KDE essential apps are often more powerful, like Gwenview (the only modern FOSS viewer with many edit capabilities) or Okular. Installing them works but the theme may look ugly and it pulls in half of the DE
some core apps like Spectacle or the powerful search / krunner cannot be used
no wayland support means you are restricted to ancient insecure technology
the filemanager is extremely restricting in comparison to dolphin. Like afaik you cannot even add arbitrary folders to the sidebar! They are linked to a “favourites” folder or something, very annoying. I assume it has no filtering either. The date display in list view is pretty ugly by default, maybe that can be changed
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I dont use Cinnamon lol, for reasons. Too many family members blindly used it and I hate it.
since I have a terminal at my fingertips
This is not what a DE is for. If you need a terminal, the DE is not good. I also heavily use the terminal but I am talking about a good general use desktop.
weird selection of apps has me lost
They diverge from GNOME for theming or whatever, and either have weird apps for things like PDF viewing preinstalled, or the people that used it preinstalled those.
As it is neither KDE nor GNOME, it kinda uses GNOME apps but not really. Simply a pretty bad situation. On KDE I use a bunch of GNOME apps and thanks to libadwaita they all look and works fine. That is actually an antifeature of KDE apps, but if you are on KDE they are fine XD
comes with stuff installed that you might expect
That always results in opinionated defaults. People seem to get along fine and I still have a vanilla LMDE VM I have not tried.
I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.
Then maybe look it up ;) it is easy to find. Deb packages have way more attack surface than flatpaks, making this even worse. People install spotify as an unrestricted deb package instead of in a sandbox for example. Fucking spotify.
so you can apt or apt-get install
It is a DE for people who literally know nothing about Linux. The GUI store needs sensible defaults and it doesnt really have those currently due to their controversial (and unsafe) decision to hide unverified flatpaks
I can list random things I noticed
I dont use Cinnamon lol, for reasons. Too many family members blindly used it and I hate it.
This is not what a DE is for. If you need a terminal, the DE is not good. I also heavily use the terminal but I am talking about a good general use desktop.
They diverge from GNOME for theming or whatever, and either have weird apps for things like PDF viewing preinstalled, or the people that used it preinstalled those.
As it is neither KDE nor GNOME, it kinda uses GNOME apps but not really. Simply a pretty bad situation. On KDE I use a bunch of GNOME apps and thanks to libadwaita they all look and works fine. That is actually an antifeature of KDE apps, but if you are on KDE they are fine XD
That always results in opinionated defaults. People seem to get along fine and I still have a vanilla LMDE VM I have not tried.
Then maybe look it up ;) it is easy to find. Deb packages have way more attack surface than flatpaks, making this even worse. People install spotify as an unrestricted deb package instead of in a sandbox for example. Fucking spotify.
It is a DE for people who literally know nothing about Linux. The GUI store needs sensible defaults and it doesnt really have those currently due to their controversial (and unsafe) decision to hide unverified flatpaks