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Plasma 6.4 review - A worrying trend
Quoting: Plasma 6.4 review - A worrying trend —
Wayland aside, which is going to be a disaster and neuter the Linux desktop, the testing made me sad. Mostly because Plasma 6.4 brings in several Windows-like and Gnome-like features that have no place on a reasonably designed DESKTOP. Touchesque stuff that requires more mouse clicks. Very sad. Now, I love KDE, I love Plasma, and I think the KDE team is doing a lot of great, sensible things, and their desktop environment is lightyears ahead of everything else out there. So why ruin it by mimicking cheap competition? This is like what Mozilla did with Firefox by aping Chrome. That does not translate into market share. On the contrary, it makes your product worse.
I hope there will be a reversal of decisions, and more focus on pure desktopness of the desktop. But the arbitrary focus on Wayland, for me, feels like an indicator of things to come. Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic, but hey, Plasma 6 is being "marketed" with Wayland as one entity. This worries and annoys me. And since Wayland makes desktop usage "simple" and flawed and less optimal, it's quite possible that the bundling of this inferior technology will infect Plasma and make it into a less good desktop. Almost definitely so. Just imagine all the energy the KDE team wasted in Wayland being redirected to improving other, meaningful things.
The same goes for the pseudo-atomicity thingie. That can only work if there's a super-100% reliable upstream store, which neither the Snap Store not Flathub are, nor can ever be if they ever allow any sort of community contribution, which they have to, otherwise, they may as well become commercial-only stores. And I know I definitely don't want randomly packaged almost-real but-not-real results showing in my desktop, bypassing all security safeguards that exist in the distro world. I don't have infinite bandwidth either, and I have no desire to run a crippled Chromebook. If I wanted that, I could buy one. I don't want to.