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Hector Martin: "And while we're stirring up ho…" - Treehouse Mastodon

 1 year ago
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Hector Martin: "And while we're stirring up ho…"Hector Martin@[email protected]

And while we're stirring up hornet's nests, I should mention why I chose KDE as the default desktop environment for Asahi.

For one, yes, it's my own personal choice, which obviously helps (it's easier for me to fix issues). But also, I've had *very* positive experiences interacting with the KDE community. Bugs get fixed, the developers care, I can send out PRs and they get merged. We've already gotten a small pile of bugs fixed and new features added to improve the experience on Macs, and several of us on the Asahi side often contribute back upstream or help guide discussions on how to approach certain issues.

The configurability of KDE is also nice, because it means we can ship tiny defaults changes to make the out of the box experience better, or at least document what are good options for Macs running Asahi. And it also means that I can feel comfortable recommending it to more people, since it *is* possible to tune it to work well for many different workflows (some other DEs are more opinionated, which makes some use cases easier and others impossible, so it's harder to recommend them as a general option).

Wayland support in KDE has been making huge strides over the past year. I had some showstopper issues that just aren't there any more. The KDE folks are generally on the ball when it comes to newer Wayland protocols and features. And, albeit using custom protocols, KDE also offers a lot of extra stuff that has otherwise gone "missing" in the Wayland transition, so us power users can make things work for us (e.g. using kscreen-doctor to script screen resolution/refresh rate changes in lieu of xrandr). Stuff like fractional scaling on XWayland just works these days.

Should everyone use KDE? Of course not. But if you're undecided, you don't particularly care, or you're open to change, I would encourage you to stick with KDE if you're trying out Linux on Apple Silicon. It gets that extra little bit of love, things are a bit more likely to work well, and we're more likely to directly work together with upstream when we run into problems.

I guess one way to put it is that KDE has been very welcoming to support for the platform, and that is something I really appreciate. Us developers need to care for users to get a good experience, and new platforms always create new issues or break old assumptions. Without good support from upstream projects like this, we'd never reach our goal of offering a polished experience on these machines.


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