Should Ubuntu Have Gone With KDE Instead Of GNOME?

[GreatEmerald]

If KDE was main desktop, gnome would have been "gnubuntu?" There is Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu who cares about main deskop.

No, it would be... Ubuntu GNOME. Like it is right now.

[GreatEmerald]

Here's how KDE would feel to a Windows/casual user:

*presses Windows key*
*nothing happens*
*furiously presses Windows key several times*
*nothing happens*
This is broken, can you put Windows back on?

*presses Alt+F2*
User continues happily ever after.

You do know that distributions can change the default key bindings if they want to, right? Also, I always bind my Win key to Compose.

[GreatEmerald]

Most people I trained into using computers (on Windows or Linux alike) are...
- Either uninterested/insufficiently knowledgeable to really get a hang of it, and they will always write and follow religiously the same process, which heavily involves visual hints such as icons.
- Or motivated/knowledgeable enough to go poke around by themselves, and make arrangements.

This is quite true. There is some in-between, the people who can do tasks when shown how to do them once, and try the very basic things that are on screen or in menus (but have no concept of, for instance, tabs), but they're pretty rare.

3. intergrations and more support. Evolution handles my place of employement's MS Exchange server surprisingly well. I also have limited system integration for MS Exchange via gnome shell.

true multi-mon support finally landed in XFCE 4.12, even if you could set it up in xrandr, unfortunately its not enabled by default. I cannot understand why "mirroring" would ever be the default mode for multi-mon. If there are more than one monitor, most, and I mean most setups are an array of monitors. This is the expected use.

Speaking of which, there's a recent project called akonadi-ews that brings pretty good support of Exchange to Akonadi (KMail etc.).

And I can understand why mirroring is default. If you plug in a projector, you usually want mirrored displays. If you plug in a monitor, you can configure it however you like, because you're not under time pressure.

[GreatEmerald]

I get in here and complain about software, and some people take that soooo personally. Get over it. My opinions aren't the same as yours. Maybe not everything I said was 100% accurate, but neither are others. We all have limited time to spend trying new DEs and you know what? I've given KDE an honest chance several times. Have even said I will do so again in the future. Did I miss some features? Clearly yes I did. But do YOU ever miss something and talk about it anyway? Of course you do. We're human. Anyway, I still stand behind most of what I said.

And I don't care what you think of my view of average Windows users, because I work with and support lots of them every day. Even if you do too, your experience is no more valuable than mine.

Edit: I am installing KDE now. I have heard your points and I retract certain statements with this edit and will check the behavior of certain things again, this time on Fedora. I must have missed installing certain things on Gentoo, even though I thought I had been pretty thorough with the USE flags. But I will check again and in the meantime I removed some of the questionable stuff.

As was pointed out, it's just correcting the mistakes in what you said, that's all. No hard feelings, and it's great that you learn from the corrections and are open to giving it another try. That's what the whole purpose of discussions like this should be, after all.

Personally I haven't used DEs other than Plasma much (only LXQt and XFCE). I don't think I'd like GNOME, but since I don't know much about it I can't comment on it. If you do comment about something you're not really sure of, others will argue with you, of course.

[GreatEmerald]

Let's assume you're correct and kioslave is superior to gvfs/gio. Why, then, does no one outside of KDE use kioslave? Loads of desktops use gvfs/gio, and it works very well for them. It works well for non-Gnome applications and environments because there are easy to use hooks for developers to do things like "unmount" an MTP mount, for example.

I'd guess for historical reasons? Using KDE technology in the past would usually mean pulling in a whole lot of dependencies (not sure if that was ever the case for kio, though). But after KF5, that's no longer an issue and everything is modular.

[ldo17]

I do find it ironic that in this thread we have people both criticizing KDE for having too many features and too few.

Is that a hallmark of success? That, as Alan Kay’s famous quote goes, KDE is actually worth criticizing?

[ⲣⲂaggins]

But after KF5, that's no longer an issue and everything is modular.

How is this to be reconciled with packaging formats like flatpak? Everything would get bundled into a single 'KDE runtime' in complete opposition to the modular nature of KDE frameworks.

[ⲣⲂaggins]

KDE is simply not good enough to be anyone's competition. KDE4 was better. The last few years have proved the ever smaller KDE project to be a joke.
Guess what, KDE will fail. KDE will even fail to understand why it failed.

There's nothing like having Honton back. Not to mention in a thread titled "Should Ubuntu have gone with KDE instead of GNOME?".

[TheBlackCat]

How is this to be reconciled with packaging formats like flatpak? Everything would get bundled into a single 'KDE runtime' in complete opposition to the modular nature of KDE frameworks.

Only the parts needed for the particular application would get bundled. This is much better than under the pre-KF5 days, where practically the entire set of KDE libraries would get bundled in even for an application that only use a tiny piece of them.

[damonlynch]

Citation needed. KIO most certainly does have a "hook" (called an API) for unmounting KIO slaves.

You're illustrating my argument with that link. With GVFS/GIO there are easy-to-use mechanisms for non-Gnome applications to ask GVFS/GIO to unmount / eject / give up exclusive access to a device. For example, you can call a command line program; or you can use the GIO API via gobject, which is perfectly usable by Qt programs too. Is the reverse true? Can a non-KDE application use the API you linked too? Well, if they can, it's far far harder. As of today there is no interface for a Qt program written in Python to use that API, for example.

This has real implications for the average desktop user. It's particularly frustrating with respect to MTP, because KIO will not give up control of an MTP device as long as the KIO process that accessed the MTP device is still running. For KDE apps it's not a problem, because they all use KIO. For every other app outside that system, they're blocked from accessing the device.