KindaABigDyl

I'll give it a look

Bismuth for Plasma 5

Nah. I couldn't get behind Bismuth either. You had rigid ways you could arrange your windows with no way to adjust.

For instance, you can't get a layout like this with Bismuth (or any dynamic tilers that I know of, i.e. dynamic tilers aren't worth using):

---------------------------------------
| A                    | B            |
|                      |--------------|
|----------------------| C            |
| E        | F         |--------------|
|          |           | J    |   K   |
---------------------------------------

The closest in Bismuth would be using master and slave like:

---------------------------------------
| A                    | B            |
|                      |--------------|
|                      | C            |
|----------------------|--------------|
| E                    | J            |
|----------------------|--------------|
| F                    | K            |
---------------------------------------

Which isn't nearly as useful

I gave Plasma a genuine, honest try, both 5 and 6, and it was a complete let down.

But your attitude would make Pop Shell devs burn their own project down out of fear

Nah bc the Pop Shell devs have done an AMAZING job. The new COSMIC will make KDE and GNOME look like pet projects when it drops.

There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.

That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.

I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.

True, but with files, you really benefit from the speed that ext4 provides

and thinking “we can downsize”

And then they'll go out of business

I agree. We've let the standards for what is good drop.

I think it's mainly because the "just works" mentality has become infectious among engineers. It's one thing when just starting out, but as you learn more and gain experience you should care more.

People do the designing and architecture and programming just because it all pays well, not because they have a love for the craft.

I think the second, slightly less strong reason is because many engineers do not know how to effectively communicate with management when something will result in terribly written software and just do it anyway. Another skill I see less and less amongst my brethren.

This is already how the military works BC they lost the source code for ancient machines. They've gotta now hire reverse engineer researchers to help out

Try harder

Well yeah, but that's what standards are for. Look at Wayland. Outside of GNOME being a bit slow, all the major compositors and DEs like KDE and Hyprland have agreed to implement certain common desktop features that every desktop should have along with the Wayland protocol itself. Then they go their own way.

So it's not really as you say. There is unity in development beneath the heavy diversity.

But along the way, things that would be considered “requirements so basic we don’t even need to state them” are not met.

Except they are

Your desktop doesn’t have a cohesive look with colours and fonts mismatched in a way that no monolithic project would ever tolerate.

This is a bad example bc it's opposite to what you say. You haven't set a universal theme. Theming is commonly supported across desktops to some degree. You can get all your apps to have the same look unless an application forces its own (which would happen even in a homogenous Linux world). Some desktops will do it for you, but if they don't it's still as simple as install a universal theme, apply the Gtk version, and apply the Qt version. My understanding is soon it will be even simpler once a few more Wayland standards get adopted.

We already have the best ecosystem. It literally could not improve functionally

Ext4 is, afaik, the fastest as it's the most understood

Btrfs has compression and you can make snapshots to roll back to if something goes wrong (not necessary on immutable distros or NixOS tho)

There are many other options, but I've only ever had a need for those two

The problem with that is simply that what counts as good will vary from person to person.