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by banishwashtub 2969 days ago
I try using KDE every couple of years and I can't even put my finger on why it grosses me out so much. The "K" start to every piece of software is obnoxious, I don't know if this is true today but I remember one of my first times using KDE and searching for "calculator" or something and being unable to find it because it was "kalculator". Terrible UX.

I think what really gets me is I use Windows at work and KDE is too close to windows in some respects but isn't...it's also too close to other Linux DE's but isn't. Feels really awkward, and isn't very pretty. I don't necessarily agree with the design decisions of GNOME Shell and GTK but I think they still look a lot better than KDE and Qt.

2 comments

> I don't know if this is true today

It's not.

Also, I can't stand the ugliness of GNOME, while Plasma looks mostly neat and clean.

They are somewhat moving away from calling everything and the kitchensync something with K, but the calculator is still called KCalc.

Luckily, the search has gotten a lot better, so it will actually find KCalc when you type in "calculator".

You can also type "1+1" into the search bar and it will tell you the result right there.

And there's also an option to have the menu show applications with their generic names. So, for example "File Manager" instead of "Dolphin". Depending on the distro, this option may be default-on, too.

And now would be a good time to try it again, by the way. The last three years were spent with a major rewrite. Now it has most of the features that you'd expect from a KDE again, is stable and has been stable for long enough that most distros actually have a stable version in their repos (even Kubuntu is decent for once.)