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I have an old box running Gnome on Ubuntu. I did a massive update hoping they finally fixed some of my gripes with it.
still no right click -> create text file in the file browser
Welp, I’ll update again in two years
KDE forever. I don’t understand anyone who still uses Gnome.
without features that few people are going to use
Every KDE user has shaken the mouse once just to see how big it gets, this is a critical feature!
yeah, I have a 65" TV connected and it gets comically large. I wouldn’t be nearly as productive without it.
I knew the cursor got bigger but I didn’t know it would keep growing.
It all depends on the stimulation.
if your cursor enlarges for over 4 hours please see a doctor
That way they can admire it too
It jumps up quickly to a bigger size and then keeps increasing more slowly if you keep shaking it.
I’ve never even tried this, but now I’m gonna have to give it a whirl.
Super useful for if, like myself, you lose track of your cursor quite often.
“He can’t see us if we don’t move.”
Except that I usually AM moving it…just sometimes ADHD brain goes:
OMFG! WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE!
And then I have no idea where the cursor is even when I’m moving it. I had no idea about the cursor enlargement effect until one day my mouse ran out of battery and wasn’t waking up fast enough, so I was clicking and moving it back and forth really fast…got a bit of a fright when it suddenly got several times larger.
I’d honestly would expect to have a mouse locator. I think on Windows that was the alt key or something like that.
My setup doesn’t have anything like that, but I also see roughly where the mouse is since my tilingmanager gives focus to the window the cursor is over
Doesn’t work for me in KDE anymore???
Edit:
It stopped working because I switched back to X11, it only works in Wayland, but I had to switch back, I think it was because some hot keys don’t work and can’t be configured under Wayland. Or at least couldn’t when I configured my system about a year ago.The secret reason Wayland is superior.
Unfortunately I had to switch back to X11 because Plasma on Wayland lacked a feature I need.
Well, now X11 lacks a feature you want…
At last we found a killer feature for its users!
Now that I think about it, I should shake the cursor in KDE more.
Beeeg
I use it probably ten times a day!
That was the thing I texted my friends about when I started using KDE. 😄 I loved it, perfect self-affording feature.
I sometimes do it at work out of boredom
I did it often until i learned it crashes some games :(
I tried KDE once (normally a GNOME user) and I couldn’t stop shaking the mouse to see how absurdly large I could make it. 😂
Yeah, I had not realized it was growing and growing further. I just played with it. It got huge.
Now there’s no coming back. If you take away that feature, be ready for WAR!
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
If KDE ran a restaurant, if you shake the menu it’ll grow exponentially in size until it fills the restaurant.The gnome type of restaurant is called prix fixe, and it very much exists.
That type of restaurant tends to be among the best in the world.
Which makes sense. If each day you offer one choice you can make that one really good.
But for someone who doesn’t like that specific food it doesn’t work. They’d prefer having different options.
Kind of similar with gnome and KDE.
The difference is, most people go to a restaurant to eat food, so the restaurant can get really good at making food that humans eat.
People use a computer system to do all kinds of things. It is a lot harder to make one choice that will please everybody.
Yes, and 99.9% of the meals you eat in your life will not be there. Because it is either prohibitively expensive and elitist gourmet BS. Or it is trivially easy to offer some choice when it is not elitist gourmet BS.
Even at a more mundane restaurant, only having one meal for each course to worry about drastically simplifies life for the entire back line, plus it makes life easier for the chef or whoever does the ordering as well.
Even low fixed price day-menu restaurants in my town offer some basic choice or variation. People have food limitations and preferences.
I’ve been to a restaurant in Korea where you pay per person and they just serve you one main dish (you have no choice) and like 8 unlimited side dishes
It was about $5 and you had a choice of topping up or not. It was great, actually
Cool, having choices is great, like you get to choose the side dishes and the toppings. That sounds awesome.
So then don’t go to a prix fixe restaurant or check the menu beforehand. There’s no need to be this bitchy about it.
But I do go there. And when I tell them I don’t eat mayonnaise due to health concers they understand and offer an accommodation. The waiter most definitely doesn’t berate me or scuff at me. Nor do they refuse my patronage.
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
And if you want to add salt and pepper to your meal, there’s a convenient store across the street that sells salt and pepper shakers. No, the Gnome restaurant will not be providing them.
I’m a GNOME user and extensions are pretty easy to install. I use the wiggly extension for the mouse shake to grow thing, but unfortunately it has a maximum size of 256 which is plenty big enough to find it but you can’t shake it forever until it grows bigger than the screen. GNOME 0 KDE 1 🥲
People hate on Gnome but I think it’s actually great UI. Lots of hardcore Linux users shit on the windows UI but insist that Windows 7 UI clones are somehow peak UX. Gnome is more similar to Mac, but I find even easier to use. The super key is money on Gnome.
Yeah I tried KDE for a while, people talked about how customisable it is that you can do anything. But I never found a way to recreate that super key experience.
And those extensions are easily borked due to some random update. Because reasons. Been there done that. Still waiting for my “Gnome Borked My Favorite Extension” tee shirt.
The Gnome waiter just stares in shock and confusion when you mention that you have nut allergy
Are you implying GNOME is the ableist desktop environment? It might be even though it has lots of accessibility features.
Implication or not. GNOME is hit or miss with accessibility features. They’ve done some stuff, but they could still do more at no particular greater cost to them other than a shift in attitude. Which…you know… GNOME.
The massive cursor during shake is literally what sold two of my friends on Garuda getting them off Windows 😂 idk why I guess the wimsy factor is difficult to account for.
The cube thing from compiz had a similar effect back in the earlier years of Ubuntu.
Compiz was insanely cool, it was better than anything we have today.
I use burn my windows and desktop cube with Gnome extensions. Kwin still supports many of these effects too. It’s fun to see people’s reaction.
Some of the effects have become mainstream. But there is no comparison to the real Compiz feel.
For instance the original Emerald windows dresser was amazing, and zooming with the scroll wheel combined with for instance the left win key was extremely useful. The smoothness and configurability of the cube was crazy cool.What is available today is hollow shells of what we had.
Yes I use wobbly windows in KDE, but Compiz is 100x > Plasma.Writing fire on the desktop and window animations like burn up on exit were also awesome.
KDE cube always feels like watching a b-movie version starwars. Nailed the wobbly windows though.
Compiz and cairo-dock is peak nostalgic linux for me. Tux surfing around the dock and all.
Oh boy I’m getting all nostalgic, it’s 20 years ago it came out now!
Yeah, Compiz and Emerald were the goat!
We still have Compiz today, you can still run it.
Thanks and yes I know.
But AFAIK it was mostly limited to Ubuntu Unity and XFCE for a long time, and support became shaky.
I actually looked it up just before, and it seems Mint has support for it, but looking at the emerald themes it looks nothing like it did back in the day where it was new and revolutionizing. Also I’m lazy, I don’t care to fiddle so much with my computer anymore.
Compiz was Da Bomba! But I still get my Cube and exploding windows in KDE
Unfortunately KDE still has serious shortcomings compared to what was possible with Compiz.
For instance hot keys cannot be bound to mouse keys. Which is extremely annoying here 20 years later that it can’t.
Until recently you couldn’t even bind them to numpad keys! Because QT didn’t support it. So it was the same for ALL QT programs.
I like KDE it is a decent desktop, but even today it is not as good as Compiz was 20 years ago.
Yeah, I love just shaking the mouse when I’m bored or waiting for something to finish downloading.
Sometimes I jiggle the mouse just to see how big I can make it
Well, my first thought was also “I need to try it” so they are not alone
I have the pipes screensaver and space cadet pinball (I use Arch btw)
Wait until they find it you can make the windows wiggle when you shake them.
I discovered this when configuring a new machine the other day, great fun and I was sad to disable it when I discovered it made moving and resizing windows much more fiddly :'(
Always the first thing I enable.
GNOME’s design philosophy is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”.
KDE’s is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature… but it would be really cool, fuck it, we
ballcube”.fuck it, we
ballcubeThis is KDE we’re talking about, so it would definitely be “fuck it, we kube”.
Klitoris
Kdefile
Can there even be life without the lovely and amazing Kube? It would certainly not be worth living.
“we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”
How? Trust me bro! Users hate features, they get all confused and stuff. That’s why nobody should ever choose anything, the OS should just be shit forever. We also get paid by Microsoft and IBM coincidentally.
We also get paid by Microsoft and IBM coincidentally.
Microsoft and IBM both donate to the Linux Foundation itself. They are both platinum members who regularly give them funds for all kinds of projects. This is really idiotic gotcha attempt.
A donation isn’t quite the same as pay (as in salary)! I’m thinking of Miguel de Icaza and Lennart Poettering, for example.
Is GNOME Microsoft’s controlled opposition?
Well who needs systrays anyways? While we’re at it, let’s remove theming support too! Surely nobody would miss that feature?
I really miss KDE. Sadly my experience with new major versions (5, 6) tends to be that plasma is unstable for daily use for at least a year or two. I’ll be back once things settle down a bit.
Plasma 6 has been nothing but great for me! Not a single crash ever since it released. It’s nothing like the beginning of Plasma 5
Sadly my problems are with buggy applications, and hdr (more of a monitor issue than plasma itself). I’m hoping these get patched as more people yell at bad wayland support and poorly implemented hdr.
Somehow, under GNOME things “just work”. Or at least it doesn’t take down the entire session.
“It implements client-side decorations, or it gets the hose again!”
I will update as soon as I have found my cursor on my 4k screen.
Don’t quote me on this but I think it’s somewhere to the right side of the screen. Somewhere in the chat window I think.
Kde’s mouse growing big is actually useful though.
Ever lose your mouse? Just a wiggle- which is an action I take anyway to find it- and it gets easier to find, for a moment.
Lets me make the mouse tiny.
Yes, and the low-resolution pointer when you do this excessively is just unacceptable. I’m glad they’re finally addressing this pressing concern.
The just added a high res image or whatever rather than scaling it up. Someone probably fixed it in their spare time.
What? Why isn’t it just a vector graphic?
Because it uses the XCursor format, which is a quite old standard. Getting apps to switch to a newer standard that has vector graphics is already hard enough. Getting them to do so without burning your GPU is basically impossible.
No it doesn’t it just uses metadata compatible with XCursor themes, see e.g. this discussion.
The fix was needed because the render code just used to have a maxScale: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/9176
You have to re-render vector graphics when you zoom in. Otherwise they have the same pixels stored in memory as when they were first opened.
You are always viewing a bitmap image because you have a bitmap display and it makes sense they don’t load a full size cursor into memory to get rendered.
I’d be curious as to if they’ve rendered a full size image to sit in memory, or re-render the vector image directly as it grows.
Given the way games work re-rendering would be trivial for any computer running KDE so I’d take that bet.
They re-render it, but that used to be capped with a max size: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/9176
Theoretically speaking, you could draw directly from vector data instead of generating a texture as an intermediate step. Or you could use a signed distance field to sample from instead of a regular bitmap.
Would it be absolutely bonkers and utterly incompatible with any legacy software? Suuure, but you would get a perfectly crisp cursor after all that wiggling.
I would assume they replaced it with an SVG that is rasterized on demand instead of a very high resolution rasterized image.
In terms of coding effort, just replacing a PNG is the easiest, but it’s also the least correct solution, imo.
I went and read the commit descriptions.
Previously it was using whatever cursor the theme had loaded and just scaled it up. Now it references the full set of resources for the theme and picks the appropriate one for the size.
So they went with the most correct third option: defer to the standard set by a more authoritative source. :)
Perfect. Thanks for being curious enough to actually look 😜
That’s coincidentally also what I do when I can’t find my dick
KDE - We added a neat accessibility feature.
Gnome - THIS GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR AND ANYONE ASKING FOR IT SHOULD FEEL BAD!
I turned it off. I never need it or want it. But I won’t hate anyone else who uses it like gnome devs do.
It’s also a nice time waster to try and see how big you can get it before whatever it is you’re waiting for is done
I don’t need this feature even a little bit.
In lieu of this, I have consistently used this feature at least twice a week ever since I found it by accident. It adds a little joy to my day.
I think it’s more “I found a thing that’s technically wrong and fixed it” and that shit pays dividends down the road when technology changes and people forget this was ever an issue. They solved it now so they don’t have to solve it later.
Oh my gosh finally! I can enjoy the vector experience! I’ve always felt this was missing from KDE. I would show my friends all the benefits of Linux, but when I showed them by wasting approximately 1-2 minutes, you could embiggen your mouse cursor to absurd proportions, their eyes lit up unlike anything before. They wanted it the moment they knew the potential of infinite cursor sizing.
But I often made the amateur mistake of embiggening a few pixels too far and their delight would rapidly plunge into disappointment as they came to the realization that it was simply scaling up a raster render of the cursor in a lazy post-processed Easter egg.
They all leave the room in a huff, sending my attempts to reach out directly to voicemail, unanswered. But this. This will change everything. Thank you KDE. This is what we had all been waiting for.
Yeah, I’m sure the KDE Foundation spent this year’s entire budget on this, and it wasn’t just a fun little side project for one of the many volunteers who keep open source going.
Oh, I love KDE. It’s my daily and I have used about a dozen DEs over the past. I just wanted to have some fun with creative writing.
I really love this feature, it gives me something to do while waiting for pages to load in Firefox.
When I connect to my living room TV, I can have a cursor over three feet tall.
My daughter holds the current household record by getting the cursor size so big that the whole screen is blank.
Blank screen from cursor shake goes hard.
Often times when there was a big new update for GNOME, I’d try it out, decide I still don’t like the concept and go back to plasma.
I don’t get the appeal of that desktop. Even the tiniest changes need gnome-tweaks? Why isn’t that stuff part of the base settings? But ok. You can’t ungimp GNOME. The usage concept is baked into it. Fine. But why?
I mean there must be people who want this and nothing else, otherwise people wouldn’t use it.
For me it kinda always went something like this:
“Hey can I have window labels on my taskbar? And maybe quicklaunch. Also can I type in paths in the file manager?”
KDE: “Sure no prob.”
GNOME: “You are an enemy of Christ.”
I don’t really like to talk about it on here because people are very hostile towards GNOME and its users, but I used it (extensionless, tweakless) for about 4 years up until recently. Very comfy and efficient workflow in my opinion. I think a lot of people don’t take the time to understand how it works, they get frustrated and want their alt-tabbing and minimizing back. Either way I don’t really care. No emotional attachment to any DE, and I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.
I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.
What do you use currently? I’ve been using GNOME for a few years now, but I like to try new things (then switch back to GNOME, naturally.)
Currently using niri. It’s not easy to explain, but you could say it takes GNOME’s concept of infinite horizontal workspaces and applies it to individual windows.
That’s one I’ve been meaning to try out. Do you use Niri with Noctalia or some other Quick Shell implementation with it? I’ve been looking at Noctalia and DMS.
Yeah, I briefly tried out Noctalia, Caelestia and DMS and chose DMS. They all feel a bit too bloated for me, but on this PC I can’t be bothered to setup all the utilities manually. It has worked just fine but I can unfortunately feel the QT framework.
Because putting QoL improvements and having an effective workflow behind a bunch of plugins that break on the tiniest Gnome update is all part of the user experience I guess. I’ve given it several tries over the past 20 years or so, but each attempt eventually ended in utter disappointment.
I don’t believe you. Gnome 2 was pretty much universally loved (hence the existence of Cinnamon, which is a direct descendant), and people were pissed about the tablet-oriented Gnome 3. You’d know this if you used Gnome 20 years ago.
Well, my apologies for misremembering the exact Gnome 3 launch date. Turns out that was 15 years ago instead of 20. You caught me red-handed sir.
As KDE user, Gnome 2 was the best Gnome has ever been, (Cinnamon is a good offspring of it though). I used the carp out of it. I cried and drank myself to sleep for days after Gnome 3 replaced it.
I have even bigger hopes for COSMIC. If DE any can run a black sword through Gnome 3, it will be COSMIC.
I used gnome then, when Ubuntu would send you free CDs and GNOME was poo-flavoured. It was harder to set things up then, and I kind of see why people gave up and used some hack of the windowing kit from GIMP. Much has happened it 20 years though. KDE got worse (imho, but we have Trinity), GNOME stayed worse, and Linux became easy and mainstream.
I guess I’m one of the few people who matches gnome pretty well. I actually appreciate that the default is 90% of what I need, and don’t mind if the last 10% is maintained outside of the core project. Scope creep and all that.
You don’t even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed “Other locations” where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don’t give an easy “you got 10 gigs left mate.” I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.
GNOME used to be good until version 2. Then the developers went insane and all subsequent versions of GNOME feel like they’ve been designed by someone who has never worked in his life.
My conspiracy theory is that it is pushed so much by Red Hat because they have optimized it to be as boring and distraction free as possible to increase productivity in an enterprise context. It is useless outside of that.
That’s what I like about it. I use my computer to use applications and it gets out of the way.
Not that I don’t understand this in general, I just find it harder to actually do normal computer stuff I do. No dock, very little info in the top taskbar. That’s why I said an enterprise context specifically. You’ll usually open an app or two and leave it at that, maybe occasionally switch desktops to go to your second of 2 apps. Anything more than that is actively a pain. And why not ALLOW changes that don’t rely on plugins? That’s what really gets me. Maybe the devs believe in the maximizing of space, but then just auto hide the dock by default like macOS or even just turn it off by default instead of not even including it? That’s the part that gets to me. And it is sure not using that lack of features to optimize responsiveness or lower storage size. It’s the most thicc DE out there.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
For me the info I want is behind the Super key. Show open apps? Super. Show the dock? Super. Search? Super. Mostly I use the dock for occasionally opening the Apps menu or the System Menu to connect something Bluetooth or change network settings. I agree it could go, but then any casual users might get lost looking at an entirely blank screen.
GNOME is very opinionated about the desktop design, which maybe explains the plugin situation, why they were the first(?) to drop X11 etc. And there’s always KDE, XFCE and others.
kde plasma does not get in your way, though
I didnt try KDE and only used GNOME and XFCE, but i guess it’s easy and clean side. I immediately get a hold of most applications, and everything feels polished without touching anything. And when i want to get something specific, i’m generally fine with complex tweakings, so the weird ways of finetuning it don’t really bother me.
I mean there must be people who want this and nothing else,
Honestly I am on gnome, because I do not know shit about linux. I did not even know what gnome or plasma were, when I started, barely still understand the difference even now. I just picked some distros that were recommended for a total noob coming from windows, and stuck with the one I liked the best.
I like GNOME’s workflow, more importantly it breaks less often than KDE does for me. My fiance’s computer uses KDE because it has a more Windows-like UI, it’s also the one that runs into weird graphical glitches and issues.
Examples, we plugged the new TV into it to watch something recently, since then the lock screen started glitching the fuck out having two different clocks flickering overtop of each other, even back on the original monitors.
New headphones didn’t work right away because it had defaulted to an incompatible audio stream, changing it was buried under three different menus… we knew it wasn’t the headphones because they worked fine with my computer, using GNOME. I’ve never had to dig through settings like that to use headphones with any other OS or desktop environment, but I did with KDE.
From the sheer amount of people that recommend KDE I have to assume that for most people it works, and that’s great. My experience is that it’s buggy and fiddly to use, GNOME for me is not. It’s what I use on my main computer so that I don’t have to troubleshoot stupid shit when I get off work. I like the less cluttered UI and the multi-desktop focused layout, plus it feels WAY more polished than KDE which has always felt jank to me.
As someone who’s eye sight is getting worse, I really love this KDE Plasma feature.
Dude, everyone I show this too loves this feature. It’s such a simple solution to an ongoing issue.
Back when I used Windows, many years ago, I used to have the setting that drew a ring around the cursor when you pressed ctrl. It was annoying when you used ctrl for anything else, and it was also visually ugly. You also had to remember about it when you lost the mouse, which is more difficult than it sounds like.
Needless to say, I love this feature from KDE. Not only is it way more intuitive to use and more unlikely to accidentally happen, but it also looks way better. And the fact that it keeps growing indefinitely is such a nice and fun addition.
Dang you know what I miss? Mouse trails. I used to enable that on every machine I touched and it would annoy my dad. 😂
You can add WindTrail to KDE if you want it. But you need to add it, it’s not a stock choice.
WOO! I’ll look into it! Pointless? Probably. Nostalgic? Yes!
Edit: Ah so it doesn’t leave a trail of repeating cursors… But this is COOL! Thanks for sharing it!
Windows PowerToys still offers this feature, and the shortcut can be remapped and disabled.
I think I’ve got it set to triple Ctrl on my work laptop? Really helps reduce the accidental triggers.
As an aside - I’m still trying to find a similar solution to FancyZones for CachyOS, don’t suppose you have any suggestions?
I’m not sure what fancy zones is, some kind of manual tiling as far as 10 seconds of search shown? That is available in kde by default, you can change layout by pressing win+t, then when pressing shift and dragging a window it will highlite nearest tile and tile automatically.
My understanding was that tiling doesn’t allow overlapping windows, is that not the case?
I am a complete novice at this, to be honest.
Both kwin built-in tiling and most tiling wms include ability to make a window floating while other windows are tiled. Difference is in how window manager behaves by default, most popular environments float by default with ability to tile when needed. Tiling wms tile by default with ability to float when needed.
As I’ve said in previous post you can try kwin tiling without any long configurations, there is a default layout so you can just drag a window with shift pressed and there would be highlighted area where it would tile.
♥️
This looks very promising, will check it out when I get home tomorrow night!
You might be able to do all the stuff you use fancy zones for using a tiling plugin or wm. I prefer Niri but the downside is all the tiling wms I’ve tried require you to setup zones in text files which can be a bit confusing and intimidating the first time.
yeah, I mean, I only have 2 monitors, but since I use the sway window manager, I have it configured to automatically highlight the window that my cursor is under, so it kind of supersedes the need for a cursor locator. And all but my active window are set to dim as well, makes finding where I’m at much easier.
I feel like it could easily be explained in a tutorial or something I completely ignored, found out about it by sitting a mouse on corner of glass desk.
Calling Gnome simple and straightforward is quite a funny joke actually
But ar least it’s without features that
fewpeople are going to use, so there’s that.
KDE remains the superior choice.
