 2 weeks to get online, reading HOWTOs, having to write shell scripts (to dial the ISP and hangup) just to get basic functionality ..oh yeah that's wifi and linux these days ;)
I just spent 3 hours this week fighting the iwlwifi driver and my Intel 7265-D card. Turned out power saving mode was causing all the drops (iwconfig $iface power off).
Just got a new work machine, trying to get external ASUS usb wifi working, no luck, drops the signal like in 1-3 minutes after going live. Tested all the power saving tricks and so on, no luck, gave up.
Hehe, ISDN was the reason I started out on SuSE Linux. After a few years I tried installing Debian, but I managed to render the system unbootable trying to get it to work.
Man, ISDN was a pain. But it was nice to be able to see a log of incoming (including missed) calls in the log file. ;-)
(By comparison, Wifi via NetworkManager has pretty much "justed worked" for me.)
I got ISDN to work in Debian Woody out of the box. I had a ISDN internet flatrate back than, which even included the 2nd B channel. 128 Kbit/s, for me that was huge in 2000.
I was a bloody n00b back then, I had almost no clue what I was doing. A while later I managed to get a dial-on-demand-ISDN-router working using NetBSD, with NAT and all. That was a lot fun, and I learnt some things along the way. (It helped a lot that some friendly soul at the NetBD project had written a tutorial how to do exactly that.)
Before ISDN, I had a 14.4kbit modem, so even single-channel ISDN at 64kbit was amazingly fast back then, to me. Dialing was faster with ISDN, but you did not get those cool sounds modems made. I still get nostalgia when I have to deal with fax devices and hear them screech. ;-)
Iirc, Gnome didn't have a dedicated WM for the longest time.
for a while Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) was working for Red Hat and Gnome used Enlightenment as their WM.
But there came to a disagreement between Rasterman and the Gnome devs about where things were going, and he left Red Hat and started working on turning Enlightenment into a full DE.
Not long after i think we started seeing various WMs being bundled with Gnome, culminating in some that used composition and OpenGL to render the desktops as sides of a cube.
After that it seems that everyone involved with the major DEs got hooked on eyecandy.
I've been using Linux exclusively since ~2001, and I used to keep going back to either E16, or Gnome+E16. It's fast, unobtrusive and strikes a nice balance between customisation/eye-candy and minimalism.
These days I use tiling WMs (mostly XMonad), but if I were to go back to stacked then I'd probably end up with E16 after a while :)
I'm still using an $ECONFDIR that was initially created in ~1997 for exactly that reason. Everything else is either missing features (windowmaker) or slow (everything else).
I have yet the 6 cdroms . It was my first Linux/Unix experience. I remember trying RedHat and Debian, aparte of SuSE and I found at these moment SuSE YaST installer was the BEST installer (I was 14 years old ~> 98's)
The sad thing is, it looks way more practical and tasteful than KDE5. I would say I miss nice DEs, but that's not true: i3 is way nicer than any DE has been, for me.
i3 user here. I call it the best system for 2% of people, and the other 98% HATE it. One time I left it up and my wife had to use it when I wasn't home. Talk about a unfun conversation. BUT I still use most of the KDE programs.
KDE is by far my favorite Desktop Environment (i3 to me is not a DE) and I find the macOS being my least favorite. KDE unfortunately had a license issue with Qt at first and was the reason why GNOME was actually founded. Then KDE became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0 (That was pushed out by Distributions due to community excitement) KDE 4.8+ has been a great DE but people would still say it was bloated even though in reality it was the same size if not smaller then Gnome 2.x.
I still use some KDE apps on Windows (Kate (now VS Code has taken over) digiKam and Okular (PDF viewer). The KDE on Windows also provides for Kritia (My favorite painting program) Here is a blog on the active project http://kfunk.org/2016/06/18/kde-on-windows-update/.
> Then KDE became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0
I'm a long-time KDE user and I actually like the plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 should never have been a public release -it was not ready, but KDE got through it. I'm not embarrassed to admit I felt some schadenfreude towards the Gnome 3 struggles
Some KDE apps are nice, but I tend to find the UI to have too much bling for my tastes: it's distracting. But Konqurer and Krita are both excellent (although I use firefox), and I've heard good things about Kate (although I'm an Emacs user).
As for i3, yeah. It's actually a really nice system: you can do almost anything by keyboard although you only need to know five shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+h, $mod+v, $mod+shift+q, and $mod+shift+e respectively), and there are a few other handy ones ($mod+enter, $mod+<number>). it's a really clean, and it just feels good to use.
But it's really confusing to those who don't know it. I had a friend who tried to use my computer once... that was fun to watch.
Even something as simple as volume buttons needed to be configured manually in i3wm, and after battling compositing for so long, I ended up just giving up and using GNOME.
Well, yeah. They're WMs, not DEs. However, you can use i3 with gnome by launching gnome-session with the arg --session=i3. The instructions for setting up the DM to do this on Ubuntu can be found at http://blog.hugochinchilla.net/2013/03/using-gnome-3-with-i3.... They're for Ubuntu, but it's fairly similar in other distros (although it varies by DM).
Agree completely. i3 has been an eye opener for me. I'd recently got back into Linux after Windows 10 and I went with Arch and Gnome, but Gnome really wasn't doing it for me.
Set up i3 and I haven't looked back. I love how fast switching windows is, and I like the fact I can nicely organise everything I want quickly.
I have to use Windows at work and often find myself pressing Win + 1 to switch to my browser heh.
Why do I find these retro DE more appropriate and eye pleasing than modern ones? KDE 1 with HaikuOS icons would look amazing! I was rocking WindowMaker until recently.
Building KDE 1.0 (or was it 1.1?) from source on Redhat 5.1 was the first ever major thing I did with *nix - I barely understood anything about Linux or building software at the time. I was so amazed that I even got it working.
My old Pentium 200 classic (64MB RAM from memory) barely had a working dialup connection, and it seemed to take ages to download the tarballs and build them.
I remember building 3.2 (ish?) again years later on a much much faster machine and it still seemed to take about the same about of time though :)
Ah, I still remember complaing on the mailing list that this new "Kool Desktop Environment" (yes, that was its name) had no proper HIG and it's probably better if they get some style guides ready before starting up...
The heady days of early Linux GUIs. When Tk was king and nobody thought that somebody would do something like Xt again...
When KDE 1 came out, I had installed from source on a 75Mhz PowerPC 601 with 128MB of RAM[0] running MkLinux[1]. It ran acceptably, it was much more responsive that System 7.5.
KDE 1.0 was release in 1998, almost two decades ago. Even a decade old machine low-end machine is scifi-high-end by 1998 standards.
That being said, it may be impractical to browse the modern web with KHTML 1.0 (from which webkit was forked by Apple, hence it being a remote ancestor also for current Safari and Chrome!).
Guys, is FAST as hell, and the screenshot was taken from inside KDE 1 using a PLasma 5 application, so in general sparse term, is usable. I will make it totally usable in next weeks tough, as i didn't have time to port 100 %.
KDE1 source came with Slackware 3.6, it was pretty cool to compile it all from a tarball. but it was also nice to customise FVWM to whatever i wanted it to, for example use the BeOS colour scheme and put the buttons in the same place on windows.
It was FUN. KDE is doing 20th years, i've been there for 16 now. No, nobody payed me, i made it because i have passion for the project and it shaped my professional career. And YES, we need keep our memories for future reference
I could have done a better job elaborating in my original post, I was too glib. To me it's less about this particular example (it's small potatoes overall) and more about the double standard for the tech industry. Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun. Imagine if Ford started producing Model T's again just for fun. Tech is the only industry where people goof off, get paid (in dollars or praise) and yet there are still complaints about how bad it is to work in technology.
Edit:
To add on to this, I think what frustrates me most is the lack of collective self-reflection or appreciation of privilege in the tech industry. I'm not trying to deny the existence of real problems in the tech industry but every time I (as a non-tech industry worker) hear my friends or see some article about how underpaid tech workers are (at 3 to 4 times my salary) I have to clench my bowels and try not to have an aneurysm. I would love to see articles regularly hit the top of Hacker News titled "Look at how good we have it" (including some recognition about how bad the economy is for everyone else) but I don't think I've ever seen that.
There'd be value to a museum making a reproduction of a Model T, & there's value to the history of science, to focus on what kind of world scientists then were thinking in terms of when they created various hypotheses
I've invested a lot of my personal time in creating the fastest befunge implementations I know of. I intend to spend even more time eventually when I get to having it JIT to assembly. I find it fun, I don't get paid for it, & I have a modest salary (under 40k/yr)
It _did_ end up having positive outcomes, where I was JITing befunge code to python bytecode, & it got me thinking about the bytecode's performance, so to optimize my befunge implementation I went a level deeper & optimized the python implementation to wordcode instead of bytecode, giving anyone who uses Python 3.6 a 1% improvement
But maybe working on improving the performance of Python by 1% is frivolous, since Python's just some big codebase whose only use is in silly things like my befunge interpreter..
That said, I agree with you somewhat on that tech industry rant. I mention my salary's modest, but it was less while I was working as general labor in flooring, which was way more than when I was vending icecream off a bike (which was much more than when they'd have me put together coolant packs for 25$ in a 6 hour day)
You're directing it at the wrong thing. Writing a blog about some hobby project isn't what's wrong with the world
I think I'm not making my point particularly well. It's also possible that my point itself is terrible, as evidenced by the raft of downvotes and the fact that I was banned from posting this comment until hours later. I guess HN is only a place for popular opinions.
Your Python example is undeniably progress because Python is still in wide use, a better example would be if you improved the performance of Dylan (or some other language that has long since fallen out of use). For your flooring example, imagine if you were contracted to work on someone's house and went, "Instead of using fresh floorboards, we decided to install floorboards that have been sitting out in the rain for 40 years because we enjoyed the challenge!"
I've seen enough people make comments on how contributing to free software is a fight for the future of political and social freedom, since those who control technology will have a disproportionate impact on the systems of power and I find that hard to square with the attitude that free software no big deal and we should just have fun.
It's because there is no consensus on any of those things, particularly political beliefs surrounding free software. The people who are saying free software is about scratching itches are generally not the same people who equate contributing to free software with fighting for the future of political and social freedom. You're not seeing contradictory positions because you're (usually) not seeing the same people state those positions.
If it seems that way, it's because a given online discussion isn't a random sample of people's beliefs. For example, to someone reading Reddit or Slashdot (or HN sometimes, unfortunately), it's easy to jump to the conclusion that everything sucks and everyone hates everything. Post an article about Python, and all the comments will be about how Python is terrible and everyone should use Ruby (or whatever). Post an article about Ruby, and all the comments will be about how Ruby is terrible and everyone should use Python (or whatever). Read the same site for long enough and it will start to look like a mass of contradictions- "wait, everyone here said Python sucked before and I should use Ruby, but now they're all saying Ruby sucks and I should use Python?!?" But really it's just different people showing up to disparage whatever the topic of discussion is. I think it's just the nature of the medium that makes it really hard to gauge consensus within a community.
> Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun.
My university physics curriculum was pretty much all around in the 1940s (classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, special and general relativity, etc.)
I'm currently in a computer science department where the curriculum includes a bunch of stuff like Cassandra, Mongo, Javascript, Unity, etc.
I think it would be good for those of us in computing to take more notice of our field's past (even by the 1940s we had lambda calculus, combinatory logic, etc.)
If you took more than an intro class then I would say your university did you a disservice. And of course history has it's place for all fields of knowledge, but not at the expense of progress, which is the point I'm (poorly) attempting to make.
> Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun.
Well, here's Stephen Granades' awesome video where he explains how the luminiferous aether works, and how it transports light, and even (helps) perform an experiment to demonstrate it. It's got real science in it!
I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.