Comment by groby_b
4 days ago
> Use Linux/KDE.
Yep. I, too, get more productive by spending a PhD worth of effort on choosing a window manager.
4 days ago
> 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 On some obsolete system with outdated graphics system maybe?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?