Can we please have an official merge of KDE plasma and gnome?
I just installed fedora with the KDE plasma spin and kind of like it, but kind of don’t. I like that it is so much more feature rich, all the little things like easily accessible clipboard history and nice overview of everything. On the other hand I like the feel of gnome, it feels snappier. But plasma seems like a more developed os compared to gnome. But gnome feels more fluid and is just so much more pretty compared to plasma! And it’s more intuitive to me (still partial windows user though)
Am I the only one here? It would boost the Linux community so much if more projects would be merged and more people would work on it together. I totally get that not everyone has the same vision and has different ideas and wishes for software, and competition and alternatives are good. But on the other hand more people would work together on one goal :D And I think that a lot about open source projects. Due to the beautiful nature of being open, no one really leads projects or can merge and manage workforce on projects. So it feels to me like there is a certain limit, what open source reached yet and so many things feel a little unpolished because its not their goal to get many people to use it and earn a lot of money?
How do you feel about that?
It escalated a little, I’m sorry but I had those thoughts for a while now and would really appreciate some opinions on it :)
The teams have very different visions. Basically incompatible at a core level. From the very basic UI libraries. KDE uses QT, a pretty open source friendly tool kit, but IIRC not actually open source itself. Gnome uses GTK. The g in GTK originally referring to Gimp.
Gnome itself has traditionally had a much more apple way of doing things. If you venture outside of that. Things can break easily. And at a base level there are things gnome is kind of reluctant to do UI wise. That said, it’s simple and works well. KDE is kind of jack of all trades master of none. But it still does. All them quite well. If you want to mimic Mac OS. You absolutely can right down to the theme panel placements etc. If you want to emulate windows it’ll do that perfectly too. If you want to look like gnome. Yup. If you wanted to look like some unholy abomination the world was never meant to see. They got you covered as well. In fact, I think Garuda Linux comes default with that.
However, choice is never a bad thing. And there’s no real reason for them to merge. They run side by side. Quite brilliantly. And I even find myself popping back and forth from one to the other randomly. Your issue with snappiness under KDE could be a couple of things. There are a lot of configurable settings under the hood. You can decrease animation times etc etc etc. Which will often give a feeling of snappiness things just moving faster. But at a more fundamental level. Gnome has been a bit better optimized for use under Wayland etc. Which most distributions are moving towards. Which greatly increases the performance and responsiveness of many things. KDE has been lacking in at department. Though early this year we may see a solution to that. In the meantime though, sit back relax. Enjoy both and compute how you like.
Choice is never a bad thing. …
In this context maybe but overall after a certain level of possible outcomes, choice doesnt cause more happiness but anxiety and “choice-stress”.
Qt is absolutely open source. It’s dual licensed as either LGPL or some commercial license.
Qt since its 5->6 transition has become very restrictive in its non-commercially licensed terms. A legal team must have worked hard and long to stretch this as LGPL, meaning that GPL licensing needs more attention to detail.
There is practically no support and no way to report a bug unless you are a paying customer, is what I kept.
My main issue is those two GTK and QT, are pushing linux to become an MSw and Mac alternatives respectively. Both ugly and anti-unix
@2xsaiko @Eldritch
Open source doesn’t mean they have to accept bug reports. A project is still open source if you just provide appropriately licensed source tarballs of version releases on your website and nothing else. However, yeah they certainly have been trying to screw over non-commercial users, especially on Windows with their stupid installer, but thanks to KDE they have to keep Qt free software unless they want the last free software release to have to be relicensed as BSD.
How? If anything I’d say GTK is trying to become unusable to anything but Gnome, and Qt is doing some weird mobile shit with Qt Quick. While Qt Widgets, which has been like this for a long time, is pretty much a clone of Win32 Controls (which is a good thing, Win32 Controls are well designed) and the one that’s like Mac is GNUstep (which I’m also really fond of).
All of these are still only UI toolkits and application frameworks though. They can’t push Linux to become alternatives for complete OSes. That’s up to application and desktop environment developers. And right now I don’t see anything like that happening.
Qt is the base, what I meant is the KDE-plasma appears to push for the Mac-ation of linux while Gnome is pushing for the Microsoftization (aesthetics functionality wise) … it may be the reverse I don’t use either 4 of them.
wm with least possible overhead possible is my minimalist tendency for a graphic enviornment.
@2xsaiko
Again, I don’t see that happening at all. I’m not even sure what that is supposed to mean exactly.
Do you want me to list software assuming you either run gnome or plasma?
Articles presenting the choice in linux as being those 2 desktops alone?
And all of it with direct code linking systemd utilities as there is no alternative or use of more common functions.
@2xsaiko
I don’t see how that’s relevant to what you’ve said before. You don’t need Gnome or Plasma to use systemd libraries, and plus, application developers have the right to write software against whatever API they want, don’t they? Especially if it’s the ones from their own project. And trust me, nobody goes out of their way to write software that doesn’t work on other desktops.
As for articles, of course articles by the Gnome or KDE project contributors are going to talk about those projects, and everyone else can write about whatever desktops they want. The reason is probably rather that they are the most popular desktops and most complete so new users are likely to want to start with them. And I doubt any serious articles aren’t at least going to mention MATE, Cinnamon or Budgie.