You think KDE is a clusterfuck?! When was the last time you used GNOME? File Roller still doesn't support drag'n'drop in Wayland; issue now open for over 5 years.
It pains me to see them throwing money at the wall instead of creating dedicated jobs, paying (German) engineers to fix bugs and develop long needed features. Given how low German wages are, they could pay around 10 engineers for a full year with that money.
Reading these Linux DE threads always makes me glad that the only desktop Linux I use is SteamOS.
So you are using KDE
Pretty sure that it's not KDE outside of the desktop mode considering that the SteamOS and its GUI is proprietary and KDE is GPL.
Of course Steam itself is not KDE
Steam runs on KDE on SteamOS
Desktop mode is KDE on X. In that case your comment is true, steam will just run on KDE.
Game mode is a wayland session with gamescope as a WM, but it isn't controlled directly by the user. The steam client controls the WM and exposes those controls to you through menus and handles stuff like notifications and being a driver for the controller, so you could call it a DE in game mode.
Game mode is a wayland session
More like X session running under XWayland. gamescope doesn't really expose Wayland interfaces to clients (well, technically it does expose some stuff, but I wouldn't qualify that as anything else than implementation detail - although that may have started to change recently, I've seen some stuff being done around xdg-shell there).
Can't find any "kde" or "plasma" references in the process list under normal operation. It's only after you reboot into the desktop mode that you start seeing process names like "plasmashell", "kded5", "startplasma-x11" and so on.
I'm not entirely convinced that using SteamOS can really be counted as "using KDE" in any way.
in any way
Well, I wouldn't make that statement so strong. KDE Plasma is the default desktop environment on SteamOS, it's just that it doesn't boot into its desktop environment by default (but you're two buttons away from switching into it).
It does not, unless running in desktop mode. In gaming mode, Steam runs on top of gamescope.
SteamOS is just a slow release Arch with KdE on top so your comment says what we need to know
And it just works without any tinkering. Maybe that part is more important than the choice of DE.
I'm partial to KDE myself, but honestly anything with a sensible panel is usable.
just works without any tinkering
Yes. It'samazinghow much better Linux runs when the hardware vendor actually supports Linux.
It also helps that the Steam Deck has a narrower Mission than a desktop computer.
I’m partial to KDE myself, but honestly anything with a sensible panel is usable
I’m the same! I’ve never understood how people have such strong emotions when it comes to a desktop environment. They all (including Windows, macOS, and even iPadOS) feel like they are good enough to me and I enjoy switching to something different once in a while.
Which SteamOS? The old Debian one fort he cancelled SteamBox, or the new Arch one for the Steam Deck?
The Arch one for the Steam Deck, which makes it really easy to forget that it's even Linux.
Ok, but that's just KDE, no? Do you use it in desktop mode?
I doubt that many people use the desktop mode on it to be fair.
I just switched my work computer from a Linux laptop running Gnome (on Wayland, with working drag and drop) to a MacBook Air M2. The hardware is a great improvement, the desktop environment is not.
Same here. Recently moved to an M2 pro from Gnome. Mac desktop seems like a downgrade to me.
I think it’s also a matter of getting used to it. I used Linux from 1994-2007 and Mac since. I had some Linux desktop excursions in between and I always come back surprised how broken the Linux desktop experience is. Let alone there would be something great like Shortcat or Raycast app menu search.
The only thing that is annoying in macOS is the lack of good tiling, but there are good third party options that add tiling.
I wouldn't attach too much weight to negative comments. People love to complain, and on the other hand those who are perfectly content often don't feel the need to advertise that. That is not to say that Linux DEs are perfect, mind you, but maybe not as bad as comments on HN would suggest.
Yeah, I use GNOME on my laptop every day, and I say it's pretty good. Things "just work" enough for me to focus on doing my work or enjoying myself without having to worry about the DE, and Ilikethe defaults, mostly; it's not just a matter of convenience. And the keyboard shortcuts and mousepad gestures on GNOME are great as well. But from the way GP complained you'd think the Linux desktop were ruined.
I’m not sure there is a piece of software in existence that doesn’t have a group of angry HN users posting about their pet bug that no one else has heard of.
From cars to microwaves to soldering irons, if it's got software on it, there's a bug in the code.
And reading any HN thread about Windows or macOS makes me glad I'm not using them.
Yes it could always be better.
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop environment for 19 years. It's unbelievable how little I know about Linux these days. Things just work!
If it's only for that, don't worry, that's also a steaming pile of s... /s
German wages are low? Are you serious?
US tech wages for a single position are probably on average more than the typical EU tech company makes in total revenue per year. 60k is like a god tier wage here.
60k is very average for someone with 3-4y experience in Vienna and our salaries are much lower than in Germany. You should find another offer.
Unless you're talking about net income, then it is truly god-tier...
The duck? Are you living in the same Germany as I am?
That's not god tier, it's pretty average:https://www.stepstone.de/gehalt/Software-Developer.html
It'd be low for a senior dev:https://www.stepstone.de/gehalt/Senior-Software-Entwickler-i...
Yes, talking about the IT sector here. I am from Austria, it's about the same over here.
File Roller still doesn't support drag'n'drop in Wayland
Fwiw Wayland is a bit of a disaster, see:https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
There was an HN thread on this, but it was flagged:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210694
This page is mostly a bunch of lies and shows little understanding of what wayland is and what it is not. It should definitely be flagged
For someone as clueless as me, would you care addressing them all one by one? That would be more than welcome.
Use the search bar at the bottom. Every week we have a new Linux post with 200 comments of complaints about Wayland.
Reddit, Phoronix, the entire internet has people complaining about Wayland. It's really not hard to find them.
Time's too valuable to make that worthwhile, especially when a large amount of them boil down to: Wayland is not X and tools designed for interfacing with X-specific details will not work on Wayland without modification.
File Roller isn't a GNOME app:https://apps.gnome.org/
"An archive manager for GNOME."
To my understanding itisa GNOME app, but it isn't acore GNOME app. Meaning it isn't something that would be shipped in a "GNOME" package group.
What is it then, part of GTK? It's certainly a core part of a Gnome desktop.
File Roller still doesn't support drag'n'drop in Wayland
Neither does KDE Ark on Wayland. Tested yesterday.
Maybe it depends on what you're dragging to? Dragging from Ark to Dolphin works fine on my Wayland machines.
Out of the loop. Why is KDE clusterfuck?
1. You can configure about anything (which may be a good thing) but all of this "configuration" looks and feels like Apollo 11 Command Module.
2. UI\UX is lacking. Too many controls all over the place or at least too sticking out.
PS: "all over the place" is just the best phrase I can thing of in english to describe KDE. But most of all this is just about two different views on how a DE should look and feel like.
KDE fans prefer this "I have all the inputs in one place even if I use 80% of them once a year" and "I can configure every pixel even though I won't do it ever".
Gnome fans prefer "clean and simple (and opinionated)" and "this DE gives me 80% of what I can possibly want for 20% of effort".
2. UI\UX is lacking. Too many controls all over the place or at least too sticking out.
That's very subjective. I used Windows, Mac OS, Android (various UIs), KDE etc.. It's not "modern" semi transparent themes and gradients and rounded everything and whitespace, it is very responsive and works like I expect.
That's very subjective.
My whole comment is a private opinion.
Many menus are collapsed into "...And X more menu items", menus nested in menus automatically without any thought put into it. You don't need modern styling, you can have thoughtful design while looking like Windows 95. That is what KDE lacks.
If System Settings confuses you, do not go into System Settings.
The same can be said about almost any KDE\Qt app though. It's nto about confusion though, mostly it's about aesthetics.
My point being that you seem to be suggesting, in parent and sibling comments, that there are manifest and myriad configuration options provided by KDEANDthat you feel you must use them.
You contrast this to Gnome, where there areNOTcomparable configuration options, and you are 'happy with minor issues'.
I don't see how this is materially different from simply choosing to not use the extensive KDE configuration capabilities and being as 'happy with minor issues' as you would be with Gnome.
"I can configure every pixel even though I won't do it ever".
Or, more likely, will configure many of them once and then be happy, as opposed to GNOME where if you're unhappy with anything you're just out of luck.
If that's how it is for you - great.
The whole point of my comment is that people are different. I'd rather not spend my time configuring KDE as I did 15 years ago and be happy with minor issues of GNOME.
For those who don't know the interior of the Apollo 11 command module:https://www.si.edu/sites/default/files/newsdesk/fact_sheets/...
I've seen it before, but notthatpicture! It's an 8 megabyte jpeg from the Smithsonian Institute and it's glorious. How did you come across it?
My reason for switching from gnome to KDE was that it was not possible for gnome to manage more than one Bluetooth adapter. A scenario that quickly occurs when you use a docking station. KDE had no problem with that. Another thing is the crusade against tray icons by gnome. So yeah, I like the cleanliness of gnome actually better than KDE, which is really a bit messy. But when this "cleanliness" comes at the price of stripping away essential functionality, there's no choice.
essential
To each their own. Like I said.
You can configure about anything (which may be a good thing) but all of this "configuration" looks and feels like Apollo 11 Command Module.
I wish I could configure KDE "declaratively" with a configuration file, like what I do with i3.
KDE is actually hard at work to fix these problems and make sure programs have e.g. better defaults, are more consistent, and easier for new users (see for example the KHamburgerMenu widget, which even gives users a choice if they prefer an old fashioned menu). The core principle of the KDE HIG is "simple by default, powerful when needed":https://develop.kde.org/hig/
The difference is that KDE prefers doing this incrementally, which takes longer especially outside of core apps like Konsole and Dolphin, but it also prevents clusterfucks like the gnome-terminal vs gnome-console situation, and reduces churn in general.
Didn't get this either. I love using KDE.
Maybe because it allows you to configure it so much, that you might actually break it. Gnome on the other hand is the Duplo among desktop environments, it drives me mad.
Every GNOME user calls KDE this
I understand that KDE is a clusterfuck
Nah it's the most capable desktop on Linux these days.
Gnome is surely more stable and reliable than KDE, but it's also as configurable as Planck's constant which makes it useless for power users imo.
Who are these “power users” of a DE?
I guess I'm one. For some uses I want to be able to capture literally thousands of lines in a terminal session. I used to be able to do that with gnome-term. The "edit > select all" used to select the entire scrollback buffer. Now it just selects the visible portion. There is no option to change to the previous behavior. The value for providing that option is deemed not sufficient for the additional code complexity.
Yes, I know there are other ways to do this (e.g. screen), but they require planning in advance and I don't always know when I want to do that. There have been other things that I used that have also been removed over the time that I used Gnome.
I appreciate Gnome for the smooth experience they provide but have switched to KDE which better meets my needs and wants.
That’s an application, not a DE, problem. There is no reason to use the defaults if you have particular needs, or spend much time in some environment.
People don’t make much art in MS Paint, or code in Notepad, despite those being the default for most computer users.
I think GNOME is very explicit in pushing you towards using independent applications that best fit your needs, while also providing simple to use, but not very feature-rich, defaults. I appreciate that approach.
That was my point: I understand who power users of terminals are; I understand who power users of graphics software are; I understand who power users of CAD are. But a DE is a glorified application launcher; there really isn’t much there of which to be a power user.
People don’t make much art in MS Paint, or code in Notepad, despite those being the default for most computer users.
This is very Windows-specific problem. macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, KDE nowadays all include decent sets of apps, thankfully. I will not miss the days of installing PDF readers (half of them full of ads), ZIP decompressors, image viewers (IfranView), MP3 players, etc.
Sadly, last time I was daily-driving GNOME (~2 years ago), this was exactly my experience - Evince was extremely laggy on big PDFs compared to Okular, Eye of Gnome had little functionality compared to Gwenview, File Roller lacked drag-and-drop and some formats that Ark supported, Gnome Terminal lacked many keyboard shortcuts that Konsole had, Gnome Software looked like just a proof-of-concept, etc.
I think GNOME is very explicit in pushing you towards using independent applications
I wasn't aware this is the case, but I could accept this philosophy and be happy... if the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) shared this opinion and thus made their default flavor have GNOME WM with e.g. KDE apps. Sadly this is not the case, so I've started recommending my non-tech-savvy friends (that became curious to try out Linux since Windows got so bad) to go for full KDE experience.
This is very Windows-specific problem. macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, KDE nowadays all include decent sets of apps, thankfully.
My examples of a drawing app and a text editor stand, I think.
if the distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) shared this opinion and thus made their default flavor have GNOME WM with e.g. KDE apps
A distribution, typically, does not have a better way to guess your preferences than a DE does. Pushing overloaded applications on everyone is not a solution.
I've started recommending my non-tech-savvy friends (that became curious to try out Linux since Windows got so bad) to go for full KDE experience
Do you support them afterwards?
The ones that want a DE that works exactly how they like it. I quickly lose my focus from having to deal with even the most minor annoyances and KDE lets me change the little things very easily.
KDE letting me change little things is exactly what causes me to quickly lose my focus :)
It's good that there are 2 distinct, competitive desktop environments, that each suit different people well.
Gnome is extremely configurable if you use extensions
Second part does not make any sense though because power users come in various forms and shapes. Not every power user need to customize the hell out of their desktop. Some prefer, just let me do my work and get out of my way kind of a desktop.
One statement does not necessarily contradicts another.
KDE is not even remotely a clusterfuck. It is stable and has been a reliable desktop for my job for years. KDE and Gnome are the two most popular desktop environments on Linux and both are stable and usable.
How do you define "clusterfuck"?
Look it up in the dictionary
Nah it's the most capable desktop on Linux these days.
I still haven't used anything more 'just works' and 'capable' than xfce, what has KDE added in the past decade or so since I used it that made it 'most capable'?
Don’t you mean Klusterfuck?
(though I quite enjoy kde myself)
Naming terminal "Konsole" will never stop being funny.
GNU and Gnome name things with G and nobody cares. KDE names things with K and people can't stop tittering about it. I really don't get it.
GNU and Gnome name things with G
Unless it is The GIMP. That seems to get people going every once in a while.
Wonder when they will bring out the (next) Gimp.
It's literally the translation of "console" to German.
That's just clusterfuck but qt.
So, clusterfuqt? On topic: KDE is great, switched from Gnome years ago and never looked back. In general, I appreciate the effort of Gnome, but it's not for me.
Clusterfuq
"American", "European"? Free / Open Source software like that does not have nationality, it's a collaborative effort of thousands of developers around the globe. It's irrelevant what nationality the initial founders once had.
It's irrelevant what nationality the initial founders once had.
That is not the point.
Most big open source projects end up with an entire commercial ecosystem backing them. KDE has probably directly created many more jobs in Europe/Germany than GNOME. Such things should be taken into consideration when determining who deserves grants paid by EU/German tax payers.
Did KDE even apply?!
These are not football teams/US politics, it’s not us vs them. This idiotic attitude only harms the state of open-source.
I personally care much less about open source than where my tax money goes.
Pretty ironic that you resort to calling it "US politics" while calling out weird nationalism. You realize that recent European economic/tech policy has had a very nationalist direction. And that xenophobia and protectionism is much more common in Europe than the US?
KDE has perfect fine grained fractional scaling. Gnome does not; it uses frame buffer scaling, which is terrible.
Seriously, this is out? I thought it was still years away.. Brb jumping back on the distro hop express!
Well with a caveat - perfect fractional scaling _only_ in Qt apps, not in GTK.
Or, y'know, pick projects to sponsor on other traits, not country of origin? Why would they sponsor the European one if it doesn't fulfill their needs?
That's only one part of the equation.
How is KDE a clusterfuck? Last time I used it was with Open Suse Tumbleweed and there it was pretty buggy but that was expected from cutting edge versions. I played around with themes and there were bugs. I actually always went back and forth between KDE and Gnome/Unity. I like KDE better actually. But I use Material Shell (Gnome 3 extension) now that beats everything.
KDE always offered more options and configuration and was never as dumbed down as Gnome. But obviously most users do not need that that is why they like Gnome better. KDE has cool things like KDE Connect that was ported to Gnome later. When I used stable versions it was always perfectly fine to use. Not at all a Clusterfuck. 2nd most popular DE for a reason.
KDE is amazing and your point is even more valid.
Money spent on any other DE besides Sway is frankly a complete waste.
On the meantime, school agencies in my country have given an undisclosed amount of money to Microsoft and Google. Each school uses at least one of them
I find it quite surprising that the top comment on "Gnome Receives €1M from German Government" iscriticisingthe effort, saying they spent the money on the wrong thing.
Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
Giving tax payer money to a non-profit that pays its executive 100k a year is questionable (you never see that kind of salary in germany), specially when the foundation's expenses keep growing while their revenue decreases, it is poorly managed
you never see that kind of salary in germany
Here is the Glassdoor page for "software manager" in Germany:
https://www.glassdoor.de/Gehälter/software-manager-gehalt-SR...
As you can easily see, the job pays up to 150k, with 100k on average.
Where is the truth?
For a non-profit?
Non-profit doesn’t mean “no profit”.
It does, but no profit doesn't mean low salary.
As a managing director of a German non-profit gGmbH, I can tell you that you can and may make a lot of profit. It's just about how and in what period the profits must be used.
Well you certainly can't pay out profit, right? No dividends.
Of course the org can make money and keep it for later.
A non-profit organization is a group organized for purposes other than generating profit and in which no part of the organization's income is distributed to its members, directors, or officers. Nonprofits run like a business and try to earn a profit, which does not support any single member.
Does non-profit mean they should be paid less for doing the same work?
If a non-profit hires a janitor, should they pay the janitor less?
Fun fact: Rolex is a non-profit.
What is the point you are implying?
A lot of people seem to believe that, which is completely nonsensical.
As someone who runs a tiny hyper-local non profit (we take in a few thousand $s a year), running a non profit requires as much, if not more, work than running a for profit business.
One reason why we have such awful non profits is that they don’t pay enough to compete for the best talent.
I know a few people who work for medical non-profits, they make well into the 6 figure range. It was somewhat eye opening to me. They are not doctors.
If funded by private donors it seems legit but if this is funded by tax money it smells like a grift
So what shoild be the max salary for public servants then? Keep in mind we do want qualified people there, not that everybody wants to work in the private sector.
Can I ask why there's an assumption that to do good in the world requires participating in some kind of poverty cult? Never understood where this comes from.
Jesus.
Being the trust-fund offspring of a deity, he had it made from birth. But that's not how the story goes.
It shows humility and puts you on the same level of vulnerability as others. It's what separates you from the gentry. You give everything of yourself to help others, to prove you're one of them, and inspire others to help in kind.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys
Worth noting that monkeys will also accept inflated salaries, and sometimes insist.
Regulation for non-profits in Germany doesn't prevent employees from being paid competitive salaries for comparable positions. So if the average salary for a given position is about 100k€, nothing would be stopping a non-profit from paying a comparable sum.
As someone living and working in Germany I call this numbers unrealistic. People with 10-15 years of experience earn something around 60-70k gross here. FAANG and CTOs may earn more, but it's rare
As someone living and working as a senior software developer in Germany and on top of that currently involved in a client's hiring process, I say these numbers are completely realistic. Experienced developers are asking 90k at least, I've seen juniors with 2-3 years of experience state their current salary at 75k. For a senior software developer to earn 60k, you'd have to either be living in an extremely rural area or be blindly loyal to an employer. Talking about managers, I don't think anyone above team leader would accept a 100k offer right now.
I've seen juniors with 2-3 years of experience state their current salary at 75k.
Which land and business domain is that?
Hessen and I don't remember what business domain the applicants were working in but broadly it's embedded/firmware work
Sorry, but that depends on region and company size. I know plenty of people that work as senior engineers or leads that earn rather 90 - 110k, even at smaller companies.
You're blatantly misrepresenting the figure. The average span is 59.308 € - 103.663 €/year. So choosing 100k as the average skews the number in favour of your argument.
It literally says the average is 95k, there is no choice involved.
Well, what you're saying is actually true. But if you have a look at the "graph" you'll see that it's skewed because of fewer but higher salaries. I'm thinking of the median and wouldn't consider the average to have any indication whatsoever.
The truth is that quite some jobs pay >=100k in Germany. Usually needs to be one level above senior engineer, so staff eng. or some kind of manager.
What? Am German.. know multiple people with that salerie and higher...
For an executive this is a low salery, even in Germany.
For an executive this is a low salary, even in Germany.
Sorry, but simply not true. You might want to look into statistics and not extrapolate from your vicinity.
... We are not talking müllers IT Services GmbH Doing Websites for restaurants here.. I know there are plenty of those wasting massive potential in germany and even in those the level executive(which I would roughly match with the German title Prokurist, also it's not a perfect match) is above the 100k range (average 125k)
https://www.glassdoor.de/Geh%C3%A4lter/prokurist-gehalt-SRCH...
I don't consider the average indicative. Have a look at the graph and you'll see that it's skewed because of fewer but higher paid execs.
... Did you look at the graph? It effectively starts around 88k... Aka the bottom 10% earn less then 100k + it's the base salary... Bonuses come on top and are usually significant, starting from 7k according to Glassdoor
And we are including müllers it services here
Or you can look at the puplic tariff tables for all kinds of jobs, find out that 100k is the upper limit there in a lot of cases, and then realize that those tables barely touch the lower ranks of middle management, not to talk aboutexecutives. No statistics needed there.
Wait, let me take a quick look at the salary statistics... Yes, it's a low salary.
I have no idea what this person does or should be paid, but as a software engineer in Germany, I have earned much more than that.
Yes! People lose sight that 100k is not life-changing sort of money.
Also, people lose sight that other people's conditions are not the same as their own.
The missing context here is that you don't get from zero to 100k salary in normal circumstances. By the time you arrive at that level, then you're already having someone willing to pay you that for the value you bring.
On the "life changing" aspect, consider this thread is about German market and therefore cost of living. Given that, I'm confident to say 100k is not life changing. Comfortable salary range? yes absolutely, but not something you can just get this amount once and be sorted for life.
It absolutely is if you're poor.
Sure, in case you have nothing and win 100k in the lottery I agree.
The context here is completely different though, we are talking about specialized white collar jobs in the German/european market.
Lol, SWEs and execs can earn more than 100k Eur in Poland (not every company though). Is Germany that far behind?
No.
Poland has caught up is all.
No. They are fare ahead.
Really? They're paying their new Chief Executive Shaman $100K a year?
(Yes, I too was surprised to learn that Gnome is now run by a self-described Shaman with no engineering experience)
Shamans are uniquely qualified to work with gnomes.
Tons of "running a nonprofit" at least experience though. And she's not setting direction on Gnome.
In Sweden a tech executive can def. earn 100K a year. I find it hard to imagine Germany being that different (salaries are generally higher there).
From what I've seen, their salaries are higher brutto but not netto
But we are talking brutto here
For 100k a year i would hire a developer and a UI design person and make a better desktop environment than what gnome currently is.
Sure you would, what a reasonable thing to say.
That makes, in Germany, around 35k gross per person. Not sure that's gonna work out...
you never see that kind of salary in germany)
You need to work on your negotiating skills
You need to be more careful with your tax payer money funding foreign foundations that already have plenty of cash available
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/43572...
pays its executive 100k a year is questionable (you never see that kind of salary in germany)
really? Executives are quite important in making sure the organization they're in charge of is well run, efficient and reaches the stated goals.
Paying a low salary to an executive for a non-profit will merely make the non-profit less efficient at achieving their goals. Just because it's a non-profit, doesn't mean the workers in the organization should be self-sacrificing their own salary (by accepting a lower-than-market rate).
Now, there's a point to be made where if an executive's achievements or effectiveness at directing the organization is poor, they need to be booted, or at least have performance incentives etc.
As for the grant being tax-payer funded, i don't see why it is any worse a form of spending than welfare.
100k is the upper (upper-upper but still) end of the IG Metal collectively bargained frame contract for the metal and electronics industry in Bavaria. As soon as you lead a department, you make more. Leading a department as in you are not the hierachical equivalent of a senior manager in a US company, rather somewhere at Level 6 at a plave like Amazon. Directors and VP make considerably more.
So 100k salaries are totally a thing in Germany for white collar employees.
100k a year is the cheapest executive I’ve ever seen.
Usually these sorts of complaints relate to executives who earn many many millions per year. 100k per year seems perfectly reasonable?
We pay so much more money to Microsoft I hardly think your argument is relevant at all.
you never see that kind of salary in germany)
Then you haven't been paying attention for what your GEZ fees are being spent on.
Most mid career specialized functions in tech areas can get you to €100k. It’s not really rare these days.
Certainly not a reason to criticize the German government for this great initiative.
It also set a good example for startup folks that use a lot of open source and in most cases give nothing back.
you never see that kind of salary in germany
I can't speak specifically for Germany, but in the UK Germany has a reputation for paying better, and €100k would be pretty par-for-the-course for a senior developer, and stingy for a staff/principal engineer.
Rest assured 6-digit salaries are quite common in areas like Munich, and if you work for US companies like Google or Microsoft they can be double or triple that, or even more, through stocks. The sad truth as well is that there are not enough successful and large tech companies in Germany that you would see those there as well.
100k a year isn't that much for an executive
As a KDE user, I dare say I'm literally shaking with rage /s
Whereas I am still livid that KDE missed an open goal by calling their calendar KOrganiser instead of KPassa.
Why not just kall it the Kalendar?
Because it would confuse germans even more than Konsole.
https://github.com/KDE/kalendar
I am not quite sure how kalendar, korganizer and kontact fit together.
They abandoned that K naming scheme years ago. They do not do that kind of stuff anymore. What you see is only stuff, leftovers.
A play on the Spanish, qué pasa? (What’s up?)
Seriously? KDE is managed by a German Foundation. They probably received more German money than Gnome.
Well, then challenge the status quo and donate to KDE!
I dunno, sponsoring open source is good, but desktop environment is such a fragile and transient part of the system, that it feels this money would better serve some more fundamental project. I.e. it not self-evident to me what's the return of this investment (in terms of common good) will be looking 10 years forward where some other desktop environment can become more fashionable.
desktop environment is such a fragile and transient part of the system
That might be part of the point of the money.
Also, gnome isn't going anywhere, it's been around for decades, and we watched Ubuntu the most popular distro by google trends move away from gnome only to go back to gnome a while later
I miss Unity, nowadays using XFCE.
Gnome is so much better than what I remember in 2005. I've also grown up a little, and my internet connection is much faster. Yes, XFCE plays nicer on lighter hardware but I'm very happy with less sprawling dependencies and the polish in Gnome today. Plus Gnome is the one most likely to have HDR, VRR, and such sooner. I'm just not looking forward to next year with Apple Vision Pro. We're finally getting well-rounded desktop environments on Linux, now we have to edge into "spatial computer" desktop environments. That will take 20 years to catch up to.
I'm still convinced every desktop environment should be a physics simulator - 2D or 3D. If you want consistent animations, changes of state, etc. you don't hardcode these into your application. Your application should exist in a physics simulator. Your windows are objects with layers. You're looking at a composited view of them. In 2023 we have the hardware and the know-how to run physics simulators as your desktop environments.
</tinfoil-hat>
Except even for basic XFCE stuff, GNOME needs extensions, and on top of that, written in JavaScript.
Also, as you can see on my comments history, most of my GNU/Linux use is on VMs and servers, since VMWare got good enough I have stopped the dual boot dance.
In terms of getting more casual users to use Linux, it makes sense to sponsor projects like Gnome, considering how popular it is, and the fact that DEs are the main interface between users and the system; it's really rather important they're properly maintained, easy to use, etc
While I half agree with you that there may be better sources for this funding, I'm happy for any serious open source funding, and the (hopefully positive!) attention it receives from that
(And this comes from a long-term i3 user who loathes using heavy DEs :P)
Gnome is the most popular DE! Why would some other DE become "more fashionable" there are basically just two main ones and that is Gnome and KDE. Everything else is niche. All these minimalist DEs and low hardware requirement DEs make less and less sense as hardware gets faster and faster and every little SBC has more and more ram ... there is rarely a need.
We can pretty reliable say that Gnome will be around for a long time.
So if something is open source it's immune to criticism?
Let's assume KDE and Gnome are equally good in every single aspect. In this case, don't you think it's a little bit weird that German government chooses Gnome over KDE, whose origin in Germany? It's not charity, but taxpayers' money.
That's not what the post says:
I find it [...] surprising that the top comment [...] is criticising the effort
Nothing about it being immune to criticism, just surprised that the dominant post (as the time) was critical. The puzzle of successfully funding open source is ever present. A government has made a meaningful investment in an open source project. It might not be your favourite project, and it doubtless has challenges. But I'm with GP in seeing this as net good news.
Criticizing Gnome and KDE is not the same as criticizing the German effort to fund open source SW projects.
Yeah, the criticism of the effort absolutely seems misplaced.
Even the criticism of the money going to Gnome seems misplaced unless someone has gone through the criteria and identified which criteria they find unhelpful, or goes through Gnome’s application and identifies where they’ve misidentified.
Otherwise a criticism of the effort sounds simply like someone who has done no work at all, looks at an effort that has clearly put in a lot of process and safeguards (as evident simply from the application submitted), didn’t like the result but out of sheer laziness don’t even try to identify what went wrong and decided to piss all over the people who are actually putting in money, time, resources and effort to do something.
Unfortunately this is quite common in the open source world. People who don’t actually do any of the work (which includes me, even if I’ve submitted a few PRs) that go around telling the people doing the actual work that they’re doing it wrong without putting in the effort to show how or why they’re doing it wrong.
don't you think it's a little bit weird
Not at all. GNOME filled up an application for Sovereign Tech Fund and received the grant for stated purposes. In order for KDE to receive it too, someone from the project would have to apply first and their request would have to be evaluated positively too.
It's just paradoxical that they would have received less criticism if they didn't donate anything at all.
I'm probably the last person to praise the German government for anything, but one has to recognise a good decision. The next question is, why so little and only to Gnome?
They constantly give funding to projects FWIW. I don't know at this scale though.
Overall this project by the German government gives 11.5 million euros per year to a number of open source projects.
Looking at the list onhttps://sovereigntechfund.de/en/my highlights are:
Improving the security of the Python and JavaScript ecosystem, this was very much needed, curl, wireguard, and OpenSSH.
Indeed, only with these kind of sponsorship can The Year of Desktop Linux actually happen.
I am aware of a few German cities having a custom SuSE version with KDE on their libraries, for the employees and terminals available to the public.
Fully agreed. The gnome paradigm is not for me, but it's good to see open source desktops receiving funding. a rising tide lifts all boats
I'm overall happy about this. (I went to post the GNOME foundation post about it, but it was already dead in new when I looked.) It's good to see support for open source projects and developers.
That said, unfortunately, I echo the statements from others: I think they really ought to have picked KDE. I think KDE better embodies the spirit of the Linux desktop and open source, even for all of its flaws, of which there are many. I'm sure GNOME has a lot of avid fans and users, and having used Phosh I'm legitimately impressed at how good GTK4 and libadw have gotten for mobile. That said, I still feel like it makes a pretty bad productivity desktop, and there's a reason why every alternative GNOME or GTK-based desktop from System76 Cosmic to Budgie to XFCE is either ditching or ignoring Mutter: GNOME's fumbling of the Wayland bag has been painful for the whole ecosystem. I hate to complain about anything that is literally free, but it has become a genuine depressing drain. We could've just had pragmatic SSD support in Mutter, but instead all we have is libdecor, an option that is not ideal (especially for apps not written in C) and seems like it's perpetually not ready. Sometimes it feels like your actual best option for getting window borders in GNOME might be sub-surfacing yourself into a GTK4 window.
And it's even more frustrating, because some of the developers are great. I am a huge fan of libinput in general. I was looking forward, then, to checking out libei, a library (in theory) that lets youemulateinput, e.g. to inject events. A library like libei could be great, because there's already a lot of Wayland compositors (mostWayland compositors) that support input injectiontoday, so making it into a C library seems smart. Unfortunately, libei doesn't support them. Apparently, it is not "waylandy" (??????) to put input injection protocols in Wayland, and libei is only designed to support its own homegrown RPC solution which is a slightly modified version of the Wayland protocol instead. The way libei is supposed to work is that you use it, and it connects over a socket to the eis server, which speaks the ei protocol. How do you know which eis server to connect to? From the libei side, there's no prescription here. But it's OK. Mutter doesn't expose an eis serverdirectly. Apparently, you need to go through XDG Desktop Portals to use libei on Mutter. Because this is insanely convoluted, the foresight was had to develop liboeffis, a library that does XDG Desktop Portal interactionsforyou so you can get a socket to the eis server without having to care about all of that dbus crap. I tried compiling a version of GNOME that had eis support (at the time NixOS didn't have GNOME 45+, I don't know if it currently does) and I was either unsuccessful at that, or unsuccessful at getting libei to work. No matter how hard I tried, nothing really seemed to work right.
Meanwhile, on wlroots compositors, you can just use the Wayland socket itself:
https://wayland.app/protocols/virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1
https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-virtual-pointer-unstable-v...
This, of course, makes a lot of sense when you consider that the input events you're injecting will... you know... go over the Wayland socket. It's a perfect way to speak to the correct compositor, since I already am speaking to the correct compositor. Why introduce another socket?
Meanwhile, while lacking this rather basic feature, libei allows for backends that do things like use uinput, which to me makes no sense. The big difference between libei and something like uinput is that I'm injecting events on the compositor side. It's like the difference between telling the compositor to move the mouse to 4, 4 and generating USB HID motion events to do the same. Almost every other platform has a serviceable API here, and it's useful for accessibility, automation and testing, and probably more. Unfortunately the story today with Wayland is pretty mediocre and even more unfortunately the direction it seems to be going doesn't look like it will improve unless you're willing to only support wlroots.
This sucks because Iwantto work on cool Linux desktop software, but in practice I'm so bummed out by the time I scale through the mess of a stack that has developed in the desktop side that I basically lose interest. And to be clear, I'm not saying the wlroots ecosystem is perfect. Like I don't think there's a good way to make a virtual graphics tablet device yet in wlroots, which would be quite useful for a project that I wanted to work on (trying to get support for Windows WMPOINTER_* events in Wine; making Winetests for this would probably ideally involve virtual input, but lacking even basic support for what XTEST does, it's hard to imagine making these tests work in Wine any time soon, and compositor-specific protocols are a no-go afaik.)
It'd be nice to have something like autohotkey for Linux, too. But I think by the time a developer has gone through the realizations that I have, they are probably too drained to even think about working on it.
(Despite all of this, I really am still glad for it, and I believe some day all of this crap will get sorted out. I guess a part of me types out these huge rants just to vent, but another part of me hopes someone who has influence to fix things will read them and realize the situation sucks. Wishful thinking.)
It'd be nice to have something like autohotkey for Linux
I have built this already:https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11
The X11 variant was fine, but Wayland support is indeed too messy, so the experimental build for that just uses uinput/evdev and ignores anything Wayland-related. I don't think there is a feasible alternative right now for tools like this, and it sucks. At this point I'm honestly mostly hoping for at-spi to rescue us.https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11/issues/2
From what I understand, the barrier devs are planning to add Wayland support via libei [1]. I guess this should be relevant to you too?
1.https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2023-Ma...
It's exciting, but for both keylisteningandgrabbing, the evdev route is still required, so unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't help us on its own.
It also doesn't help with window management: "One example is xdotool which does window focus and modifier mangling (see below). Window focus notification is not available to a pure libei client and would have to be obtained or handled on a separate channel, e.g. X or Wayland. Having said that, a Wayland client does not usually have acess to query or modifiy the window focus."
Edit: libei supports a "receiver" mode too. Perhaps it'll be useful after all!
input events you're injecting will... you know... go over the Wayland socket
This may be my least favorite part of the current wayland architecture. I really wish potentially high frequency input events depending on user action wouldn't be mixed up with the regular wayland events. I think it should be up to the consumer to choose how often to wake up and see if the user has done anything it cares about. Forcing the wayland socket to be activated every $MOUSE_POLLRATE is just a big waste, and it also leaves a risk if the consumer isn't fast enough for some reason because when the socket buffer it full it will be closed and the app likely crash. A better solution would have been a ringbuffer of set size, potentially with a consumer set policy of how to handle overflow.
This is a lesson the telecom industry have learned a long time ago - don't mix signaling and bulk traffic.
From what I understand, how it works in Win32 is that it is throttled based on how fast the app is reading the event loop. That is, if you get 3 or 4 mouse events while processing another mouse event, they will be "coalesced" as much as possible. And at least for the newer WM_POINTER APIs, it's possible for an app that cares enough, e.g. a digital painting app, to query for the events that have been coalesced, too. This seems OK to me and seems to cover the bases well enough.
I don't think any compositor does this, but at least in theory it seems like you could do this using Wayland too, by just silently coalescing events when the client is behind on reading them. There's already a frame ID for input events, so in theory adding a protocol to go back and grab coalesced events using the frame ID seems like something you could do. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already some kind of solution like this somewhere, but at least it doesn't seem too hard to do if not.
The one thing I will say is that Windows also had the concept of events havingpriorityin addition.
Sometimes it feels like your actual best option for getting window borders in GNOME might be sub-surfacing yourself into a GTK4 window
Isn't this what libdecor does?
Interfacing with the system toolkit is how you get window decorations on both macOS and Windows, so it's not as if that's not a already widely used idea.
I think that's what the GTK3 plugin does, but its actually modular.
Maybe KDE didn't apply
One of the features they say they'll develop with the money is:
"Encrypt user home directories individually"
What does this have to do with Gnome, a desktop environment?
Will it have to use government supplied keys?
I’d like to introduce you to my friend, open source software.
No
I don't get the point of directory encryption. So much metadata (and entire data) leaks to other places. Just use full disk encryption?
It can be useful in environments with shared computers, or the home directory is streamed over the network.
It's also much easier to disable/enable encrypted home directories post-partition.
Does Ubuntu not already offer an option for that? I always encrypt my entire disk to I uncheck the encryption of the user (home?) directory that Ubuntu offers on installation because it would not make sense to double encrypt.
GNOME has driven plenty of important system level integration initiatives. Because that's what you have to do when building a user experience.
I assume it has partially to do with integration with systemd-homed (which has support for it). Last time I tried it, it was kinda not working and when I recently checked online about it I found a few issues/MRs about it.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservi...https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4644
Why not KDE ?
My guess - probably they have more work places in government which runs Gnome what makes sense to them invest into it.
My same thought. KDE could only cause issues if deployed on government machines, due to its configurability. Gnome gives you the minimum you need to get work done, less areas to troubleshoot.
Doubt it. As a German, I am pretty sure most government PCs run Windows, a few cities and certain state ministries have dabbled with Linux, but that's just a small fraction.
As far as I understand, GNOME being funded is all about doing a good job at applying for a grant with the Sovereign Tech Fund.
Maybe they did not apply.
Good question, I guess it's because Gnome is the default on most of the major Linux distros making it the one most people in control of money have actually heard about, so yeah...
I was surprised to discover recently that most of the big open source projects are now linked to those non profits poping up in the space in recent years. Organisations like Digital Public Goods Alliance [1] or Conservancy [2]
(The Sovereign Tech Fund is different beast it seems because it is actually the German state behind)
So most of those non profits look the same, are all lead by some professional–managerial class newcomer who have no real link to computer science. They are not really here to inspire people or recruit contributors, they are people in charge of keeping the money flowing, governance, compliance, etc.
My guess is this new architecture of the open source software ecosystem is an elegant way for tech (IBM, Google, etc.) to keep funding & control over key projects they rely on. While fiscally optimizing the whole thing & getting public money from the EU and others.
This is just my intuition, if someone could confirm...
What am I complaining about?
Those are not free, grassroot projects & organisations anymore. The day you will desperately need free software because the Orwellian architecture of the EU chatcontrol and cyber resilience act will be operational those non profits will most probably take the knee and comply.
This comment seems like it's written from an angle of libertarian distrust of government. Honestly, I think I trust the EU bureaucrats to have the interests of their citizens at heart much more than I trust Google or Amazon to serve the interests of their users.
Maybe the EU will eventually sell us out in the name of saving-the-children, but at least they don't have selling us out as theirraison d'être.
It's true this is no longer the small hobbyist/tinker dream of the free software activists, but is that vision even possible in today's world? If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth.
If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth.
How is this an objective truth?
Also why is it that what was possible yesterday is not possible today?
The GNU project was started in the early 80s when even in the western world only a very small minority had access to a computer.
Since then we put computers in the hand of almost everyone but now we can't write serious free software without a big corporation/government & money?
This is what happened in the early 00s, corporations like IBM understood they wouldn't be able to compete with free software now that we have the internet & everyone will have access to computers. So they captured the open source projects & even Microsoft understood 15 years later that they had to do it too. And now they have been successful in convincing you that no serious software can written without them and you consider that an "objective truth".
And on top of that the EU & others are telling you can't have serious & safe software without complying to their regulations...
Just look at the BSDs, they have been able to keep up with Linux (I mean they are in the same ballpark in term of security, features & performance) with a fraction of the money.
IMHO it's not possible today because of higher expectations from nontechnical users and radical complexity bloat in commercial software.
There is a path-dependence in software and it's almost inconceivable that a small team of hobbyists starting from scratch could build, for example, an office suite that could compete with MS Office or Google Docs. For better or worse, we're stuck with Libre Office.
Even Microsoft, with their massive resources, decided they weren't up to building and maintaining their own browser engine. They've chained themselves to Google's Blink along with everyone else.
BSD is an interesting example: less hardware support, fewer GUI options, good luck running BSD on a mobile phone. Can you imagine your parents trying to use BSD as their primary OS?
Eh, developers gotta eat. They can't all do open source as their second job. FOSS developers should be organized if they don't want these people to out organize them.
Awesome! If they spend some of it on accessibility, the year of the Linux desktop may be near for blind people like me. Windows has gotten so bad that if you have File Explorer open to the Home section, NVDA just says "pane" instead of reading out the home section. That's along with other papercuts and rough edges on the OS. But oh no, Windows 11 was made <s>from the ground up to be accessible!</s>. And I think we've already seen the Safari not responding thing for Macs.
Linux already has a good foundation. BRLTTY works with just about any Braille display, cups can print both text, and even images, to Braille printers, and Emacspeak has existed since the late 90's. Even on Windows, the best and most useful addons for a screen reader are on NVDA, the open source one. Imagine what we can do when we control the whole stack? A true audio desktop, with audible animations. No need to spend $1099 for the most high quality screen reader and OS. being able to put Linux on the [Optima laptop](https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/optima/) upcoming laptop, and have everything open, from the metal to the GUI. Just a dream of mine, and I'm not a developer so can't do much to bring it to life, but it definitely would be nice, and the desktop environment is about the biggest thing that can be made better in order to fulfil this. I'm telling y'all, we're ready for something better than Windows and Mac. Note that I'm just one person, and don't speak for every blind person and definitely don't speak for every disabled person. There are blind people and especially partially sighted people that love Windows and Apple and Android.
I'm not a developer so can't do much to bring it to life
Funding and advocacy is just as important as developer time :)
Well I mean, I think I donate like $20 a month to Gnome, ... or is that KDE... Both? I'll have to look. But anyway yeah that's about all I can do is donate and try to be there to help where I can. I can also do documentation and proofreading.
There was post made in recent weeks on the Gnome Accessibility blog about the work they'll doing over the next year. Sounds like it's being spearheaded by someone quite capable, with a strong vision:
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-...
Oh yes, I can't wait to see what comes of that.
Does the file picker support thumbnails yet?
Yes. Since Gnome 44.
Does it allow pasting in a path? The version current on Ubuntu 20.04 does not.
Didn't they actually implement it recently, to everyone's surprise?
Only for few filetypes
I'm surprised that Germany wouldn't prefer KDE.
I'm not sure preference is behind a grant like this I think many other factors come into the decision. But why would they prefer one over the other? Sorry didn't get your comment at all.
KDE was started by someone at a german university and would presumably have sensibilities suiting a german take on UX, whereas Gnome is a very simple mainstream one.
Hopefully all that money goes into making the GTK file picker better
I think I remember at some point reading that the end goal is to have file picker just be "a mode" in Nautilus instead of a separate thing
Edit: found the discussion I think I sawhttps://discourse.gnome.org/t/nautilus-as-file-picker/11605
I just read kde is getting hdr support. What about gnome?
Gnome is currently helping to design a standard HDR protocol for Wayland, they definitely won't add HDR support into the DE unless there is a standardized protocol for it (which is a good thing IMO)
Couldn't they have sponsored KDE at least
KDE receives a lot of money from commercial interests, Gnome not so much.
They should have given it to the XFCE folks.
Agreed :( It's a much better choice if they want to fund a "standard" desktop environment.
I wish there was more funding also to healthcare FOSS applications - both provider and user level ones. Even most DICOM viewer programs struggle to support all format quirks and many are outdated or abandoned.
I make fun of Gnome for stubborn decisions as much as the next person, but one thing they are really, really good at is organization. People like to question the usefulness of some positions at the Gnome Foundation - well, here's an example of what they do! The money probably didn't come from nowhere.
I'm also proud of my government for doing this - It's probably one of the coolest projects they do and some of the best allocated spending.
Just think what all this high-quality software would cost us as a society if it was sold or rented to us.
Love to see it. I know a part of the US government has been funding improvements to GDAL and QGIS. I feel like the bang for the buck in the long term could be far better than paying rent to the likes of Esri and MS.
Love it. Gnome is my favourite DE and it sure helps that now they have funds to make it even better
Let's all recall that the gnome project started out as an alternative to KDE using then-proprietary Qt library. Whether you like GNOME or not is not important. In fact, you should be MORE HAPPY that gnome gets money if you think it sucks. Open source needs competition too. Monopoly hurts everyone.
Perhaps they can finally add a window list to the top panel?
Good for them, hope this will help them hire some one with more motivation
The Sovereign Tech Fund is awesome!
We recently won funding as well (much smaller scale)https://stackable.tech/en/empowering-rust-projects/
This is definitely government spending I can get behind.
Wonder if they'd also invest in Linux.
To all crying wolf, saying this should have been donated to KDE or somewhere else, I suggest you go and set the example: Go and donate to some projects you use; Contribute patches; Incentive your employer to donate.
I'm not a Gnome user these days, but where I can, I donate to the projects I use.
This attitude from German government is great and sets a great example for us all.
What an awesome contribution from German government. Thank you! Unsurprisingly, there is a lot whiners here. Linux desktop scene is full of those circle jerks. Can't we just relax for a bit and be thankful for the fact that one of prominent Linux desktops got a nice little funding. No sir, complaining, and whining are the way of life around here.
Hoping that with all this money and accessibility initiative buttons in Adwaita will start looking like buttons again.
So do we get fractional scaling that works and Gnome 2 back for that money?
I grew up on Gnome 2 and I actually like gnome 3 a lot. Good choice. Kde is slower and buggier.
Fantastic! Public money, public code. Even if you don't like or use GNOME desktop, there is also the entire GNOME application and GTK ecosystem and that is used very widely.
Maybe we finally get working thumbnails
Government money? What strings are attached? I'm not familiar with the Sovereign Fund.
I understand that KDE is a clusterfuck, but giving the money to the American desktop environment instead of the European one is not really a good look.