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0 pointsawilfox4y ago0 comments

I can do office and productivity tasks, but not in a way that interops with the tools that others use. It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't.

I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to the one that at least pretends to care about user privacy as a feature (Apple), rather than considering user privacy a bug (Google).

KDE has a lot of little nits, too, and it wore on me. Some of the ones I can think of are:

* When KWin crashed, the title bar font went from 12pt to 18pt. I could not fix this unless I ran some specific dbus command in Konsole and then immediately ran `kwin_x11 --replace` afterwards.

* Kickoff doesn't let you click "Applications" to go back to the beginning. I suggested it twice and even tried to implement it myself but they have layered everything so deep in QML I was lost. Apparently, they have redesigned the launcher again in 5.21, which released after I was gone, and now it looks like a bad copy of Windows 10 instead of being somewhat decent. Fabulous!

* KRunner took about four seconds to respond to input, even on a 16 CPU (Talos II) system.

There are plenty of things I loved about KDE too: Kate is amazing, Konsole is a fantastic terminal emulator, and I still use Tellico to this day – I even contributed the Homebrew formula so others can enjoy it on Mac OS. But the experience of using it as a full DE was just not all there for me.

0 comments

sofixa4y ago

> It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't

While i haven't had any issues with LibreOffice created or edited .docx, last week i discovered Pages tries to force you to use their proprietary format ( which of course nobody supports). If you open a .docx with Pages, make an edit and save it, it wants to save in .pages. You have to export it to .docx.

That's the kind of user hostile bullshit that rarely makes it to Linux-first software, and when it does ( e.g. GNOME disallowing desktop icons or snaps auto-updating) there are alternatives. If Apple don't want you to do something, you're out of luck. Best case scenario someone has made a (usually paid) app that implements a workaround (like Karabiner for basic key combination remappings).

awilfoxOP4y ago

I agree that it should save to the format it was previously saved in as a default, but it isn't necessarily user-hostile. "Normal" people coming over to a Mac probably want to use Pages, and might even appreciate the transparent conversion of their documents to the native format.

If the option to export was missing, that would be user-hostile IMO. Same with your example of GNOME disallowing desktop icons – the feature is missing, not just something you have to enable.