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I have an old box running Gnome on Ubuntu. I did a massive update hoping they finally fixed some of my gripes with it.
still no right click -> create text file in the file browser
Welp, I’ll update again in two years
KDE forever. I don’t understand anyone who still uses Gnome.
without features that few people are going to use
Every KDE user has shaken the mouse once just to see how big it gets, this is a critical feature!
yeah, I have a 65" TV connected and it gets comically large. I wouldn’t be nearly as productive without it.
I knew the cursor got bigger but I didn’t know it would keep growing.
It all depends on the stimulation.
if your cursor enlarges for over 4 hours please see a doctor
That way they can admire it too
It jumps up quickly to a bigger size and then keeps increasing more slowly if you keep shaking it.
I’ve never even tried this, but now I’m gonna have to give it a whirl.
Super useful for if, like myself, you lose track of your cursor quite often.
“He can’t see us if we don’t move.”
Except that I usually AM moving it…just sometimes ADHD brain goes:
OMFG! WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE!
And then I have no idea where the cursor is even when I’m moving it. I had no idea about the cursor enlargement effect until one day my mouse ran out of battery and wasn’t waking up fast enough, so I was clicking and moving it back and forth really fast…got a bit of a fright when it suddenly got several times larger.
I’d honestly would expect to have a mouse locator. I think on Windows that was the alt key or something like that.
My setup doesn’t have anything like that, but I also see roughly where the mouse is since my tilingmanager gives focus to the window the cursor is over
Doesn’t work for me in KDE anymore???
Edit:
It stopped working because I switched back to X11, it only works in Wayland, but I had to switch back, I think it was because some hot keys don’t work and can’t be configured under Wayland. Or at least couldn’t when I configured my system about a year ago.The secret reason Wayland is superior.
At last we found a killer feature for its users!
Unfortunately I had to switch back to X11 because Plasma on Wayland lacked a feature I need.
Well, now X11 lacks a feature you want…
That was the thing I texted my friends about when I started using KDE. 😄 I loved it, perfect self-affording feature.
Now that I think about it, I should shake the cursor in KDE more.
Beeeg
I use it probably ten times a day!
Yeah, I had not realized it was growing and growing further. I just played with it. It got huge.
Now there’s no coming back. If you take away that feature, be ready for WAR!
I tried KDE once (normally a GNOME user) and I couldn’t stop shaking the mouse to see how absurdly large I could make it. 😂
I sometimes do it at work out of boredom
I did it often until i learned it crashes some games :(
KDE wins again
Kde’s mouse growing big is actually useful though.
Ever lose your mouse? Just a wiggle- which is an action I take anyway to find it- and it gets easier to find, for a moment.
Lets me make the mouse tiny.
Yes, and the low-resolution pointer when you do this excessively is just unacceptable. I’m glad they’re finally addressing this pressing concern.
The just added a high res image or whatever rather than scaling it up. Someone probably fixed it in their spare time.
What? Why isn’t it just a vector graphic?
Because it uses the XCursor format, which is a quite old standard. Getting apps to switch to a newer standard that has vector graphics is already hard enough. Getting them to do so without burning your GPU is basically impossible.
No it doesn’t it just uses metadata compatible with XCursor themes, see e.g. this discussion.
The fix was needed because the render code just used to have a maxScale: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/9176
You have to re-render vector graphics when you zoom in. Otherwise they have the same pixels stored in memory as when they were first opened.
You are always viewing a bitmap image because you have a bitmap display and it makes sense they don’t load a full size cursor into memory to get rendered.
I’d be curious as to if they’ve rendered a full size image to sit in memory, or re-render the vector image directly as it grows.
Given the way games work re-rendering would be trivial for any computer running KDE so I’d take that bet.
They re-render it, but that used to be capped with a max size: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/9176
Theoretically speaking, you could draw directly from vector data instead of generating a texture as an intermediate step. Or you could use a signed distance field to sample from instead of a regular bitmap.
Would it be absolutely bonkers and utterly incompatible with any legacy software? Suuure, but you would get a perfectly crisp cursor after all that wiggling.
I would assume they replaced it with an SVG that is rasterized on demand instead of a very high resolution rasterized image.
In terms of coding effort, just replacing a PNG is the easiest, but it’s also the least correct solution, imo.
I went and read the commit descriptions.
Previously it was using whatever cursor the theme had loaded and just scaled it up. Now it references the full set of resources for the theme and picks the appropriate one for the size.
So they went with the most correct third option: defer to the standard set by a more authoritative source. :)
Perfect. Thanks for being curious enough to actually look 😜
KDE - We added a neat accessibility feature.
Gnome - THIS GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR AND ANYONE ASKING FOR IT SHOULD FEEL BAD!
That’s coincidentally also what I do when I can’t find my dick
It’s also a nice time waster to try and see how big you can get it before whatever it is you’re waiting for is done
I turned it off. I never need it or want it. But I won’t hate anyone else who uses it like gnome devs do.
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
If KDE ran a restaurant, if you shake the menu it’ll grow exponentially in size until it fills the restaurant.The gnome type of restaurant is called prix fixe, and it very much exists.
That type of restaurant tends to be among the best in the world.
Which makes sense. If each day you offer one choice you can make that one really good.
But for someone who doesn’t like that specific food it doesn’t work. They’d prefer having different options.
Kind of similar with gnome and KDE.
The difference is, most people go to a restaurant to eat food, so the restaurant can get really good at making food that humans eat.
People use a computer system to do all kinds of things. It is a lot harder to make one choice that will please everybody.
Yes, and 99.9% of the meals you eat in your life will not be there. Because it is either prohibitively expensive and elitist gourmet BS. Or it is trivially easy to offer some choice when it is not elitist gourmet BS.
Even at a more mundane restaurant, only having one meal for each course to worry about drastically simplifies life for the entire back line, plus it makes life easier for the chef or whoever does the ordering as well.
Even low fixed price day-menu restaurants in my town offer some basic choice or variation. People have food limitations and preferences.
I’ve been to a restaurant in Korea where you pay per person and they just serve you one main dish (you have no choice) and like 8 unlimited side dishes
It was about $5 and you had a choice of topping up or not. It was great, actually
Cool, having choices is great, like you get to choose the side dishes and the toppings. That sounds awesome.
So then don’t go to a prix fixe restaurant or check the menu beforehand. There’s no need to be this bitchy about it.
But I do go there. And when I tell them I don’t eat mayonnaise due to health concers they understand and offer an accommodation. The waiter most definitely doesn’t berate me or scuff at me. Nor do they refuse my patronage.
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
And if you want to add salt and pepper to your meal, there’s a convenient store across the street that sells salt and pepper shakers. No, the Gnome restaurant will not be providing them.
I’m a GNOME user and extensions are pretty easy to install. I use the wiggly extension for the mouse shake to grow thing, but unfortunately it has a maximum size of 256 which is plenty big enough to find it but you can’t shake it forever until it grows bigger than the screen. GNOME 0 KDE 1 🥲
People hate on Gnome but I think it’s actually great UI. Lots of hardcore Linux users shit on the windows UI but insist that Windows 7 UI clones are somehow peak UX. Gnome is more similar to Mac, but I find even easier to use. The super key is money on Gnome.
Yeah I tried KDE for a while, people talked about how customisable it is that you can do anything. But I never found a way to recreate that super key experience.
And those extensions are easily borked due to some random update. Because reasons. Been there done that. Still waiting for my “Gnome Borked My Favorite Extension” tee shirt.
The Gnome waiter just stares in shock and confusion when you mention that you have nut allergy
Are you implying GNOME is the ableist desktop environment? It might be even though it has lots of accessibility features.
Implication or not. GNOME is hit or miss with accessibility features. They’ve done some stuff, but they could still do more at no particular greater cost to them other than a shift in attitude. Which…you know… GNOME.
I don’t need this feature even a little bit.
In lieu of this, I have consistently used this feature at least twice a week ever since I found it by accident. It adds a little joy to my day.
I think it’s more “I found a thing that’s technically wrong and fixed it” and that shit pays dividends down the road when technology changes and people forget this was ever an issue. They solved it now so they don’t have to solve it later.
Calling Gnome simple and straightforward is quite a funny joke actually
But ar least it’s without features that
fewpeople are going to use, so there’s that.
i agree kde is awesome
The massive cursor during shake is literally what sold two of my friends on Garuda getting them off Windows 😂 idk why I guess the wimsy factor is difficult to account for.
The cube thing from compiz had a similar effect back in the earlier years of Ubuntu.
Compiz was insanely cool, it was better than anything we have today.
I use burn my windows and desktop cube with Gnome extensions. Kwin still supports many of these effects too. It’s fun to see people’s reaction.
Some of the effects have become mainstream. But there is no comparison to the real Compiz feel.
For instance the original Emerald windows dresser was amazing, and zooming with the scroll wheel combined with for instance the left win key was extremely useful. The smoothness and configurability of the cube was crazy cool.What is available today is hollow shells of what we had.
Yes I use wobbly windows in KDE, but Compiz is 100x > Plasma.Writing fire on the desktop and window animations like burn up on exit were also awesome.
KDE cube always feels like watching a b-movie version starwars. Nailed the wobbly windows though.
Compiz and cairo-dock is peak nostalgic linux for me. Tux surfing around the dock and all.
Oh boy I’m getting all nostalgic, it’s 20 years ago it came out now!
Yeah, Compiz and Emerald were the goat!
Compiz was Da Bomba! But I still get my Cube and exploding windows in KDE
Unfortunately KDE still has serious shortcomings compared to what was possible with Compiz.
For instance hot keys cannot be bound to mouse keys. Which is extremely annoying here 20 years later that it can’t.
Until recently you couldn’t even bind them to numpad keys! Because QT didn’t support it. So it was the same for ALL QT programs.
I like KDE it is a decent desktop, but even today it is not as good as Compiz was 20 years ago.
We still have Compiz today, you can still run it.
Thanks and yes I know.
But AFAIK it was mostly limited to Ubuntu Unity and XFCE for a long time, and support became shaky.
I actually looked it up just before, and it seems Mint has support for it, but looking at the emerald themes it looks nothing like it did back in the day where it was new and revolutionizing. Also I’m lazy, I don’t care to fiddle so much with my computer anymore.
Yeah, I love just shaking the mouse when I’m bored or waiting for something to finish downloading.
Sometimes I jiggle the mouse just to see how big I can make it
Wait until they find it you can make the windows wiggle when you shake them.
I discovered this when configuring a new machine the other day, great fun and I was sad to disable it when I discovered it made moving and resizing windows much more fiddly :'(
Always the first thing I enable.
Well, my first thought was also “I need to try it” so they are not alone
I have the pipes screensaver and space cadet pinball (I use Arch btw)
gnome was horrible to use, even simplest things that make life easier were missing. fucking TRAY ICONS so you can more easily access some running programs?!
made me feel like its system for bunch of elitist that can act snooty when scrubs like me cant handle their minimalist perfection.
Tray icons? You had to use Gnome Tweaks for the most basic things, like adjusting fonts.
i dont understand who likes to use gnome, its just plain awful and even if you customize it there is always a chance update breaks some crucial part of your ui
It’s somewhat decent on touch screens. I use it on an old convertible Lenovo. But on my main system i still prefer KDE.
for touchscreens i can understand it, on those all the ui stuff that normally makes life easier doesnt help that much
Ehh, I loved Gnome with the bottom panel hidden and tiling manager installed via gnome shell extensions. KDE just feels like it hasn’t substantially changed in ~15 years and just feels dated and like a halfway attempt at recreating Aero. I’ve moved over to Cosmic and I yearn for my gnome days but it’s getting better with each release.
why change something if it works though?
i took a look at cosmic and it looks nice, maybe i’ll try it too at some point. How much do i need to think about stuff not working on it? I can play and run what I want on mint with steam and wine, is it the same with distros that use cosmic?
For me the pieces that didn’t work were all the customizations I had with gnome shell namely around “quake-style” terminal, cursors/themes, and some app panels like tailscale. I’ve been able to resolve 90% of those issues but it took some time and was frustrating but that comes with using anything new
GNOME’s design philosophy is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”.
KDE’s is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature… but it would be really cool, fuck it, we
ballcube”.fuck it, we
ballcubeThis is KDE we’re talking about, so it would definitely be “fuck it, we kube”.
Klitoris
Kdefile
Can there even be life without the lovely and amazing Kube? It would certainly not be worth living.
“we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”
How? Trust me bro! Users hate features, they get all confused and stuff. That’s why nobody should ever choose anything, the OS should just be shit forever. We also get paid by Microsoft and IBM coincidentally.
We also get paid by Microsoft and IBM coincidentally.
Microsoft and IBM both donate to the Linux Foundation itself. They are both platinum members who regularly give them funds for all kinds of projects. This is really idiotic gotcha attempt.
A donation isn’t quite the same as pay (as in salary)! I’m thinking of Miguel de Icaza and Lennart Poettering, for example.
Is GNOME Microsoft’s controlled opposition?
Well who needs systrays anyways? While we’re at it, let’s remove theming support too! Surely nobody would miss that feature?
I really miss KDE. Sadly my experience with new major versions (5, 6) tends to be that plasma is unstable for daily use for at least a year or two. I’ll be back once things settle down a bit.
Plasma 6 has been nothing but great for me! Not a single crash ever since it released. It’s nothing like the beginning of Plasma 5
Sadly my problems are with buggy applications, and hdr (more of a monitor issue than plasma itself). I’m hoping these get patched as more people yell at bad wayland support and poorly implemented hdr.
Somehow, under GNOME things “just work”. Or at least it doesn’t take down the entire session.
“It implements client-side decorations, or it gets the hose again!”
Thats why “easy to use” is very subjective.
Gnome is sure easy but if things mess up and i need to reinstall? I had to hunt and reinstall my extensions and enable the right settings. That could take like 30 mins or more, after reinstalling the distro.
In minimal setup like sway? I can literally git clone and then stow all my dot files. No more than 5 mins. I could do it with 10 beers at 3am in.
I just have a bash with all my extensions , takes like 2 seconds to run
KDE remains the superior choice.
I really love this feature, it gives me something to do while waiting for pages to load in Firefox.
When I connect to my living room TV, I can have a cursor over three feet tall.
My daughter holds the current household record by getting the cursor size so big that the whole screen is blank.
Blank screen from cursor shake goes hard.
