this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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I think many people in here need to realise that most people don’t care about their OS, or Copilot or Recall or anything like that. I don’t know what the reason is for this but most people don’t change their OS.
Most people care about knowing how to use their OS, with as few changes as possible. If they use Windows at work, they will most likely get Windows if they have a computer at home.
If you have ever taught someone how to print and it took 5 minutes. You should know why they want it to be as close to the same at every computer they step up too.
Some people hate search functions but at the end of the day I use the keyboard for most things. So if I'm on a Windows machine, I want to be able to hit the windows key and start typing cmd, outlook, whatever. On a Mac cmd space, and start typing disk utility, or whatever it is. If I walk up to any Windows or Mac in the last 10 years and approach it that way it will work. If I walk up to a new Linux distro, I can only remember terminal, and then I have to glance around to figure out what browsers might be on it, what software names exist to figure out what I actually need for file formats etc.
If it is my home computer, that's fine. I will know what flavor of each application I have installed and have it set up in a way that is quick usage.
If I walk into a library and it had that, it likely would double the time needed to get done whatever it was I needed to do. People want uniform working devices across all work machines and public settings. It sucks that it is owned by the rich, but I don't see that changing overnight.
KDE offers a better user experience than MacOS or Windows (haven't used 11 though). It really took off in the last years.
By default it's similar to Windows but you can completely customize the look and feel without touching a terminal/console. It has inbuilt stores with user contributed themes, icons, backgrounds, widgets and extensions. Some of those can make KDE really shiny.
Then you can completley change the layout of the Desktop. Add panels (alias taskbars), add different buttons and functions to the panels change their positions. The widgets KDE comes with are very nice too. Especially the hardware monitor ones. I use HW-mon widgets for temperatures, diskspace, ram, network-activity e.g.
You can add as much virtual desktops as you want. You can activate desktop animations for things like switching between virtual desktops or window overviews. With an extension like Krohnkite you can automatically arrange your windows. You can change most keyboard combos for the various functions of the desktop.
KDE is based on the superior Qt programming framework and is therefore pretty optimized and most of the apps are pretty consistent in their design language unless they're written for the concurrent desktop environment Gnome whose apps can also be run under KDE.
Alt+F2 opens a KRunner overlay which is KDEs universal search for applications documents, web, even open tabs in browsers. You could also open the Kickstarter (Startmenu) via the Windows-key and enter the application name right away.
Browsernames are the same. Just search them via KRunner. The best way to install software for newbies is a package manager which is included on user-friendly distros like Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, Kububtu. You open the package-manager/appstore search for the application you want to install and click install. Huge Advantage: With every OS-Update all the software you installed via a package manager gets automatically updated along with the OS packages.
Generally if you come from Windows use KDE. There other desktop environments like Cinnamon or Mate similar to Windows but none come close to KDE. If you feel adventureous and want to learn a completely new desktop workflow use Gnome.
The first and most important choice is to choose a good Distribution. I'm using EndeavourOS and Arch. They are extremely good distros but maybe not the best for beginners (although Endeavour is not too bad with onboarding).
Fedora or OpenSUSE could ease the learning curve.