Fair points but I still think there’s one “desktop” project they host that should not only be supported and get fundings, but be one of their top priorities: Servo.

I think it’s crucial not only for the Linux desktop but for the future of the open web. It’s has the potential to be a great web renderer engine (it’s built atop Rust) and, with good support and development, in the middle-long haul it could be a serious, community-driven alternative to the hegemony of Chrome/Chromium.

After Mozilla ditched it due to the abhorrent administration they had, it went to The Linux Foundation. Afaik there’s no more paid people working on it nor working on it full time as it was when it was under Mozilla. With its enormous funding it’s insane that Servo has to look out for its own fundings.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and though I’m not a fan of GNOME since 2008 (I guess you can check my recent comments…) I concede you can see the (visual) direction they’re trying to follow with Adwaita UI and trying to make it cohesive and coherent. Something I wish other DEs did that religiously, like Xfce, Enlightenment, even KDE itself, LXQt or you-name-it.

Still I think the problem with Adwaita is not that it’s ugly or something (I’d say more that it is highly opinionated, as it has become the full GNOME experience - either you like it as it is and it fits you like a glove, or you have to use something else because there’s no point in between), but a couple things even worse than that - (1) the serious issues it has brought to accessibility, i.e. not being able to tell with full certainty what is a button and what it is not in a toolbar, and (2) doing awful things in usability and UX for the sake of “convergence”. Like putting the primary action (“open” or “save” buttons) of dialogs in the exact same spot where you’d find the close button in every else window. Why is that? Yes, because “convergence”. On desktop.

All in all the hate towards Adwaita could be that it’s allegedly a visible symptom of how GNOME has so much power over GTK that Xfce and co are doing black magic trying to get rid of it for their development. I’ve just read rumors so don’t quote me on this, but I’d believe it can be true.

Coming up: systemd-antivirusd

Kinda rich dissing KDE for its “unstability” and putting GNOME as its paradigm, the very DE well known to break every major version.

Sometimes this kind of posts/“content” make me feel like I must be the only person in the world who hasn’t had major issues with KDE and it’s been absolutely flawless lately, specially since 5 - but I then realize people without issues don’t complain. It’s the people who have issues with something that make the noise and make it a very big deal (and I’d argue most cases are of the PEBCAK type).

If the need is for something simple and stable I’d shoot for something like Xfce - but putting GNOME as the example of “stability” is nothing but laughable.

I’m just curious about what software was used to make this image.

As any person that lives under a rock I barely blinked and everyone was using streaming services while I kept half of my hard drive full of pirated mp3 and never got to understand why people fell for that trap. I really like MPD, though when it goes yolo it’s a pain in the butt to re-configure it.

I used ncmpcpp for like 10 years (or even more, but I can’t recall) but only a couple years ago re-discovered ncmpc and liked its minimalism (compared to ncmpcpp, that is). Even wrote a couple stupid patches to change the default progress bar.

But a few weeks ago learned about mmtc. Which is written in rust.

I didn’t have rust installed and the 12 GB of RAM weren’t enough to compile rust in my Gentoo box so I used this as an excuse to buy more RAM. And then compiled rust and it took a bit more of an hour so I could use this shiny “new” MPD player. Only to discover its so minimal it doesn’t have an database update function - the author literally says you have to set a key combination to call mpc to do so.

It felt like it had a bit of sensationalism, which alas is not uncommon in today’s journalism, but can it be too much that a major newspaper like the NYT covering this story can bring indirect attention to the problem of hugely underpaid/no paid people working on (and mantaining) critical FOSS stuff?

KDE prioritizes features and customization over stability and out of the box experience.

I mean, the fact that the very new major release of KDE almost hadn’t added new features and focused on a rather smooth upgrade kinda proves otherwise.

I’m a bit curious about why you have been waiting for it “only” for half a decade, since that feature was gone since 5.0, more than a decade now.

All in all there have been no mention of it coming back whatsoever, and for what I understand they removed it because the code behind it was causing lots of trouble with Qt5 and was impossible to mantain. And they’ve stated they won’t be reviving this feature.

Not sure if you’re still following Luwx/Lightly, but there’s a fork of it - boehs/Lightly (though for what I’ve seen the changes it has had have been imperceptible).