To begin with: if you're pressed for time, don't waste it reading this - it's entirely irrelevant to anything to do with problem solving or any other serious subject. It's just one man's decision to make a public confession.
I've been an XFCE guy for years. Its simplicity, the million ways to customize it with ease, the uncomplicated way in which it does its job without boasting about it - perfect. Nothing else anywhere can touch it - not Gnome (well of course not!), and certainly not KDE. Definitely NOT KDE! I mean - what an endless mess of complicated settings. Right? For the simplest operations, a person needs a PhD, like being able to turn off notification sounds; if you want to set custom keyboard shortcuts, or do anything else which in XFCE takes an average of three clicks, in KDE be prepared for any number of setbacks, fits of rage and the outlines of a death wish. That used to be my most cast-iron conviction. In forums, I'd read stuff like "I love KDE Plasma!", and I'd think: This person needs therapy!
Then - for whatever reason, possibly a fit of masochism - I installed MX 23 KDE in a virtualbox. Various iterations. Just to confirm yet again my wildest prejudices.
Wow! Not noticeably heavier in RAM usage than XFCE. What? Speed fine. Looks? With a few tweaks, rather great. And the odd thing: It's reasonably easy to find out how to get there, and much faster than I remember from a year or two ago with NEON. Same applies to lots of other stuff. I remember KDE not volunteering too much info on customization. There used to be five locations for one and the same effect. To find them, as I remember the situation, was to do with luck as much as anything else. Not any more. Either I have matured as a person (most unlikely), or KDE's settings panel has grown up. There are still a few things I find puzzling - little things, such as: on Dolphin, why do I need to click, click again, and then do some serious clicking before I can unzip a file? Why is KDE the only DE which makes me hunt around for the reason Libreoffice dropdown boxes and panels don't render letters but empty squares? (This was because some font or other, weirdly, wasn't in my .font folder, which in turn had to do with the fact that my .font folder is one I always copy over from my host XFCE system; it doesn't natively contain the specific font used by Libreoffice in KDE). The system update panel is more efficient, to my mind, in XFCE. Stuff like that, none of it deal breakers, all of it easily got used to.
The upshot: I've been using KDE in Virtualbox for a week and - well, I need therapy. Because I love it. And since I've gone on record before to state how awful it is, it's only fair I should own up. KDE Plasma is very VERY good. I'm not saying better than XFCE. In some ways, it still seems needlessly complicated. But it works. And it works as smoothly as XFCE, and customizing it no longer seems to require you to mess around for hours to accomplish a mundane task.
And what I do like best, perhaps: In MX Linux, all the MX goodies come with it. To me, that males this version of the DE superior to any other out there, including the much touted NEON (and let's not even mention the Ubuntu offering).
That's all. Catharsis, see? Written in a KDE environment - and I'm not feeling at all weird about that :-)
I've been an XFCE guy for years. Its simplicity, the million ways to customize it with ease, the uncomplicated way in which it does its job without boasting about it - perfect. Nothing else anywhere can touch it - not Gnome (well of course not!), and certainly not KDE. Definitely NOT KDE! I mean - what an endless mess of complicated settings. Right? For the simplest operations, a person needs a PhD, like being able to turn off notification sounds; if you want to set custom keyboard shortcuts, or do anything else which in XFCE takes an average of three clicks, in KDE be prepared for any number of setbacks, fits of rage and the outlines of a death wish. That used to be my most cast-iron conviction. In forums, I'd read stuff like "I love KDE Plasma!", and I'd think: This person needs therapy!
Then - for whatever reason, possibly a fit of masochism - I installed MX 23 KDE in a virtualbox. Various iterations. Just to confirm yet again my wildest prejudices.
Wow! Not noticeably heavier in RAM usage than XFCE. What? Speed fine. Looks? With a few tweaks, rather great. And the odd thing: It's reasonably easy to find out how to get there, and much faster than I remember from a year or two ago with NEON. Same applies to lots of other stuff. I remember KDE not volunteering too much info on customization. There used to be five locations for one and the same effect. To find them, as I remember the situation, was to do with luck as much as anything else. Not any more. Either I have matured as a person (most unlikely), or KDE's settings panel has grown up. There are still a few things I find puzzling - little things, such as: on Dolphin, why do I need to click, click again, and then do some serious clicking before I can unzip a file? Why is KDE the only DE which makes me hunt around for the reason Libreoffice dropdown boxes and panels don't render letters but empty squares? (This was because some font or other, weirdly, wasn't in my .font folder, which in turn had to do with the fact that my .font folder is one I always copy over from my host XFCE system; it doesn't natively contain the specific font used by Libreoffice in KDE). The system update panel is more efficient, to my mind, in XFCE. Stuff like that, none of it deal breakers, all of it easily got used to.
The upshot: I've been using KDE in Virtualbox for a week and - well, I need therapy. Because I love it. And since I've gone on record before to state how awful it is, it's only fair I should own up. KDE Plasma is very VERY good. I'm not saying better than XFCE. In some ways, it still seems needlessly complicated. But it works. And it works as smoothly as XFCE, and customizing it no longer seems to require you to mess around for hours to accomplish a mundane task.
And what I do like best, perhaps: In MX Linux, all the MX goodies come with it. To me, that males this version of the DE superior to any other out there, including the much touted NEON (and let's not even mention the Ubuntu offering).
That's all. Catharsis, see? Written in a KDE environment - and I'm not feeling at all weird about that :-)
Statistics: Posted by hebelwirkung — Tue Jul 02, 2024 8:49 am