06.28.21
Gemini version available ♊︎In Terms of Technical Innovation and Features GNU/Linux is Miles Ahead of Anything Apple and Microsoft Have (or Even Promise)
Summary: We take a quick look at some of the more advanced (and scarcely known about) features in KDE; we hope to inspire some users to explore more powerful desktop environments, pushing modern machines to their full capacity without spending like $1000 on a new PC (my main PC cost just 200 pounds)
I HAVE a confession to make. I’m a desktop environments nerd. Since the 90s I’ve been messing around with just about any desktop environment I could put my hands on, tweaking the hell out of it (I went through pretty much every desktop environment that exists and on my Debian box I installed every one that was available in 2020). I love testing those things to better understand what’s available. Even Mac OS 9 back in the very old days. I like to test the limits. Right now I push the limits with 4 desktop environments that I use in tandem over Barrier and Synergy (both running in conjunction) and over the weekend I went through all the settings in the latest stable build of KDE/Plasma5 (for Debian 10). This video is far from an exhaustive tour/walk-through of features, as instead it focuses on the sorts of things no other operating system really has, except maybe FreeBSD or other BSDs with KDE built for them.
“As more and more people’s activities are shifting online (the coronavirus accelerated this trend) it’s important to use desktops that the individual users, not the vendors, control.”The learning curse may be steep for some of these features but once they’re mastered they can save a lot of time for years to come. It pays off, think of it as a long-term investment. That can also help avoid/reduce human errors/mistakes.
In order to avoid mention of (or free press for) other operating systems we might be doing more videos such as this one, showing ways to handle workflows in GNU/Linux, without a terminal or anything like that, just GUI. We don’t try to over-complicate matters. Think of it as hobby ‘marketing’ or advocacy.
This video focuses primarily in visuals and usability aspects, including window- and application-specific settings. It does mention KDE “Activities”, but we’ve not properly demonstrated them, at least not yet. Such a video would definitely require some preparation in advance.
People tend to judge the quality of an operating systems based on media coverage, so they wrongly assume what the media isn’t mentioning can’t possibly be any good. That’s totally false. It shows a misunderstanding of how the mass (corporate) media works. All that fluff about Microsoft vapourware is predominantly paid-for PR, not news. It helps distract from Microsoft blunders and scandals (many of them exist lately).
Chrome OS is a very dumbed down and locked down environment, even if it’s built on top of Gentoo GNU/Linux (originally). We encourage people to explore and examine freedom-respecting alternatives, not just for freedom’s sake but for purely practical/pragmatic reasons; they’re just technically better, maybe not for companies that want users to upload everything to them (including keystrokes, as in keylogging). As more and more people’s activities are shifting online (the coronavirus accelerated this trend) it’s important to use desktops that the individual users, not the vendors, control. The users also collectively control them because they can exercise choices by forking (owing to the more technically skilled among them). At the moment KDE is not controlled by large vendors. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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