Hi there! I’ve been using Aurora for probably a year now. Mostly I love it. From the first day there’s been a constant niggle. A year on I can’t let go of of it, so here’s my vent post.
Why is Aurora so GNOMEified? It’s spinkled with GNOME apps when there are Plasma alternatives.
For example, Flatseal and Warehouse are included which are both unnecessary as Plasma provides Flatpak Permissions in the System Settings:
Déjà Dup is installed when Kup is Plasma native and should be available from the System Settings (though the package isn’t included in the Aurora image). Pika Backup is too included, which is also a GNOME app.
Terminal is included and default when Konsole is Plasma native.
Why does it matter? Coming from macOS I appreciate consistency. I’ve always tried my best to stay clear of GTK apps in Plasma, because they never adhere to the KDE Human Interface Guidelines and generally look out of place.
Perhaps there are more examples and I’d be willing to make a complete list if anyone thinks it’s worth rooting out some GNOMEness from Aurora.
It might not seem like a biggie, but I’m not sure how GNOME folks would feel about core GNOME apps being replaced or accompanied by Plasma apps.
This is one of the most annoying thing about Linux desktop. Every desktop “spin” doing its own HIG. When someone wants to change spin he or she is “required” to change whole software stack. How terrible is this… Instead changing spin should be simple it gets super time consuming finding similar but HIG compatible apps.
I don’t know how difficult it is to do some huge shift in mind and when Gnome like app starts on KDE, it is displayed as KDE look alike and vice versa.
P.S. I have red the new Cosmic desktop blog/video and they are creating whole new stack of applications one more time… and every spin is duing this. What a waste of resources.
This my comment is little bit off topic, but I just want to express my biggest furstration with Linux desktop.
Incidentally, you could try using Fedora Kinoite or the Universal Blue Kinoite images (the latter the better, IMO) and backport Aurora’s good stuff there for a genuine and wonderful KDE experience
I understand your pain! Lack of GUI consistency has been an irritant since I began using Linux about 20 years ago.
I agree with inffy. Warehouse and Flatseal are better, since the KCM component for Flatpak permissions does not have all their features. Mission Center as well. I’ve never been a fan of the System Monitor (nor its predecessor, KSysGuard), and Mission Center has a better and simpler UI.
Ptyxis has no equivalent in KDE, since it natively supports containers ― which Konsole doesn’t. I like that it picks up distroboxes, even when they just got created:
So, what to do? I went back to GNOME (Ubuntu) last year because of GUI consistency. There are a lot more GNOME apps than KDE ones. So if all your apps are GNOME apps, then GUI consistency is not a problem.
But I missed KDE’s customization features. So I have been looking these past few days into how to make sure GNOME apps use the same window decorations and title bar size as Plasma’s.
What I found is that the GNOME project does not seem to be interested in making sure their apps don’t look out of place in other desktop environments, according to comments. Not surprising, considering their very opiniated Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
My conclusion?
I let it go. There’s alway an app that ignores the OS’s GUI anyway, the browser being first among many, and Visual Studio Code, Zoom, etc.
Yeah, have to agree. Firefox, imho, is maybe the worst offender. It’s installed in nearly every linux desktop, but sticks to its own “look and feel”. So you have to go through all its themes and try to find one that kinda fits in with your Plasma theme. Or roll your own I guess, if you are so inclined and know how to do it. I don’t. But there are many more. You’d think it would be easier for the developers to just point to the global theme settings rather than have to program in all their own stuff. Or not. I don’t know, I’m not a programmer.
Lack of GUI consistency has been an irritant since I began using Linux about 20 years ago.
