My last toot on this subject, about the guy asking for the icon in cornflower blue, was out of order to the KDE fans and I apologise.

I should have said Kornflower KBlue

Moving from Mate to KDE feels like going back in time to the Bad Old Days when you had to know how Linux worked in order to use it.

Like there are some things about it that I like, but reliability-wise this is just a massive step backwards. Every problem I search for ends up with "Oh yeah, that's a known bug, should be fixed soon (last post: Nov 2021)"

Like even the text editor has bonkers defaults. If I type Fri and then hit tab, you could assume that I meant to type Fri and then move the cursor to the next tab column, not type something else and then go hunting around in the menus for the option to not overwrite what I'm typing with what it thinks I should be typing.

Even the bloody "Configure Kate" option just straight-up disappeared from the Settings menu. I went hm, maybe I'm misremembering where it was, nope, restart Kate and it's back again, damn thing's gaslighting me.

It's not very good.

You know what I need from a text editor?

A one-click button right in the menu bar to change from a dark theme to a light theme and vice versa. I do go outside sometimes y'know.

Also, another one-click button, call it Typewriter Mode - when it's turned off then the editor can try to help, change what it thinks are your mistakes, add two " when you only typed one and so forth, but when Typewriter Mode is enabled, the editor just shows the letters you type.

Like, here's the thing about KDE vs Mate, and this might also be the thing about linux in general, and hell maybe this is the thing about software and computers in general, but here it is anyway.

Mate is DONE. The software is finished. And it FEELS finished, in the same way that one of my old pinball machines feels finished; it does what it's supposed to, and no more. Sure they put out a new version every two years, but what changes between those versions is more akin to my putting new rubbers on or changing the balls. It's maintenance.

KDE keeps changing, keeps evolving, keeps getting new features. So it's never done.

So it's always, perpetually, half-finished.

The only time a tool should be half-finished is when it's half-finished, as in you're actually going to finish the other half, not get three-quarters finished and then scrap the first quarter.

If you handed me a half-finished socket driver, I'd look at it with a 😑 face and say "Ah. Yeah. Cool."

Or maybe "Kool," IDK

Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga X1 Gen 4 on Kubuntu 24.04, open Krita and draw a big fast circle on the screen: circle finishes drawing about a second after I pull the pan away. Same in Wayland as in X11.

2014-era generic HP desktop with half the CPU power and no GPU because it won't fit in the case, but running on Ubuntu Mate: circle appears instantly like I'm drawing on paper.

Same Thinkpad with Ubuntu Mate running on a Ventoy flash drive: again, circle appears instantly like I'm drawing on paper.

So clearly SOMETHING's screwy with KDE, anyone wanna take a stab before I heck this thing off and go back to Mate for another four to six years?

I wish I could just use Ubuntu Mate on this, I've been very happily bimbling along with that since the early teens on my other machines, but it became a thing during the Monitor Dark Ages and it doesn't cope well with a combination of high resolutions and small screens.

(back in the day if you were gonna rock 1600x1200 you'd be doing it on like a 19" or 21" monitor, and laptop screens were lower resolution)

A big resolution on a small screen is I guess called high DPI now or hidpi. So MATE's hidpi choices are, render everything normally (text is absolutely tiny) or double everything in size (everything is massive and what's the point of having a high resolution screen).

Kubuntu gave me more options, letting me choose like 125% or 150% or 175% scaling etc, and about 125% fit this laptop pretty well.

But I could choose between two compositing thingies, X11 or Wayland.

On X11, 125% scaling worked really well but screen rotation was borked (no auto-rotate and the tablet/touchscreen didn't rotate with the display lol), and the touchscreen controls were crap.

On Wayland, scaling didn't work properly (everything went blurry) but touchscreen controls worked.

So I spent two months deciding whether I was gonna use Krita or Anything Else and booting up to either Wayland or X11 each time lol