Linux: KDE!
I first used KDE a long time ago. I was introduced to Linux by a friend of a friend who was a student at one of the universities, and used their very fat connection to download a very early Slackware CD image and burn it to CD. My first thought, given that I was a rampant software pirate at the time, was that I could duplicate it and sell it to others, but it piqued my interest and after installing it on an old 386 (a very time consuming process), I learned a lot about this system very quickly (being fascinated with UNIX a lot having discovered it in the old council building Dad’s company had bought, and that the council had not properly cleaned out).
Given that we were on 14.4kbaud dialup in a rural area, I stayed on this Slackware version for a long time, but at one of the computer swap meets Dad frequented a lot when I was a kid he found someone selling a newer version, Linux “Mandrake” (at the time just a really low-effort fork of Red Hat) 5.2, which came with KDE.
I actually didn’t much care for KDE at the time, despite being a lot more robust than Gnome, something about the stupid foot icon on the “start” menu had me, and generally speaking I preferred the GTK styles and so on.
Anyway, long story short, Gnome on my Linux MacBook was starting to give me the shits, so I looked around for something to replace it with and KDE “Plasma” jumped out, so I thought fuck it, I’ll give it a go.
I actually don’t hate it. I don’t look at it and go “wow this is awesome”, but there’s also nothing I look at and go “that’s not the design choice I would have made”. It’s just comfortable, for the most part when I want to do something with this machine, I just do it and I don’t have to figure anything out.
For my own records, I was able to mostly (there’s probably some leftover bits) uninstall Gnome with pacman -Rcns gnome.
I did have some trouble initially with the touchpad working at the display manager login screen, and ceasing to work immediately when I logged in - it turned out (and I think this bug actually bit me before, I just did not document it), my Macbook’s touchpad only works with Wayland, not X11, so I had to install the plasma-wayland-session package, and select that as my desktop environment and then everything’s peachy. I think that’s my own fault for never bothering to get the touchpad working with X11, and I don’t have a dog in the X11 vs Wayland fight (some of the BSD greybeards I hang out with probably have far stronger feelings).
Considering how much shit I talk about it, and to the person who recommended it, it’s infuriating how well Arch has been working. Everything is reasonably well documented, and most of the time any problem is solved by “oh you just need [package]”, so it’s just a matter of figuring out what I’m missing. I keep waiting for pacman to fuck things up the way most package managers inevitably do and so far it just fucking hasn’t. God damn it.
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