this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Because we're sadly not collecting enough and actually useful telemetry. I think we know from telemetry that a big majority has double click set, but we don't know why (default setting vs user chose it explicitly).
And we can't easily add such things without breaking user trust. We need a new telemetry system that's more useful and extendable, but doing that is a lot of effort that noone has put in yet.
No, we're setting it as a default because a bunch of people that are closer to the users than us decided to deviate from the upstream default. That's a super clear sign that we're doing it wrong
I've been a happy customer since 1.2. I even stuck with it through 4.0 which was a little traumatic 8) I like choice - lots of it and KDE delivers that in spades.
Ah okay. I don't get to choose anyways, because I don't currently use KDE on my main desktop. But I'm one of the people who reverts all those settings first thing after install. It's just that it sometimes gets annoying once I need 20 minutes to configure my desktop environment and answer many questions about privacy telemetry and so on. And disable all the background stuff like updates on shutdown, the desktop search and whatever gets in the way all the times. At this point I could just use windows if that's what I like or use those 20mins to learn to configure some tiling window manager.
I was kind of okay the way it was in the olden days. You just got what the developers liked most. No telemetry involved. Often times that was quite alright. Some times they followed some design philosophy anyways (or just 'ripped off' the MacOS UX). But that also had downsides. And I get it that some people need their computers to do a specific job. And they don't want to learn lots of new concepts just to use their tool. Maybe a bit like when I sit in front of an Apple keyboard and can't find half of the keys. Maybe we shouldn't listen to what I like. Maybe we should have an onboarding dialogue that plainly asks you if you prefer UX concept A or B. I don't really know. But not for just this one thing.
You're 100% right with the last argument. If most of the distros or all of your users configure something a certain way. This should tell you something.
I just wanted to say, I like diversity. Not every UX has to look and feel exactly the same. And we don't always need to go for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, something like that could be great - personalize the defaults for the person actually using the computer when it gets set up, instead of having only one set of defaults for the masses.