I’ve always been a Gnome fanboy and couldn’t imagine using something else.
I’ve dabbled into KDE every few months (by rebasing from Silverblue to Kinoite for example) and I’ve always switched back after a few weeks.
I always wished I liked KDE, because it’s more powerful, but there always were show stoppers. Inconsistencies, bugs and crashes, too many options, cluttered UI, and more. My main argument to dislike it was that KDE tried to do everything all at once, but fails everywhere because nothing is polished and only 90% there.
Gnome on the other hand was simple and just worked, because every feature has been worked on thoroughly and integrated perfectly.
Still, there are just a few things I dislike on Gnome, especially the core problem of “sleeping” devs who decide against implementing stuff like fractional scaling or a good app tray.
The lack of modularity in Nautilus is also hugely annoying, especially when working with RAW pictures, where you don’t see a picture. I had to install a photo viewer that is basically a second file manager just because of that. Dolphin does that out of the box.
Still, Gnome felt like the lesser evil for me.
This has changed now!
I rebased to the newest F40 beta (including KDE 6) and WOW!
Everything feels so polished and reworked.
I have the feeling, on Plasma 5 were a lot of innovations and new features, but they were just thrown into the room incoherently.
Now, those have been reorganized and finished.
- The design language is almost the same, but cleaned up and less cluttered,
- I don’t feel the need to change my themes, only the accent colour and the GTK theme. Breeze looks very mature and good now.
- The gestures are pretty much on par with Gnome, which means A LOT.
- It works pretty reliable, even though it’s a beta and I will report bugs if I can.
- Future stability should also be better now, due to the bundles release schedule like on Gnome. Devs had a hard time with that in the past, and I think many bugs were caused by that. Now, Plasma might ship as the default DE for some distros.
- The settings are way more legible now and everything is easier to find.
- I also liked KRunner more than Gnome’s search and Dolphin is way better/ capable anyway.
- And much more!
To the developers, you did a fucking great job! Keep going!
KDE feels SO professional now and finally reached its potential in my eyes. The last days have been very pleasant and I can’t wait to rebase my devices to the stable release in 1-2 months!
Are the gestures (I’m assuming trackpad gestures) finally customisable now?
Sadly, they still aren’t, but at least, the overview and grid view are now combined, just like on Gnome.
Before, they were decoupled and unintuitive, and now, they got a rework.
What trackpad gesture are you missing?
I’m not missing anything, they are great. I always found the separation of desktop oberview and window overview a bit weird, and now, with the newest release, they got merged as one thing with one coherent trackpad gesture, which I love.
Me too. Plasma 6 feels pretty complete and intuitive to me. But I’m very curious what d3Xt3r is missing that he wants to add/reconfigure it manually. ;-)
The main gestures I’m waiting for are two finger left/right swipe to go forward/back
That’s something apps have to implement, we unfortunately can’t do it globally
I’m not too familiar with the gesture stack, would it be possible to have a small app that just listens for that gesture and emulates a back/forward mouse click?
There is no gesture, only horizontal scroll. The app has to scroll when there is content to scroll, and interpret the horizontal scroll as a gesture thing when you can’t scroll anymore. Firefox has that implemented, and every app that wants this to work needs to implement it for itself.
Ah interesting, thanks for the info!
Firefox has that, but it might not be enabled by default
I didn’t know that it’s an option on Firefox, but I’m not wondering that it’s disabled by default as it would conflict with horizontal scrolling. 😉
Oh cool, that’s great