Comment by ndriscoll
4 days ago
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming).
To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc.
I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
> defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me
Not that it's a better workflow, but macOS does make a distinction between hidden and minimized. You can "hide" an app, and all windows will be hidden, only the dock icon showing. Minimize will move that specific window into a separate area onto the dock since macOS treats apps & windows as separate entities.
What I absolutely hate though is you can cmd+tab and bring out a hidden app (but it restores all of its windows which drives me nuts), but you can't for a minimized app without holding option before releasing the keys.
KDE is great, but
> The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
Is the biggest benefit and point. You can toss whatever UI/workflow style you want on top of pretty much any distro. I absolutely cannot stand the loss of user agency on modern software/operating systems. I have to use both macOS and Windows at work and I hate them almost equally (I hate windows a little more than I hate macOS, but because of Microsoft's behavior, not because of the UI).
I feel like every piece of commercial software and OS now is like Blizzard "You think you do, but you don't"
I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use.
I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on, and being able to copy the sometimes esoteric nonsense in those logs into Claude and get actionable information while not remotely understanding the underlying tech is fan-bloody-tastic.
That said it was death by a thousand cuts. Some friends I hadn't heard from in awhile asked if I wanted to get on Warhammer Space Marine 2 and luckily, I had it installed! ... and was able to play after a mere 35 minutes listening to other people have fun on the call, while I was trying to figure out why the game would only launch to a black screen.
So yeah, I wussed out and went back to Windows. I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do, and they're busy selling shovels to the AI gold-rushers.
Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works.
So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week.
No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton version. 4090, 5070 Ti, 5090. All work perfectly. DLSS, Frame gen, older titles too.
If you want to there’s convenience flags to auto upgrade things like DLSS to latest versions etc. It’s not something you have to use, but I found it really nice compared to the Windows equivalents.
I’m so beyond happy to have zero Windows left in the house. :)
I would like to add that CachyOS also supports Niri, a scrolling tiling WM. As someone who long had "papercuts" from floating WMs I've had great success with it and even prefer it to something fully tiling like hyprland.
Another vote of confidence for CachyOS + KDE! This is my setup and literally the only issue I've had which presented a problem to me is that OpenRGB doesn't like my mobo at all, it's stuck in 'unicorn vomit' mode when I wanted tasteful accent lighting. Games work with minimal farting about, the desktop is great out of the box and customisable in plenty of ways, and it generally treats you like an adult.
Oooooo. Does it support HDR? Because that seemed to be entirely broken in KDE despite using Wayland.
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> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on
This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:
- "Something went wrong"
- "It's not you - it's us :-("
- "An error occurred"
- "Uh-oh..."
- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]
People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.
"Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" And just give me a fucking error code so I can try and fix it"[0]
[0] https://x.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594
> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Oh, I wish...
We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...
Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.
Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.
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I remember when BugZilla reported "Zarro boogs found". My reaction was to ask that we switch to some software that didn't act like it was a 13 year old nerd.
May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices. I have three laptops (my work mbp, my personal mba and my daily driver which runs OpenBSD) and two mini computers (one is a server for file and misc. stuff and the other also runs OpenBSD).
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
> May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices.
It cannot. You've seemingly misunderstood the problem.
> If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
That doesn't actually address their issue that nvidia currently has poor support for gaming on Linux with RTX 5000 series cards.
Anecdotes like yours are why I'll probably remain on Windows for the foreseeable future.
Games on Windows just work. It's not even a question. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle around to get a game to work properly, but it was probably 20+ years ago.
On Linux? Might as well play a slot machine. You might score a jackpot and the game has a native Linux port that works flawlessly out of the box. You might have a decent win with a non-native but works well with Proton. But there's a good chance it either won't work at all, or requires significant fussing to make it work.
> Games on Windows just work.
Counterexample: I was locked out of Destiny 2 a couple times as they shipped new updates that simply didn't run on Windows 7, even as they continued to claim it was supported.
I don't mean subtle bugs either, I mean stuff like an immediate error on startup for a "missing" DLL, which persisted for weeks.
That really isn’t true anymore. I’ve been using Bazzite for 9 months now and haven’t needed to boot windows once for a game. I don’t even bother checking protondb anymore. Games just work and peripherals just work has been my lived experience. I think it’s probably a lot of work to get a random old distro to support gaming - but there are several distros which make it flat out easy with modern hardware (Bazzite, Cachy, SteamOS, and likely others too).
> I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough.
What? That has nothing to do with KDE. And Ubuntu is one of the happy paths for driver support. The problem is squarely on either NVidia or overly pretentious commitment to FOSS and only FOSS.
It's been fairly well known for years that nvidia only supports linux gaming as an afterthought. In fact, if you'd read the whole post you'd have seen where they said:
"I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do."
Heretic.
> NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
KDE actually solved that long time ago with kdeinit (https://web.archive.org/web/20010517071320/www.suse.de/~bast... and follow-up work by Lubos, see e. g. https://conference2005.kde.org/slides/kde-performance/index....), but the new crop of developers didn't notice much difference on their high-end systems with SSDs, so they ripped it out.
KDE has a much older and richer history than windows 7. It’s been trying to be a safe harbor for Windows users to land in Linux for a long time.
What they really meant is it's like Windows if Windows didn't enshittify.
I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
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> Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
You can...? I tried dragging from Dolphin, Kickoff and the Task Manager onto my desktop, and in all three cases it worked.
Granted, there's a moment of confusion having to choose between copying or linking, as offered by the context menu that pops up, but...
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Maybe because the start menu equivalent and the task bar are their own modules. They just come precondition, but you can use lots of alternatives. But I'm just guessing.
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The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
Window 7 was the apex of Windows as an OS. Its been downhill since then.
Windows 8.1 was pretty solid, if short lived. New task manager, overhauled file copy, better SSD support & HiDPI scaling/multi-monitor support was hugely improved over 7, 8.1 also improved the window snapping and fixed the horrible table UI for it from 8.0
8.1 also ran faster than 7 on a lot of machines, they did a lot of work to optimize it for the crappy tablets which translated well to desktop.
Also the last version of Windows that you could opt-out of telemetry with (until Microsoft backported 10's telemetry engine to 7 and 8.1 via optional update)
Big PC OEMs offer models with various distros preinstalled. Examples: Lenovo [1], Dell [2]
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/configurator/cto/?bundleId=21NS...
[2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-9350-inte...
The point is getting folks that aren't on HN, mainstream adoption.
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Why do you need linux preinstalled on a new computer?
Take a user friendly distro, boot up the installer, accept the defaults on the few questions it asks... done.
It's no more difficult than the first-time configuration MacOS or Windows will walk you through on a new system.
I precisely excluded HN crowd exactly because of comments like this.
First of all that hardly works flawlessly in 2026 laptops, still.
Secondly, this is about regular consumers, not Linux nerds.
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I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.
KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.
I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.
I so want to agree. I have been a Linux user for almost 2 decades now and I still can’t close apps by throwing my mouse on the right top corner and clicking. It works on “KDE apps” and but not on Firefox so I am guessing GTK apps.
The idea that I need to have window decorations and the “GTK window decorations” configured separately is just …
Anyway, the point is it’s never going to be consumer friendly. Office systems managed by IT teams can switch to Linux no problem. People just complain about “weird work computer setup” and move on. But personal laptops aren’t going to be an attractive proposition.
> The idea that I need to have window decorations and the “GTK window decorations” configured separately is just …
Yah, well, I'm on Plasma/KDE and that idea enables me to close apps by throwing my mouse on the right top corner and clicking on that [X] there.
After having disabled the titlebar in FF itself once in "Customize Toolbar". It's the leftmost box on the underside, just uncheck it.
Not even in the settings Plasma/KDE has for that, too. There only "maximize" is activated.
It is interesting how Linux and FOSS in general is just providing a better UX these days. I have to think its because without profit motives, people do things for passion and maybe that leads people to write code the right way instead of the "it works" way.
I use KDE on Bazzite. It has a couple killer UI features over Windows. It can label bluetooth devices (so I can have blue dualsense controller, pink dualsense controller, white dualsense controller, etc.). No clue why this doesn't work in Windows lol. Also the super/win + arrow keys are more predictable, super pgdn is minimize and super pgup is maximize, so I never find myself accidentally minimizing windows when trying to move them to a corner. My wife was able to easily install and play the Sims with all her mods as well. I also use Bazzite specifically because it's atomic - so when I make the mistake of giving into temptation and updating shit once every month or so, if it's broken I can just revert it.
But I will say I've had a ton of failure to wake up from power saving issues (resolved by just disabling pretty much every power saving feature, which I was gonna eventually do anyway because I want to be able to remote into the machine), and VLC can cause the UI to lock up because of some XWayland nonsense that they're still trying to fix (I just use Haruna, KDE's default mpv-based player, and it's mostly fine). It's a little silly and was quite frustrating that Linux is still dealing with this shit. A more minor (but still irritating) issue is that each taskbar has its own set of pinned applications (instead of just being identical like in Win10/Win11), so if I change the order on one I need to manually go change it on the others.
Overall, I like it because it's good for development and creating other stuff, the filesystem is fast as fuck (way better than WSL) it's obviously less actively antagonistic than Windows 11, Photoshop has gotten worse so I've switched to Krita which works great in KDE, and I've not been surprised negatively by anything after dealing with the previous paragraph's issues, but a non-technical user might struggle to deal with maintaining it.
> Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE.
Not an option if you have to deal with iOS ecosystem of crapps.
> Use Linux/KDE.
Yep. I, too, get more productive by spending a PhD worth of effort on choosing a window manager.
Man, I should get a PhD if it's that little effort.
Sure, you can drive yourself nuts picking a window manager, but that's for the hardcore nerds who want to optimize everything about their WM. For a different example of the same pattern of behavior, here is the BITOG forums: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/
Thousands of pages and millions of words dedicated to choosing precisely the right oil for a specific motor. Does any normal person need to do this much research into what oil to use in their car? No, but if you want to optimize you can spend weeks going down a research rabbit hole involving lab tests.
For most people, just buy any oil that isn't the cheapest available. Same goes for window managers. I've never got into optimizing or customizing them, but for any mainstream distro the default will be absolutely OK. You can definitely invest thousands of hours into customizing and tweaking a WM, but you could also spend that time customizing emacs and making that your 'WM".
I've never understood why people present selecting a desktop environment/window manager as this huge hurdle. Just go with the default for your distro, if you want to get super nerdy you can change it but most people won't need to.
It's really not that bad. KDE is perfectly usable by default. More so than the only options you get on macOS or Windows. And, if you are so inclined, you can spend that extra effort to make it sing just to you. So, the hyperbole here is really not warranted.
Ironically enough I find KDE to be useless these days.
I kind of settled towards e. g. fluxbox or icewm. Mostly because I don't want to spend too much time configuring anything and these are faster than KDE at all times. Plus, KDE goes into the systemd-dependency and "no more xorg" anyway under Nate-lets-add-more-donation-daemons-Graham. Oldschool KDE was not as opinionated.
IceWM i can understand. Fluxbox not so much, because always unstable in whichever option, with the ability to take the whole X-Session down, or crash the whole system.
That aside, how are they 'faster'? On some obsolete system with outdated graphics system maybe? On current systems with somewhat mature, but not bitrotten drivers it feels like the opposite of that. Memory usage maybe? Not really when you're mostly using apps which are pulling in the equivalent dependencies anyways, multiple times. If you like Oldschool KDE just use https://trinitydesktop.org/ ? It feels like it flies at first, but then the thing about pulling in the equivalent dependencies anyways comes into play again.
So why, when you can lightly breeze the shit out of modern Plasma/KDE anyways?