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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I used to prefer Gnome before the KDE 6 update due to the rough edges in KDE. After KDE 6 came out I’ve tried it again, and it’s incredible. The team has spent a lot of time on polish for this major release and it allows KDE’s suite of more fully featured applications to shine. GNOME apps like gedit, nautilus, and gnome terminal tend to provide the minimum level of functionality, whereas KDE’s applications feel like they’re trying to work for power users. Kate goes as far as supporting the LSP for code autocompletion. KDE’s desktop is much more customizable as well, so you don’t really need extensions to get the functionality you’d be looking for in GNOME, stuff like the application launcher are built in. KDE connect is a really useful application you can install on your phone to get file transfers and notification sharing, among other things, between your phone and computer while connect to the same local network. Performance wise they seem pretty equal, even on older hardware, but KDE might have a bit of an edge in terms of RAM usage, YMMV depending on how you customize the desktop. The one thing I miss about GNOME is their “start menu” experience, I haven’t found a way to replicate that in KDE, but I haven’t looked very hard either. Overall I wouldn’t hesitate recommending KDE, plasma 6 makes me actually feel like the Linux desktop is ready for mainstream.



  • The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.



  • Yes the PowerPoint ui is much better. It takes more space but it’s much easier to find features you might not use as frequently.

    I haven’t done much switching between calc and excel. Formatting issues come up when making or editing a document in libreoffice and opening it in MS office. Especially with impress, the position and sizes of objects will be very different between the two programs. This makes opening a presentation from impress with PowerPoint on a different computer impractical.


  • I think it comes down to 2 main reasons, and some members of the libreoffice suite definitely do a better job than others.

    1. Comparability with MS Office, it’s really difficult to use these programs when you can’t reliably collaborate with people using the de-facto standard office software. Impress is exceptionally bad at this.

    2. User interface clunkines, the ribbon ui Microsoft uses in modern office versions is really nice, and makes finding the actions you need really easy. This is coming from someone who used office 03 and 07, it’s not just a learning thing, it’s a better design.

    These issues are definitely a bigger deal on some parts of the suite than others. I’ve found Calc to be a solid replacement for Excel, but when I’m making spreadsheets I’m not fiddling with complex formatting at all. Impress is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It has horrible comparability with PowerPoint, and I need to get things looking just right when I make a presentation. It’s difficult to find even basic formatting options. I could probably solve the usability issues by reading a few tutorials, but the comparability issues hold me back from putting the time in, since I have no idea how a presentation will look when someone loads it in PowerPoint anyway.





  • NFS is generally the way network storage appliances are accessed on Linux. If you’re using a computer you know you’re going to be accessing files on in the long term it’s generally the way to go since it’s a simple, robust, high performance protocol that’s used by pros and amateurs alike. SSHFS is an abuse of the ssh protocol that allows you to mount a directory on any computer you can get an ssh connection to. You can think of it like VSCode remote editing, but it’ll work with any editor or other program.

    You should be able to set up NFS with write caching, etc that will allow it to be more similar in performance to a local filesystem. Note that you may not want write caching specifically if you’re going to suddenly disconnect your laptop from the network without unmounting the share first. Your actual performance might not be the same, especially for large transfers, due to the throughput of your network and connection quality. In my general experience sshfs is kind of slow especially when accessing many different small files, and NFS is usually much faster.




  • A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn’t a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let’s say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it’s sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn’t work when you were out of the house.





  • Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn’t as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It’s a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.