After my previous rant about how crap Gnome/Ubuntu/Mint/Mate is, I decided to go back to the only desktop that seemed semi-viable a decade ago.

KDE.

Observe:

I actually have most of the day-to-day things running, Skype, Telegram, Teams, VSCode and everything.

Taking this screenshot was still a bit of a mission, since I can’t directly paste the image yet, since KDE’s snipping tool still needs some tweaking.

Konsole, the KDE taskbar, keyboard bindings, autocomplete, everything just really works much better than I thought it would.

It has still taken me a day of tweaking and getting the environment sorted out to “sane” defaults, but it has certainly been a breeze compared to <insert gnome style desktop manager>, and <sorry-for-yourbugreport-but-we-don’t think-this-is-how-a-desktopshould-work-wontfix> style responses.

I tried KDE about 10 years ago, and it was the closest I came to a “windows like” experience on the desktop. I’m glad to see that “ze germans” has made it even better. KDE Plasma fucking rocks, very closely to the Win64 desktop.

Now, if only Kubuntu installed with some defaults (and I’m literally talking basic config files here) that made it seem 99% native to windows users, then Linux would stand a chance at the desktop.

The fact that Ubuntu has flip-flopped between toolkits, window managers, task managers and environments for the last decade has done them no good.

Kubuntu, I must say, has finally convinced me that there is hope.

As I’m typing this, I have basically everything I need, and as an added bonus — lazarus-ide to work on a small side project to talk to my inverter. I’ve forgotten how low-level Pascal/Delphi style coding can be, and best yet, I can compile my project for 10 different targets. I haven’t written Pascal code in two decades, yet I can see why I loved it back in the day. Getting back in the saddle has been a bit of a <alt-tab-google-fest>, but as things are coming back, I can honestly say. Fuck C, and it’s crappy string manipulation.

Pascal is strangely enough as close to the “machine” as C is, but a little bit more safe. It was great for doing day-to-day coding, and I even coded graphical demos using inline assembler in Pascal. All of that still remains today, and is surprisingly still utterly usable.

Side note: I was considering using Mono/.NET for my inverter application until I found out how horrible THAT stuff still is… Dabbling the application up in lazarus and Pascal basically took me a day, and I’m rusty at Pascal.

And here we are, freepascal, and an IDE that was started in 1999 kicking the ass out of any lowlevel+combined GUI platform development environment I can find. And I’m actually doing it on a Linux desktop environment that only makes me gag and swear every 5th minute, instead of every 10 seconds.

I’m talking RS232 to an inverter, bluetooth to my batteries, bitflipping and doing lowlevel stuff, and I STILL have a good old easy Form/Widget style environment to tie it all together.

This literally took me about 12 hours to code, and like I said my Pascal is beyond rusty.

I will revise my previous rant, and say that if you’re not running KDE on a Linux desktop you are either a sadist, or a martyr.