> Sorry for the snarky comment but that you can clearly see the promoted KRunner search box flickering and reflowing in the promotional video is exemplary for the quality differences between mac, windows and linux desktop environments.
You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-)
I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs:
- opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser.
- keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text.
Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box.
Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing.
KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.
You are right that all desktop environments have their issues and sure open source gives you more freedom. But:
1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app
2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined. Visual states like this [1] should not appear. If they are inside a promotional video I assume that some people have seen it happening and either did not care or it is very hard to fix because the issue is rooted deeply in the system. Maybe I overreact but I stumble across glitches like this all the time I try to use linux on the desktop.
> 1. on mac os you can press cmd+backtick to cycle through the windows of the current app
I'm fully aware, it is just so utterly inefficient for my workflows and my head.
With alt-tab it is back-to-the-last-thing I worked on, I don't even think. On Mac it is: was-the-last-thing-I-worked-on-another-app-or-another-document-it-was-another-etc
This can happen hundreds of times in a day, costs up to a few seconds at a time and more importantly it is insanely annoying when you know how snooth it can be.
And to rub it in: Gnome 3 has something similar to Mac but you can disable it if you are a keyboard person like me.
KDE is like Windows but can be configured however you like it.
> 2. except for some exceptions keyboard shortcuts are pretty unified across all apps on mac os and can even be configured in a single global place
Good thing they fixed that since 2012.
> 3. from my biased point of view of being a software developer myself: If I see a file chooser modal component that locks all interaction then I see a wrong choice in a UI component that does not fit the usecase. But if I see a rendering glitch of a component in a promotional video, it looks to me as if the whole state space of the component or even of the GUI stack is ill defined.
From my perspective: if a file chooser can block all other windows and I know people keep talking about the separation between apps and windows on that particular OS I conclude that they messed up that particular one.
When I see rendering glitches on an open source project (I rarely see them, but thats maybe just me) I conclude that they haven't had time to fix it yet and probably the graphics drivers they have to build on aren't as polished as those on other OSes.
But back to my conclusion: I'm happy all OSes and DEs exist. Some people honestly prefer every one of them for different reasons.
I'm just so tired of people pretending KDE is kind of subpar because it doesn't excel in all areas at once.
You don't need to be sorry, just give me slme freedom when I answer, I'm not tryingnto be snarky but to explain something extremely important :-)
I used Mac for three years. In my opinion it had some extremely weird behavior by default (CMD-tab couldn't switch between instances and to make matters worse there is no configuration option or tool you can use to get sane behaviour.) And bugs:
- opening a dialog in one browser window would lock all windows from that browser. Good luck looking up the documentation for where the files you are supposed to upload are without either closing the upload dialog or opening a different browser.
- keyboard shortcuts vary wildly between apps: In one app CMD - Shift - leftarrow selects tobthe start of the line. In Safari however it meant go back. Guess how I still know after 8 years. Yes, filling out forms and losing everything because I wanted to select a lkne of text.
Windows also often used to drive me mad. It is better now but the performance tax when compiling is still 30%! And even their own dotnet applications use 3 seconds to start on their OS vs 127 ms or something in a virtual Linux machine on top if that Windows box.
Crazy bad performance and latency issues and insane keyboard shortcuts are UX problems just as well as flickering and reflowing.
KDE isn't worse. Just different. For some of us it has already been the least annoying option for years already.