Posted by jrepinc 14 hours ago
Has all the developer goodies with KDevelop, written with tooling that empowers UI/UX development workflows, has a proper component system with much better tooling than COM, quite configurable without extensions all over the place.
Signed, a disillusioned former Gtkmm user, with how GNOME turned out.
The Only slightly wonky thing has been the fingerprint reader. Other than that my Linux set up now feels smoother than my office Mac. AND I get way better battery life compared to Windows on the same machine.
Special call outs to: kwin, dolphin, yakuake, kde-connect
For some strange reason this seems to be very hard thing to set up on KDE or am I missing something?
And Control-W will always erase word no matter the application?
This is actually a major reason I use KDE: I can, with some effort, change keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicting with terminal Control keys. It doesn't solve the textbox problem, though.
(I don't use Emacs bindings, but Control-W erase word came in the ‘new’ TTY driver in BSD2 in 1983 — predating Windows 1.0, incidentally — likely copying TOPS-20.)
I’m not sure how they do it, i suspect it’s mostly a manual grind for configuring the most common shortcuts and apps, but there might be some idea there that can be reused for the eMacs setup.
What makes Linux great is also its biggest handicap, in my opinion, when it comes to User Experience: the fragmentation of UI frameworks and libraries.
I imagine having this control between Qt, GTK and other UI libraries and electron-type-apps os difficult if not impossible.
I am surprised this issue is not gaining traction with the KDE crowd, as I imagine a substantial part of the userbase are emacs users and used to emacs keybindings.
Last time I tried, I used Ubuntu, and I experienced problems with several games via Proton (e.g., The Finals, Fields of Mistria, and Civilization VII, among others). I checked ProtonDB, and it looks like those issues may be resolved.
However, I also wonder what people are using to replace iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever on Linux. Or, if they don't use such a thing in the first place, how they handle off-site backups of files and images.
Gaming works great on Linux, arguably better than on Windows. Show stoppers are mostly aggressive anti-cheat or DRM stuff so multiplayer can still suck but for anyone doing single player it is amazing. I have a windows installation I can dual boot into but I haven't in like half a year, I prefer gaming on Linux.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon has a traditional Desktop close to Windows. I highly recommend checking it out.
This go around, I'm thinking of trying Kubuntu. Specifically 25.10 Kubuntu, since apparently Wayland fixes a lot of the problems I had trying to game on Linux before.
Everything immediately just worked, it's familiar enough that someone not used to Linux can click around and get to things, and as a bonus, controlling it from the couch with our phones is trivial with KDE Connect.
Congrats to the KDE team. Unfortunately too broke to donate.