• Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    I haven’t used Gnome in ages, but I’ve loved KDE. I don’t know what you mean by “actually using screen real estate correctly”. Where does KDE go wrong? Are you just saying things are too large? If so, I disagree, but I’ve customized it to make things take up much less space. Yeah, the default isn’t great, but it’s far easier to customize than I remember Gnome being.

    • [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      I think this is a matter of taste

      I like gnomes toolbars, and I like macOS’s UI. Gnome mimics macOS a lot. A menu/title bar in gnome can have buttons, search boxes, really most types of control, which I think results in richer apps.

      KDE mimics classic windows UI, and I find the toolbar and title bar layouts are not what I like. Overall I just find KDE has a lot of empty space on its windows, and it’s fairly constrained in what kinds of buttons can go into the menu bars.

      I think many people like KDE because the title bar is just title and close buttons. I find that a waste of useful screen real estate.

      I was being a bit hyperbolic, but I don’t like the feel of it at all.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        You can set KDE to Mac style title bars also. I’m pretty sure it comes with a theme with that by default. You can also add many buttons and controls to it, like minimize/maximize, keep on top/below, and things like that. No search option though, as far as I’m aware. I’m not sure how that functions though. Does that mean a “find in page” style control? Surely searching doesn’t work the same for all applications, right?

        I think the thing is that Gnome is pretty opinionated. If you like that opinion then it’s great. If you don’t then too bad. KDE is the opposite. It usually comes with Windows style themes, but it does not have a strong opinion. You can make it like Mac, or whatever you want it to be. There are a ton of options to customize it.

        • [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          17 hours ago

          Wait what?

          I will try that. I begrudgingly use KDE because it works the best. I’ve seen a bunch of macOS skins and that’s not the problem for me.

          If I can get super key to work like macOS I’ll be very happy

          • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2·
            6 hours ago

            I honestly have no idea how the super key works on Mac, so I can’t say if you can. I think it’s probably likely, but I don’t know what it does.

            • [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              5 hours ago

              Superficially command (super) on Mac OS acts like like control on Windows and Linux, but command is semantically the modifier for entering shortcuts and has no overlapping functions, where alt and control on windows and linux both serve multiple conflicting roles.

              On Windows the super key is reserved for doing OS things, Linux desktops follow the convention. At some point apple added the globe key which does OS level things, but it’s poorly thought out and hard to reach, I pretty much only use it open the emoji picker.

              What I like about Mac OS keyboard:

              • Basically all hot keys are command plus something. It’s the same across apps. That frees up ctrl and alt and shift for other uses
              • The lineage just goes much better with terminals because shortcuts do not overlap with terminal input codes. There is the alt/meta key situation, which does affect terminals, but I haven’t really ran into this as an issue in like 10 years or more. I run into ctrl+c overlapping kill on linux every session.
              • Having more modifiers allows richer interactions with the same keyboard mnemonic. Undo is cmd+z, redo is cmd+shift+z (instead of ctrl+Y). But a lot more is build on this, for example close tab (cmd+W) -> close window (cmd+shift+W) -> close all windows (cmd+shift+alt+W) -> close group (cmd+alt+W). So semantically, close all windows is close all groups. This is way easier to remember for me.
              • Text input has a lot of nice affordances. It includes classic unix codes (ctrl+a goes to start of line, ctrl+e end of line), plus it has some nice motions (alt+left/right move cursor by words, up/down by paragraphs).
              • I find many windows shortcuts like switching browser tabs a lot harder to use than Mac OS equivalents (cmd+[ tab left, cmd+] tab right, vs ctrl+tab ctrl+shift+tab).
              • Not a keyboard thing, but in any app on mac OS if you forget a hotkey, press cmd+shift+/ and it brings up the help menu, and you can just type the function you want and call it directly. It shows you a help overlay, but it’s actually a superpower.
              • There are no alt codes, there’s no scroll lock, no num lock. I find removing statefulness from the keyboard a lot easier to reason about and work with

              I would love a Linux desktop that worked like this, and it’s probably possible, but you’d have to modify everything.

              I can see the value of windows/super as the OS modifier key, but it means you have to kind of context switch and I feel like it locks up a lot of potential application shortcuts.

              • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Yeah, KDE lets you modify just about every hotkey, so it’s probably possible to do what you’d want, but it’d be a pain in the ass. There’s a chance someone has already done this work though. It might be worth looking into for you.