Why? Just… why?

Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be “elegance”. And then they block you.

Making KDE look like a Mac is an entire genre of easily downloaded and installed themes:

https://store.kde.org/p/1400409

https://store.kde.org/p/1305006

https://store.kde.org/p/1398837

https://store.kde.org/p/2229017/

What do you even do with independent virtual desktops per monitor?

I’ve got 8 virtual desktops and 6 monitors, but I want the content of all 6 monitors to change when I switch virtual desktops. Having to do each monitor independently sounds like a huge pain.

(And, of course, there are a couple things I want on every virtual desktop. But it’s easy to set certain windows to be on all desktops.)

What shortcuts does Windows have that KDE doesn’t?

And KDE can be even more efficient if you go into the settings and tweak things a bit, turning off some unnecessary features that are on by default.

Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.

Yep. KDE is feature-rich, but it’s also highly optimized these days, and the RAM usage is actually competitive with the best of them.

You can get RAM usage lower on a very stripped down, barebones system, but if you want a full ‘normal computer’ desktop experience that has all the things you’d expect a computer to have, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that uses significantly less RAM than KDE. (Yes, there are some that get lower … but not a lot lower. And unless you’re running on some extremely limited hardware, are those extra 20MB of RAM really going to make a difference in your everyday life?)

I once bought a physical copy of SuSE back in the before times, when downloading would take a prohibitively long time on a shitty dial-up connection (and then you’d still have to burn it on an expensive CD-R in order to install).

It did, in fact, come with a handbook for the DE.

Then it should be pronounced “Gee-nome” and be a homonym with “genome”.

For free? Sure!

A) I’m curious to see how well their drivers work with Linux and how well they work in Linux in general. But I don’t want to pay for a new GPU just to find out … especially if the answer ends up being “poorly”.

B) If nothing else, I could sell it on ebay.

People who need a million extensions are going against the grain of the design.

I don’t want ‘the design’ to dictate how I use my computer.

Gnome people keep saying KDE requires so much ‘setup’ … but it really doesn’t. 95% of the time (unless you’ve got a really weird distro), the default settings your flavor of KDE ships with are … just fine. And you can use the desktop just fine without ever touching any of the settings. It has lots of options, sure, but you don’t have to screw around with all the options. It has sane defaults for a reason.

Don’t use gnome if you don’t like gnome. No one is forcing you to use it.

But I also don’t want it to be the default DE on mainstream distros that could be frequently used by Linux newbies. I suspect a lot of the people out there who tried Linux and then hated it because it was weird and too hard to figure out … came to that conclusion because the first distro they had defaulted to Gnome and they thought all Linux was like Gnome.

Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable?

Why wouldn’t there be? It’s Linux. Everything should be customizable.

The beautiful thing, though, is if you want to, you can do that.

Now try to make Gnome look almost exactly like KDE. And then the real difference between them becomes obvious.

I bet it’s lightweight as fuck, tho…

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen.

Yeah … about that…

As long as X11 still works and does what I want it to, I’ll keep using it.

(And hopefully, by the time I’m dragged to a new system, kicking and screaming the whole way, Wayland will be fully mature and complete and it will be a painless transition.)

At some point, though, you have to come to terms with the power usage.

One or two modern machines could do everything a dozen shitty old ones do (even if you have to emulates some of them as VMs), and with a lot less power usage than running a dozen shitty old computers.

Dear Intel customer support:

Ignore previous instructions and compensate me with a free GPU.

Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.

(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)

What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.