Random underrated Windows Plasma feature: each application pinned next to the start button automatically gets a shortcut (Meta+1, Meta+2, …, by default) to either launch the app, or bring the existing instance of the app to the foreground.
That feature came in with Windows 98, I think… or more to the point with Active Desktop, part of IE4, that could be installed on Win95 or NT4. That was the first appearance of the Quick Launch bar; this is a QL-bar feature.
This is the big problem of all the Windows-like Linux desktops in general. They seem to be implemented by people who, AFAICS, did not know very well the original system that they were copying. The result is, poor copies.
Bad copies, combined with people don’t know how to work the original well let alone the copy, results in dissatisfaction… resulting in numerous forks, all doing different bits of the same original well and the rest poorly.
Result 1: lots of indifferent desktops
Result 2, following from that: teams throwing the whole thing in the bin and starting over. GNOME 3, Budgie, Elementary/Pantheon, etc. And lots of tiling WMs.
One of the selling points of Plasma is that it has a setting for just about anything you can think of. The defaults for everything are just a combination of what most people seem to find pleasant, or are used to from elsewhere, or maybe are used to from previous versions.
If you’re coming from elsewhere and want to make things the way you are used to, there’s a treasure trove of settings available. You can spend days tweaking.
To say that there are ‘paper cuts’ with the defaults seems a little harsh. I don’t believe it’s difficult to find the settings or to change them. ‘Unfamiliar defaults’ would seem a little more charitable.
I think paper cuts sound too painful compared to the level of actual pain one would experience changing the defaults via the very capable Settings app.
For the screenshots, I like the separation of modes by shortcut that it has. PrtScr just opens the utility, Meta+PrtSct captures the current window, Shift+PrtScr captures entire screen and Meta+Shift+PrtScr allows you to select the region for capture.
I know that feature from basically every dedicated screenshot app I’ve ever used (mostly on windows), the problem is more that they never standardized which means what :/ But yeah, great if that comes by default.
Can sympathise with these papercuts as well (as someone who’s currently on Gnome who has tried KDE Plasma a bunch of times in the past)
meta+up doesn’t fullscreen the application, it moves it to the upper half of the screen instead. All the other environments I use fullscreen using this keyboard combination.
The default window management keybindings always throw me off! I remember also have the same issue with XFCE (Can’t recall). It’s something I always immediately change.
The application launcher is slow to pop up. Feels like this should just always be there. But I have the feeling that a lot of animations have a half second delay before they start animating.
Likewise, in the past I’ve always sped up the default animations
That being said, maybe it’s time for me to give it another go. Maybe I’ll throw KDE neon on a live USB.
I think there’s some context that I don’t have here – how are these “papercuts”? These are just default settings. Maybe they’re not the default settings that the author expects but that’s true of every default setting. Someone’s gonna be surprised if meta+up does fullscreen the application, or if the default animations were any faster or slower. The default binding to maximize a window in KDE has been Meta + PgUp for a very long time now. Changing it would be surprising to a lot of existing KDE users.
(Edit: I mean, I’m all for defaults that aren’t potentially disruptive, like, yes, it’s probably a bad idea to have the user opt in for displaying exit confirmation dialogs. But “good defaults” is not quite the same as “the defaults $someuser expects”. Everyone will find a default setting to disagree with, and changing that default setting won’t make the application any better, it will just piss off somebody else).
In fact, I suspect that what the author is describing might be the least surprising in the grand scheme of things – it sounds a bit like the behaviour in Windows 11, which despite its rocky start has like an order of magnitude more users than all of the Linux desktops combined. Starting from an unmaximized window, Meta+Up will first maximize it. Then, if the window is already maximized, it will move it to the upper half of the screen – at which point Meta+Down will first unmaximize it, then minimize it.
I think there’s some context that I don’t have here – how are these “papercuts”? These are just default settings. Maybe they’re not the default settings that the author expects but that’s true of every default setting
I agree. I think myself and the author are just set in our ways and expect certain things to work in a way KDE plasma wasn’t designed to it.
I think given enough time I could adapt to the defaults or gradually migrate things over.
I think given enough time I could adapt to the defaults or gradually migrate things over.
I mean… you wouldn’t need any of that, every default setting mentioned in the article can be changed.
For reasons that go back to some obscure Windows 98 utility program, back when I used Linux, my keybindings for Maximize/Minimize were Meta-[ and Meta-’ respectively, and I didn’t use any animations because I have a large monitor so animations made me dizzy. There’s no way you use something long enough to write a review and not run into the options to change keybindings and UI animation speed in the Control Center.
I think there’s some context that I don’t have here – how are these “papercuts”? These are just default settings.
If a team is implementing a Windows-like desktop, then they should use Windows-like shortcuts.
If they don’t, that’s a failure.
I am not going to start digging into settings and remapping them all, no. I am going to junk that desktop and go find one that uses the correct shortcuts.
Not out of any loyalty to Windows, because I have none. I moved away from that OS over 20 years ago now.
But because keystrokes are part of UI and if they implement someone else’s UI then I expect them to implement all of it and to do it right and not just reinvent random bits on the basis that they didn’t understand them.
This applies 100% to Microsoft itself as well. Windows Vista and 7 broke various bits of the Windows design. Win8 broke them more, there was a mass rebellion, and Win10 put poor copies of some of them back. Then because the poor copies are poor and broken, Win11 replaces those too.
The standard Windows keystroke since Windows 2.0 (and I only say that because I never used Windows 1.0) is Alt-Space for the window control menu, then x to maximise, n to minimize, c to close.
Any desktop that gets that wrong is one I am not going to use.
I am not sure how to answer any of this without – justifiably! – incurring the “unkind” flag but maybe it’s worth re-examining some of the assumptions behind your post, such as:
That the KDE team is trying to implement a Windows-like desktop
That “Windows-like” means “Windows 2.0”-like and not whatever the latest couple of Windows versions are
That these shortcuts are “correct”
That “the standard Windows keystrokes since Windows 2.0” are still “the standard Windows keystrokes” ;-)
That your personal preferences are any more important than the personal preferences of other users
I miss my favourite shortcuts from the 1990s, too, but I don’t think it’s worth getting angry that the world has moved on, especially not since it takes like five clicks to get them back…
That the KDE team is trying to implement a Windows-like desktop
This is demonstrable and undeniable. Note that before Win95 it didn’t really have a desktop, so Windows-like means Win95-and-later like.
That “Windows-like” means “Windows 2.0”-like and not whatever the latest couple of Windows versions are
It doesn’t, I didn’t imply it, and I didn’t meant to imply it.
The point I was making was that the keystrokes are not Win95-specific and predate that product by a decade. And they still work now.
Which is why Windows is, among other things, still the best OS for blind users. Consistent keyboard controls matter.
That these shortcuts are “correct”
Copy the design, copy all the design and copy it right.
Or devise something better. That’s fine too. Or copy a different design.
That “the standard Windows keystrokes since Windows 2.0” are still “the standard Windows keystrokes” ;-)
They are. What few things were set then still work.
That your personal preferences are any more important than the personal preferences of other users
The point I was making is that these were not just my prefs.
I miss my favourite shortcuts from the 1990s, too, but I don’t think it’s worth getting angry that the world has moved on, especially not since it takes like five clicks to get them back…
I’m not giving it 5 clicks. I liked KDE 1 a lot, KDE 2 was a bit of a mess, and KDE 3 so bad it drove me away forever.
That “the standard Windows keystrokes since Windows 2.0” are still “the standard Windows keystrokes” ;-)
They are. What few things were set then still work.
On my Windows 11 machine, Alt + Space does something completely different now. I’m preeeetty sure Alt + Space hasn’t opened the control menu for several years now, but I don’t have a Windows 10 machine at hand to check.
So what should a desktop do to match the definition of “Windows-like”? Use the same defaults that Windows actually uses today, or the ones that you remember from twenty years ago?
OK. With some irritation, because I really do not just make this stuff up, I just went and tested.
Newly installed Win11 from 2 days ago on brand new hardware. Open an Explorer window with 1 click on the taskbar.
Alt-space X, maximises. Alt-space, M moves.
It works exactly as I said it did, using the exact same methods.
I do not know what you did but I stand by what I said.
I think it should use what Windows $LATEST actually uses today which is the same thing as what it used in 1985, which is exactly what I said and was the point of my argument.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you don’t know why it’s like it is, either go find out, and if you can’t be bothered, then assume there’s a good reason.
If someone is going to implement a Windows-like desktop, then I feel that step 1 is learning to use the Windows desktop, properly, which includes keyboard controls for instances such as [a] when no pointing device is available [b] when it is present but doesn’t work due to, e.g., driver issues [c] when the user can’t use a pointing device because of motor control or sensory issues.
I have written about this, but Lobste.rs won’t let me submit my own articles to the site, because the Lobste.rs admins or whatever disapprove of a nearly 30 year old tech journal and feel it’s not serious enough.
Examples which are not fully desktops but window managers:
FVWM95, IceWM, JWM.
There are so few desktops which are not Windows-like that it’s a short list:
GNOME 3; Unity; Pantheon; ROX.
Arguably Budgie but it’s easily reconfigured to be one, but then again, LXDE, MATE and Xfce can be configured to be Mac-like.
But Unity, MATE, Xfce and others still respect and use the Windows style control keys. It’s KDE, the oldest of them all (Xfce is older but was not FOSS in early versions; it was a CDE clone using XForms).
Get it right, and get it right by default. By all means allow reconfiguration.
As my article says, I really want there to be more variety and choice here, and I list a set of examples.
But for now, there isn’t, and I feel that is a bad thing, for usability and for accessibility to people who don’t or can’t use the standard control methods.
P.S. as I have also written about nearly a decade ago, the Win9x design was original MS IP developed de novo by them.
Every desktop that resembles Win9x is the way it is because the authors knew Win9x.
There are only a handful of precedents, of older desktop designs that were fairly mainstream in their day:
Classic MacOS; NeXTstep; AmigaOS; DR GEM; Acorn RISC OS.
None of these has a modern maintained FOSS version. None is included with any modern distro.
NeXTstep is the closest in the form of GNUstep, but its creators feel it’s a programming framework that happens to have implemented a desktop more or less incidentally.
Newly installed Win11 from 2 days ago on brand new hardware. Open an Explorer window with 1 click on the taskbar.
Alt-space X, maximises. Alt-space, M moves.
I am looking at a computer that literally just went through an unboxing video. Alt+Space pops up the search bar.
Edit: shit, you’re right! It’s a PowerToys “feature”. I stand corrected in this regard. I could swear it was the default Windows 10 behaviour at some point, which resulted in quite some outrage – I had to jump through some hoops to disable it.
I’m not going to debate the other things, it’s just not productive. E.g. I have no idea what Enlightenment is doing in your list, it looks and acts nothing like Windows and rasterman quite notoriously comes from an Amiga background (in fact, the default Enlightenment dock is pretty similar in some regards to e.g. wbdock2 or even Amidock, or) but taxonomy is weird like that. Also, “correct” vs. “incorrect” is really not something I want to get into when it comes to user interfaces. Cheers!
I’ve also been running Plasma 5.26 on Arch (btw) for a few months (I guess, maybe it was a different 5.2x when I started) and it’s a perfectly cromulent UI experience.
This is not a box I’m doing any real work on, but it’s the GUI of my home server where I remote desktop in most days of the week at least once.
Single-click vs double-click can be set in the settings as well: Workspace Behavior>General Behavior>Clicking files or folders: [x] selects them (open by double-clicking).
Near the first thing I do when exploring a new KDE app is read through the settings pages.
I finally got annoyed enough with GNOME 42 to switch to Plasma 5. I’m totally into it. Between the global menu, redefinable shortcuts and flexible panels and widgets (and the fact it’s zippy and responsive), it’s everything I wanted GNOME to be. No looking back.
The web-like hamburger menu is one of the few features I like in Gnome. It’s cumbersome to move the mouse all the way to the top left of a wide screen monitor to access a fixed global menu. On a laptop, a global menu isn’t as annoying.
As a Gnome 3 user who ~half a year ago went back to Plasma… honestly it reminds me a lot of Windows (in the good ways). Lots of the built-in apps have a billion options that are haphazardly placed on the primary screen. “Right-click -> create new….” in the file browser is such a good thing to have. Desktop icons that aren’t a hack!
I think that a lot of the configuration stuff is a bit of a red herring. It’s easy to spend a lot of time trying to tweak themes and not really feel like you got a better result, but really just tweaking text sizes and the like will probably make you happy.
My main complaint is that the software naming is unfortunate. Gnome naming their apps after what they do (“Archive Manager”) rather than for branding needs (“Ark”) is very helpful.
If you’re someone who was a Windows user before Linux, you might find Plasma to be what you want your OS to be.
Yeah, very much this. Back in the day when I was hopping between Ubuntu, Win 7 and Mac, I did find the Windows UX to be the most reasonable one: win+arrow to quickly tile windows and win+number to launch or focus a specific app is the pinnacle of productivity.
But there is something to extra KDE customizability and power-userness:
I use F1, F2, rather than win+1, win+2, and it’s nice that I can just rebind those
I configured my apps to hide window decorations when maximized, so that I get “fullscreen but I still see the ‘Start’ panel’” behavior. And there’s an extension to move minimize/maximize/close controls of a window to the start panel as well
dolphin, file manger, has a checkbox for split-pane view, and for tree view inside the panes
bonus: if you want both a tiling window manager and a desktop environment, kde supports that a lot better than gnome does, while handling hidpi better than xfce.
Random underrated
WindowsPlasma feature: each application pinned next to thestartbutton automatically gets a shortcut (Meta+1,Meta+2, …, by default) to either launch the app, or bring the existing instance of the app to the foreground.GNOME has the same feature – I discovered it by accident recently!
That feature came in with Windows 98, I think… or more to the point with Active Desktop, part of IE4, that could be installed on Win95 or NT4. That was the first appearance of the Quick Launch bar; this is a QL-bar feature.
This is the big problem of all the Windows-like Linux desktops in general. They seem to be implemented by people who, AFAICS, did not know very well the original system that they were copying. The result is, poor copies.
Bad copies, combined with people don’t know how to work the original well let alone the copy, results in dissatisfaction… resulting in numerous forks, all doing different bits of the same original well and the rest poorly.
Result 1: lots of indifferent desktops Result 2, following from that: teams throwing the whole thing in the bin and starting over. GNOME 3, Budgie, Elementary/Pantheon, etc. And lots of tiling WMs.
One of the selling points of Plasma is that it has a setting for just about anything you can think of. The defaults for everything are just a combination of what most people seem to find pleasant, or are used to from elsewhere, or maybe are used to from previous versions.
If you’re coming from elsewhere and want to make things the way you are used to, there’s a treasure trove of settings available. You can spend days tweaking.
To say that there are ‘paper cuts’ with the defaults seems a little harsh. I don’t believe it’s difficult to find the settings or to change them. ‘Unfamiliar defaults’ would seem a little more charitable.
I think paper cuts sound too painful compared to the level of actual pain one would experience changing the defaults via the very capable Settings app.
For the screenshots, I like the separation of modes by shortcut that it has. PrtScr just opens the utility, Meta+PrtSct captures the current window, Shift+PrtScr captures entire screen and Meta+Shift+PrtScr allows you to select the region for capture.
I know that feature from basically every dedicated screenshot app I’ve ever used (mostly on windows), the problem is more that they never standardized which means what :/ But yeah, great if that comes by default.
Can sympathise with these papercuts as well (as someone who’s currently on Gnome who has tried KDE Plasma a bunch of times in the past)
The default window management keybindings always throw me off! I remember also have the same issue with XFCE (Can’t recall). It’s something I always immediately change.
Likewise, in the past I’ve always sped up the default animations
That being said, maybe it’s time for me to give it another go. Maybe I’ll throw KDE neon on a live USB.
You can rebind anything on KDE pretty easily. The fullscreen combo os Super+ Pg Up which I find a better combo for laptops.
I think there’s some context that I don’t have here – how are these “papercuts”? These are just default settings. Maybe they’re not the default settings that the author expects but that’s true of every default setting. Someone’s gonna be surprised if meta+up does fullscreen the application, or if the default animations were any faster or slower. The default binding to maximize a window in KDE has been Meta + PgUp for a very long time now. Changing it would be surprising to a lot of existing KDE users.
(Edit: I mean, I’m all for defaults that aren’t potentially disruptive, like, yes, it’s probably a bad idea to have the user opt in for displaying exit confirmation dialogs. But “good defaults” is not quite the same as “the defaults $someuser expects”. Everyone will find a default setting to disagree with, and changing that default setting won’t make the application any better, it will just piss off somebody else).
In fact, I suspect that what the author is describing might be the least surprising in the grand scheme of things – it sounds a bit like the behaviour in Windows 11, which despite its rocky start has like an order of magnitude more users than all of the Linux desktops combined. Starting from an unmaximized window, Meta+Up will first maximize it. Then, if the window is already maximized, it will move it to the upper half of the screen – at which point Meta+Down will first unmaximize it, then minimize it.
I agree. I think myself and the author are just set in our ways and expect certain things to work in a way KDE plasma wasn’t designed to it.
I think given enough time I could adapt to the defaults or gradually migrate things over.
I mean… you wouldn’t need any of that, every default setting mentioned in the article can be changed.
For reasons that go back to some obscure Windows 98 utility program, back when I used Linux, my keybindings for Maximize/Minimize were Meta-[ and Meta-’ respectively, and I didn’t use any animations because I have a large monitor so animations made me dizzy. There’s no way you use something long enough to write a review and not run into the options to change keybindings and UI animation speed in the Control Center.
If a team is implementing a Windows-like desktop, then they should use Windows-like shortcuts.
If they don’t, that’s a failure.
I am not going to start digging into settings and remapping them all, no. I am going to junk that desktop and go find one that uses the correct shortcuts.
Not out of any loyalty to Windows, because I have none. I moved away from that OS over 20 years ago now.
But because keystrokes are part of UI and if they implement someone else’s UI then I expect them to implement all of it and to do it right and not just reinvent random bits on the basis that they didn’t understand them.
This applies 100% to Microsoft itself as well. Windows Vista and 7 broke various bits of the Windows design. Win8 broke them more, there was a mass rebellion, and Win10 put poor copies of some of them back. Then because the poor copies are poor and broken, Win11 replaces those too.
The standard Windows keystroke since Windows 2.0 (and I only say that because I never used Windows 1.0) is Alt-Space for the window control menu, then
xto maximise,nto minimize,cto close.Any desktop that gets that wrong is one I am not going to use.
I am not sure how to answer any of this without – justifiably! – incurring the “unkind” flag but maybe it’s worth re-examining some of the assumptions behind your post, such as:
I miss my favourite shortcuts from the 1990s, too, but I don’t think it’s worth getting angry that the world has moved on, especially not since it takes like five clicks to get them back…
This is demonstrable and undeniable. Note that before Win95 it didn’t really have a desktop, so Windows-like means Win95-and-later like.
It doesn’t, I didn’t imply it, and I didn’t meant to imply it.
The point I was making was that the keystrokes are not Win95-specific and predate that product by a decade. And they still work now.
Which is why Windows is, among other things, still the best OS for blind users. Consistent keyboard controls matter.
Copy the design, copy all the design and copy it right.
Or devise something better. That’s fine too. Or copy a different design.
They are. What few things were set then still work.
The point I was making is that these were not just my prefs.
I’m not giving it 5 clicks. I liked KDE 1 a lot, KDE 2 was a bit of a mess, and KDE 3 so bad it drove me away forever.
This kind of thing is why.
On my Windows 11 machine, Alt + Space does something completely different now. I’m preeeetty sure Alt + Space hasn’t opened the control menu for several years now, but I don’t have a Windows 10 machine at hand to check.
So what should a desktop do to match the definition of “Windows-like”? Use the same defaults that Windows actually uses today, or the ones that you remember from twenty years ago?
OK. With some irritation, because I really do not just make this stuff up, I just went and tested.
Newly installed Win11 from 2 days ago on brand new hardware. Open an Explorer window with 1 click on the taskbar.
Alt-space X, maximises. Alt-space, M moves.
It works exactly as I said it did, using the exact same methods.
I do not know what you did but I stand by what I said.
I think it should use what Windows $LATEST actually uses today which is the same thing as what it used in 1985, which is exactly what I said and was the point of my argument.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you don’t know why it’s like it is, either go find out, and if you can’t be bothered, then assume there’s a good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence
If someone is going to implement a Windows-like desktop, then I feel that step 1 is learning to use the Windows desktop, properly, which includes keyboard controls for instances such as [a] when no pointing device is available [b] when it is present but doesn’t work due to, e.g., driver issues [c] when the user can’t use a pointing device because of motor control or sensory issues.
I have written about this, but Lobste.rs won’t let me submit my own articles to the site, because the Lobste.rs admins or whatever disapprove of a nearly 30 year old tech journal and feel it’s not serious enough.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/linux_desktop_feature/
Examples of FOSS Windows-like desktops:
KDE, GNOME 2 / MATE, LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, Cinnamon, Enlightenment, EDE, XPde, Lumina.
Examples which are not fully desktops but window managers:
FVWM95, IceWM, JWM.
There are so few desktops which are not Windows-like that it’s a short list:
GNOME 3; Unity; Pantheon; ROX.
Arguably Budgie but it’s easily reconfigured to be one, but then again, LXDE, MATE and Xfce can be configured to be Mac-like.
But Unity, MATE, Xfce and others still respect and use the Windows style control keys. It’s KDE, the oldest of them all (Xfce is older but was not FOSS in early versions; it was a CDE clone using XForms).
Get it right, and get it right by default. By all means allow reconfiguration.
As my article says, I really want there to be more variety and choice here, and I list a set of examples.
But for now, there isn’t, and I feel that is a bad thing, for usability and for accessibility to people who don’t or can’t use the standard control methods.
P.S. as I have also written about nearly a decade ago, the Win9x design was original MS IP developed de novo by them.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
Every desktop that resembles Win9x is the way it is because the authors knew Win9x.
There are only a handful of precedents, of older desktop designs that were fairly mainstream in their day:
Classic MacOS; NeXTstep; AmigaOS; DR GEM; Acorn RISC OS.
None of these has a modern maintained FOSS version. None is included with any modern distro.
NeXTstep is the closest in the form of GNUstep, but its creators feel it’s a programming framework that happens to have implemented a desktop more or less incidentally.
I am looking at a computer that literally just went through an unboxing video. Alt+Space pops up the search bar.Edit: shit, you’re right! It’s a PowerToys “feature”. I stand corrected in this regard. I could swear it was the default Windows 10 behaviour at some point, which resulted in quite some outrage – I had to jump through some hoops to disable it.
I’m not going to debate the other things, it’s just not productive. E.g. I have no idea what Enlightenment is doing in your list, it looks and acts nothing like Windows and rasterman quite notoriously comes from an Amiga background (in fact, the default Enlightenment dock is pretty similar in some regards to e.g. wbdock2 or even Amidock, or) but taxonomy is weird like that. Also, “correct” vs. “incorrect” is really not something I want to get into when it comes to user interfaces. Cheers!
I’ve also been running Plasma 5.26 on Arch (btw) for a few months (I guess, maybe it was a different 5.2x when I started) and it’s a perfectly cromulent UI experience.
This is not a box I’m doing any real work on, but it’s the GUI of my home server where I remote desktop in most days of the week at least once.
Single-click vs double-click can be set in the settings as well: Workspace Behavior>General Behavior>Clicking files or folders: [x] selects them (open by double-clicking).
Near the first thing I do when exploring a new KDE app is read through the settings pages.
Even I have only touched a very tiny amount of KDE Plasma with my contribution(s), it makes me happy to see people use it. :)
I finally got annoyed enough with GNOME 42 to switch to Plasma 5. I’m totally into it. Between the global menu, redefinable shortcuts and flexible panels and widgets (and the fact it’s zippy and responsive), it’s everything I wanted GNOME to be. No looking back.
The web-like hamburger menu is one of the few features I like in Gnome. It’s cumbersome to move the mouse all the way to the top left of a wide screen monitor to access a fixed global menu. On a laptop, a global menu isn’t as annoying.
As a Gnome 3 user who ~half a year ago went back to Plasma… honestly it reminds me a lot of Windows (in the good ways). Lots of the built-in apps have a billion options that are haphazardly placed on the primary screen. “Right-click -> create new….” in the file browser is such a good thing to have. Desktop icons that aren’t a hack!
I think that a lot of the configuration stuff is a bit of a red herring. It’s easy to spend a lot of time trying to tweak themes and not really feel like you got a better result, but really just tweaking text sizes and the like will probably make you happy.
My main complaint is that the software naming is unfortunate. Gnome naming their apps after what they do (“Archive Manager”) rather than for branding needs (“Ark”) is very helpful.
If you’re someone who was a Windows user before Linux, you might find Plasma to be what you want your OS to be.
Yeah, very much this. Back in the day when I was hopping between Ubuntu, Win 7 and Mac, I did find the Windows UX to be the most reasonable one: win+arrow to quickly tile windows and win+number to launch or focus a specific app is the pinnacle of productivity.
But there is something to extra KDE customizability and power-userness:
bonus: if you want both a tiling window manager and a desktop environment, kde supports that a lot better than gnome does, while handling hidpi better than xfce.
The Pop Shell extension for Gnome implements a pretty decent tiling window manager, for what it’s worth.