Comment by kombine
25 days ago
I use the latest Fedora KDE on my laptop and I find it to be a better Windows desktop than Windows itself. I cannot even say it is ascetic - everything just works really really well.
25 days ago
I use the latest Fedora KDE on my laptop and I find it to be a better Windows desktop than Windows itself. I cannot even say it is ascetic - everything just works really really well.
I have been evangelizing this message to my close circle of friends and colleagues lately. None of us are devs. I switched my laptop to Fedora this summer. All my windows problems evaporated. Search works, and is a button away. File organization works and my file manager doesn't freeze if it can't access a remote share for whatever reason (usually work VPN inefficiency on Windows). What is installed and uninstalled is genuinely under my control (not Microsoft's). And once I learned my way around the fifteen software installation methods (AppImages, repositories, flatpaks etc.) I even enjoy having the choices. My battery life is under my control, as is all interface with hardware on my terms (speaker/webcam behaviour/drivers).
I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.
Edit: It very much feels like being on a Symbian phone in 2005 or 2006. They were horrifically broken, couldn't load a web page, had no path forward towards even basic note taking, calendar organization, social media, or anything. But the iPhone hadn't shown up yet, so a majority of the world still used Symbian.
> I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.
It's not just the laptop market. Windows used to be a tool that allowed you to easily use your computer and programs. It no longer does this and is now mostly a vehicle to sell Microsoft's services.
KDE is solid but I think is just different enough to throw off less technically oriented would-be switchers. I think a fork of KDE that changes it to be more of a 1:1 match to Windows would be highly beneficial here, especially if this fork has a dropdown menu that can switch which version of Windows it mimics (lots of people miss 7 and XP and would find a zero effort way to get that experience back tempting).
There are countless Windows themes for KDE. You can make KDE look like anything with a theme.
Themes are great, but they're surface level and don't change the numerous little behavioral/UX differences between KDE and whichever version of Windows. They also require the user to have gotten as far as to discover that KDE supports themes and downloading, installing, and enabling the theme.
That's why I think a fork that implements the requisite changes would be of value.
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Well, at it's at least one order of magnitude less broken than just-installed Windows...
But I've never had a computer where everything just works, I guess that's because I expect too much, but I could never say this.