[berkes]

For me, it's the exact opposite.

The fact that in KDE, not only can I configure literally every pixel at times, I often must configure all kinds of things.

I very much prefer highly opinionated software for three reasons.

That softwares' defaults matter everything, so they are well researched and thought out. While with configurable software, defaults are often accidentally, historically, or whimsically defined.

Settings combine. One setting of two options gives two variations. Four such settings 16. Now imagine the combinations of a KDE app with a hundred settings, many of which can take several values. It's impossible to support, test, understand and debug all these combinations. Yet they often affect eachother. Updates in KDE were, for this reason alone, a break-fest. But even flipping some check boxes often brought my KDE in an invalid state so that (seemingly unrelated) parts would just stop working.

But most importantly, I realized my time is best spend on efficiently using software, rather than spending time on making it work efficiently for my personal workflows. I.e. better to adapt my workflow to some well thought out default, than to waste time thinking out that workflow myself. I still have vim and my shell configured, but that's where I spend almost all my time. For the rest: just vanilla Ubuntu with some nice wallpapers. It has "just worked" for over a decade and many updates now. Which is a much bigger timesaver than configuring the amount of pixels of grab-space of my window borders will ever be.

[jraph]

Have you tried KDE recently?

A lot of care has been put in the defaults in KDE (recently?). They have even set double click to open by default in Plasma 6, though most of the team actually prefers single click, recognizing that it's what users coming from other environment are used to.

Today, the default configuration in KDE software is well thought and usable as is. You don't need to change anything. But you can if you want.

I've used KDE for years now, and when I set up a new environment, I don't change much actually. It's ready to use out of the box.

You don't need to choose between "configurable but painful to set up" and "opinionated and non configurable". "Configurable with 'opinionated' defaults" is also an option and to me that's what KDE provides.

[berkes]

> Have you tried KDE recently?

I ditched it entirely during the KDE 3 fiasco. Been on Gnome/Ubuntu ever since.

But I have tried it now and again, and found that while it's much better than KDE 3, it's still a poor experience out of the box, for me. Or at least, Kubuntu is. It's OK, but not "Good".

For me, the tell-tale is that when my immediate thought is "hmm, maybe I can configure this", something is not right (for me). With Gnome, sometimes I have this (e.g. Gnome Console which has IMO insane default window sizes). Personally, I think this should never be a setting. Just Good defaults, maybe through heuristics (last size after resize? fullscreen? x% of screen size?). With KDE I have this all the time. Literally every app that I opened, be it the PDF reader, or the document Scanner, do I immediately go "Something feels off, maybe I must change some settings?" and the answer almost always is in those settings.

I'm not demanding. On contrary, I prefer others with more expertise (of console sizes, PDF displaying, Scanner UI) to make decisions for me, so that I can focus on what I do best instead.

I understand that there's a need for highly configurable software. That my preference of getting force-fed strong opinions is not for everyone. I really do. But I'm using KDE here as an example of what "configuritis" can lead to.

[jraph]

Which KDE 3 fiasco? Are you thinking of the first releases of KDE 4 which were buggy?

It appears to me it's not the fact that KDE is configurable that you dislike, but the design and default configuration choices or the bugs. Or its differences with what you are used to.

I 100% agree with you that the desktop environment should come with good defaults and you shouldn't need to mess with the settings. Life is too short for pointless configuration.

But you are not actually pointing to anything specific so it would be hard to discuss in details or (dis)agree. Not that it's actually an issue, of course. But we can't take any particular insight from your comments other than "this person doesn't like KDE for some reason". If you pointed us at some actual dumb defaults that you shouldn't need to configure but need to, we could actually get your point. The only example you gave is for Gnome, actually. I don't remember struggling with the terminal size on Gnome but then again, I pretty much always maximize all my windows or put them on a side of the screen with a keyboard shortcut, and use tabs so I don't actually create a new terminal window too often.

[The_Colonel]

The problem with GNOME "researched and thought-out opinions" is that they often require all apps to follow it to work well. They ignore use cases involving non-GNOME apps (case in point - systray), but using only GNOME apps is extremely limited.

I used GNOME as my main IDE since v2.4 (2003), but slowly grew frustrated with the changes until the v40 was a bit too much and finally gave KDE a chance (after several previous tries which did not convince me). KDE was finally mature and stable, it took maybe 30 minutes to configure it to my liking - I don't think I had to change the config since then.

[seba_dos1]

> The fact that in KDE, not only can I configure literally every pixel at times, I often must configure all kinds of things.

Neither of those things are true when it comes to KDE. While it is more configurable than GNOME, it's not a particularly high bar to pass, and it comes with perfectly usable and reasonable defaults out-of-the-box.