Is there a list of good GIMP 3 compatible plugins?

TIL!

But to be honest, that was also pretty much before standardization. I have never seen anyone use Meta for the Alt key.

Wait there wasnt a Windows key since forever?

I never saw the Alt key referred to as anything else than Alt

On MacOS it is option or something

No they are interchangeable

You are talking about global themes which is a bundle of plasmoids (which are executable code), SDDM themes (executable code, they are working on their own login manager to change that) as well as simple files like color schemes, cursor themes, icon themes, splash screens.

I can list random things I noticed

• KDE essential apps are often more powerful, like Gwenview (the only modern FOSS viewer with many edit capabilities) or Okular. Installing them works but the theme may look ugly and it pulls in half of the DE
• some core apps like Spectacle or the powerful search / krunner cannot be used
• no wayland support means you are restricted to ancient insecure technology
• the filemanager is extremely restricting in comparison to dolphin. Like afaik you cannot even add arbitrary folders to the sidebar! They are linked to a “favourites” folder or something, very annoying. I assume it has no filtering either. The date display in list view is pretty ugly by default, maybe that can be changed
• …

I dont use Cinnamon lol, for reasons. Too many family members blindly used it and I hate it.

since I have a terminal at my fingertips

This is not what a DE is for. If you need a terminal, the DE is not good. I also heavily use the terminal but I am talking about a good general use desktop.

weird selection of apps has me lost

They diverge from GNOME for theming or whatever, and either have weird apps for things like PDF viewing preinstalled, or the people that used it preinstalled those.

As it is neither KDE nor GNOME, it kinda uses GNOME apps but not really. Simply a pretty bad situation. On KDE I use a bunch of GNOME apps and thanks to libadwaita they all look and works fine. That is actually an antifeature of KDE apps, but if you are on KDE they are fine XD

comes with stuff installed that you might expect

That always results in opinionated defaults. People seem to get along fine and I still have a vanilla LMDE VM I have not tried.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

Then maybe look it up ;) it is easy to find. Deb packages have way more attack surface than flatpaks, making this even worse. People install spotify as an unrestricted deb package instead of in a sandbox for example. Fucking spotify.

so you can apt or apt-get install

It is a DE for people who literally know nothing about Linux. The GUI store needs sensible defaults and it doesnt really have those currently due to their controversial (and unsafe) decision to hide unverified flatpaks

Basically all XOrg vs. Wayland issues

• no fractional scaling, or if there is, with big performance issues
• no HDR
• no mixed DPI or FPS
• in total very bad multi monitor support (it was hacked in afterwards, not really intended from the ground up)

No idea about VR but I assume it works well on KDE or GNOME (depending on what you mean, people use Meta quest as an external display)

Well that is probably dash to panel. Or does it autohide somehow?

Themes are not a security risk XD executable code, widgets and a lack of standardization resulting in shady install scripts, that is a security risk

Themes are just colors

Edit: after reading the post, the below is not really relevant to the blog post

Interesting one

I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD

Well you havent had a person needing modern display features then XD Gamers would immediately thing Linux sucks. Also XFCE is kinda really bad to use, it is okay but KDE is so much better

KDE is better than Cinnamon, period. Apart from really old hardware (where Cinnamon is faster for some reason), KDE is way less restricting, way more modern and also very intuitive.

Cinnamon works, but is simply worse. Many powerful apps are KDE apps, while Cinnamon is GTK based, so you cannot even install them without loading an entire different graphics framework in RAM.

I get that a Debian->Ubuntu base is the most standard, and Ubuntu does weird stuff. But Mint also does weird stuff, like having a weird selection of apps, filtering flathub and more.

That is a kinda sane order tho

Normally people just install Ubuntu or Linux Mint (because it has Linux in the name or something) and use modded GNOME or some weird niche desktop, thinking this is peak Linux experience.

(Needed to do Mint tech support over the holidays again… yeah it is strange)

Nix

Yes of course, it inputs text.

But gboard is surveillance software, your voice is literally analyzed on their servers.

I did some network logs of gboard, you might be interested XD it basically sends data all the time

Yes of course, it inputs text.

But gboard is surveillance software, your voice is literally analyzed on their servers.

I did some network logs of gboard, you might be interested XD it basically sends data all the time

True, you could use text input and some voice input on the phone, like FUTO voice input

It is fine but requires the complete Kf5 Qt5 bundle (which is end of life) because it is unmaintained. But yes, that is what you would use for now

For the tts part, try PiperTTS it allows to use various models for speaking