I don't know how you can say this about KDE with a straight face.
They basically never remove features, and just add on more customization. You can get your desktop to behave exactly like Windows 95, if you want.
And the apps are some of the most productive around. Dolphin is the best file manager across every operating system, and it's not even close. Basic things like reading metadata is overlooked in all other file managers, but dolphin gives you a panel just for that. And then tabs, splits, thumbnails, and graph views.
KDE 3.5 -> 4 was its Gnome moment. The fall wasn't as hard, they have come up somewhat from there, but they still don't touch their KDE 3.5.10 Konqueror-primary days. Dolphin was a great example of the rot setting in during those days; Konqueror was the all-in-one browser application and Dolphin was the simplification cancer coming in. THAT particular KDE (which is TDE today) was peak KDE. Yes I am still this buttmad about Dolphin's introduction.
To be fair, modern KDE has more-or-less the same taskbar.
And the taskbar is also not optimal. Having text next to the icons is great, but it means you can only really have, like, 4 or 5 applications open and see all their titles and stuff. Which is why modern windows switched to just icons - which is much worse, because now you can't tell which app window is which!
The optimal taskbar, imo, is a vertical one. I basically take the KDE panel and just make it vertical. I can easily have 20+ apps open and read all their titles. Also, I generally think vertical space is more valuable for applications, and you get more of it this way.
It also allows me to ungroup apps. So that each window is it's own entry in the taskbar, so one less click. And it works because I can read the window title.
More or less, yes; Trinity Desktop is basically KDE 3. But KDE has added on a lot of other cruft since then that has no value to me.
> Having text next to the icons is great, but it means you can only really have, like, 4 or 5 applications open and see all their titles and stuff.
That's what multiple virtual desktops are for. My usual desktop configuration has 8. Each one has only a few apps open in it.
> The optimal taskbar, imo, is a vertical one.
I do this for toolbars in applications like LibreOffice; on an HD aspect ratio screen it makes a lot more sense to have all that stuff off to the side, where there's more than enough screen real estate anyway, than taking up precious vertical space at the top.
But for my overall desktop taskbar, I've tried vertical and it doesn't work well for me--because to show titles it would have to be way too wide for me. The horizontal taskbar does take up some vertical space at the bottom of the screen, but I can make that pretty small by downsizing it to either "Small" or "Tiny".
From an economic standpoint those are both very good reasons, because:
1. Burning the planet on your servers is expensive, offloading it to a client-side LLM is not.
2. Ethics means risk means you won't be SOC compliant, your legal department will be mad, your users will be mad, etc.
The current status-quo of a few giant LLMs on supercomputers operated by OpenAI and Google is basically destined to fail, in my eyes. At least from a business standpoint. Consumer stuff might be different.
I think when it comes to config too people really underestimate its power.
On desktop, I often see people waste inordinate amounts of time on workflows that don't suit their use case. Little do they know - there's a config for that!
For example, I'll see people holding outlook like it's radioactive. They'll do the same busy-body work of manually pruning their inbox and sorting stuff and deleting stuff. The config can really help them there, but I think they either don't know it's capabilities or are scared of it.
It does make quality assurance an absolute nightmare, I would know, our application is like this to the 10th degree. Config on top of config on top of setting on top of options.
But if you also want your product to be productive for a way array of use cases, it's necessary. You need to think about your market.
> It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.
That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.
We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.
It's algorithmically based - if the algorithm is built to promote certain patterns, those will be promoted.
Populist messaging, such as extremist right-wing stuff, does well on a lot of platforms because it optimizes engagment. It's purposefully stupid, simple, and outrageous. That's a recipe for success on Twitter, Facebook, and some others.
I think he means maybe AI can get around languages lacking features - like how codegen was used for a long time.
Codegen is more and more rare these days, because languages have so many tools to help you write less code - like generics. LLMs could, theoretically, help you crank out similar repetitive implementations of things.
It's not a "hack" because many language DO NOT let you store functions with state. Gleam does, I write PHP, and that does as well.
PHP has interfaces and whatnot, but a lot of the time I do polymorphism by just having a class that has Closure members. When you can arbitrarily pass around functions like that, it's basically equivalent to an interface or abstract class, with a bit more flexibility.
They basically never remove features, and just add on more customization. You can get your desktop to behave exactly like Windows 95, if you want.
And the apps are some of the most productive around. Dolphin is the best file manager across every operating system, and it's not even close. Basic things like reading metadata is overlooked in all other file managers, but dolphin gives you a panel just for that. And then tabs, splits, thumbnails, and graph views.
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