 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Nicolaus praises gnome because if you've been following me you probably know that I'm actually a big fan of the gnome project. I don't use it and yes I do develop for catyplasma but nonetheless I do think that the gnome project is pretty good and if you're not into catyplasma for whatever reason I do think it's fair to use gnome to be clear. I think I've said it. I've said it. So there are a couple of reasons why I think that I think this and before we get to the main thing that I'm totally envying gnome for these days let's get to a couple of smaller reasons that make me think that the gnome project is actually pretty good and the first one is that I actually think that having a clear idea of what you want your desktop to be and then acting on that idea is a good approach. Like I think it works pretty well yes if you're not really into the gnome sort of workflow then you're probably out of luck and you will need to find another desktop environment but if you are into the workflow and I think that many people are then it works really well to do that. In fact myself I'm a big fan of how gnome deals with things with the idea of virtual desktops and not having a minimized pattern not having icons on the desktop all those things I fully agree on and I actually do just that but on kdplasma too because I think it's a nice approach but I do think that the gnome approach works best on gnome. I replicate it on kdplasma but I think it works better on gnome simply. So that's one thing also by choosing specifically what you want to do and sticking to that well that allows you to make sure that your software is as stable as possible which is a great thing for a kdplasma user so considering the amount of flexibility that kdplasma has and that it's you know its biggest advantage I think that also has the downside of bringing a lot of bugs because it's hard to test for all configurations and stuff which is why for what I'm currently developing as you know the floating panel as an example for me it's really important to say this is what I want to do and whatever would make it harder to maintain harder more bugs more flexibility I have to put a limit on that because the floating panel the panel in general is already quite complex and making it even more complex will just exponentially bring in a ton of bike reports and I don't want to deal with them there's not enough workforce to so these are the things that I like but there is one particular thing that I envy which is particularly easy to see if we go into the gnome blog post like this week in gnome blog post I think you know it. So these are the latest blog posts let's take this one as an example and we can see as an example that we have this nice app in the gnome circle that is used to customize the stream deck which I don't have it's an example and in the latest blog post there is this nice application that is used to upscale images that is very interesting I've actually talked about this in the past radio and in general if you go ahead and see pretty much any blog post from the gnome this week in gnome blog then you will see some update about some new application that is coming on or you know all the applications that are getting updated at better and better and it's impressive actually because if you look at all of those applications they all look very good and very consistent with each other I'm not too into technical details about how gnome does application theming I think there's like jdk that offers basic widgets and then there's libadwita that offers more complex widgets to integrate in your app but they're apparently doing it very right even the very idea of the gnome circle is very good and something that I think should could benefit kdplasm as well if you don't know what a gnome circle is basically it's a way for gnome to somehow make third-party applications more official and into the gnome ecosystem and there are there are lots of very good third-party applications that were previously third-party but then get you know integrated into the gnome circle but also is one I can think of and you do get a lot of benefits like you get the ability to promote and advertise your application through the gnome community you also get some I think like hosting benefits like being able to host your application on the gnome gatelab this kind of thing on the gnome circle gatelab and you can just go to the list and there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of good maintained third-party applications that are actually not third-party anymore they're kind of first party because they're within the gnome circle you go through them I did for some and they all look good and consistent and are generally actively maintained especially because if you do want to get into the gnome circle then you have to go through some verification that you have like gnome designers that tell you you're doing this correctly this could improve and then you act on the feedback it's a very friendly process I think so in general I've always said that I personally prefer kdplasma applications because kdplasma core applications like dolphin, gwenvue, ocular they're so powerful in what they do and I think they're great applications so I'm not taking that back but what I totally envy of gnome is the ability to have such a large ecosystem of applications that are maintained that look good and that really make it feel alive for kdplasma it's a bit more difficult so there is a lot more work for first-party applications but from what I've been able to see maybe I completely wrong but it's not close to what gnome is doing in the amount of applications that you have and how much maintain they are if you go into the kdplasma website for applications if you go through the list of all of the applications and actually try to amount to see how they look how they're maintained and such I think you will easily find a bunch of applications like all the games applications usually that look very outdated outdated compared to the current design of kd has a hole and that are also not quite maintained take conqueror as an example yes it's in this list but I would never I would just never suggest anybody to actually use conqueror I did for a while it's it's that it's unmaintained it's very old some applications yes are maintained but because of some you know lack of works workforce very often they're not able to advance as rapidly as some other kd applications and then you can really see how different the core applications are in terms of their design and functionality compared to some that receive updates much less often like take calligra as an example I have used calligra for a lot of time and I think that in its design it's it has had improvements in the last years but nowhere as quickly as other kd applications and nowadays if you use calligra it does feel a bit old and you know when on one end I would totally want to help with that but on the other hand I don't have the time and I'm trying to be at the the panel even from a technical point of view I think it's not super clear of how kd applications should be done like nowadays new kd applications are usually done with kori gami which is a super nice library and I think that most applications done with kori gami look absolutely amazing out of the box and I'm a big fan of the library at the same time as far as I understood it and I've actually discussed with agnome developer to clarify this kori gami is kind of the kitty thing that is libadwita for agnome so offering more widgets more you know yeah more widgets to built in your applications with of course some differences in design but the fact is whereas it feels like libadwita for agnome is the clear path forward for kori gami in kedi plasma with the fact that kori gami is really meant to be convergent it's sometimes not clear what kori gami really should be especially if you're talking about the kedi plasma desktop if you are doing a application that is like desktop only should you use kori gami and a lot of the time the answer seems to be yes but lately it didn't seem that clear a choice and as far as I know there hasn't been quite a choice about this from the design group so it is something to discuss about to think about because as a whole I think that the agnome environment as far as the amount of applications and how well all of those applications are done is something that I totally envy and that I think that from the kedi plasma side is things are yet not yet that good I think we can improve though we'll get there we'll get there