 One of the primary complaints against KDE is that it's too bloated, that it's too complicated. And the fact of the matter is that the argument is pretty compelling, because if you go to the settings app in KDE, which we can actually just do here, you'll see that there's just a... I mean, you can scroll for days here, and this is just the main category of settings. If you delve into any of these settings, you'll get even more settings. And there's just tons of these things, right? So the idea that KDE is actually too bloated, and don't worry, this isn't actually Windows, this is just me being an idiot and having some fun, the idea that KDE is too bloated in terms of settings and stuff might be an appropriate argument. The problem is, is if you took out all the settings that make KDE, then KDE would no longer be KDE, if you get what I mean. The problem here is that when people say, no, no, no, I can't use KDE, there's too many settings. That's fine. Everybody gets to make their own choice, and there are alternative desktop environments out there for a good reason. But whenever I hear anybody say that, I always want to ask them, well, what would be your solution if you were to use KDE? Would you want them to go through and dumb it down a little bit? Take out a whole bunch of settings, maybe provide an easy mode? And that seems to be what they're thinking about doing. But for me, I think that that kind of dilutes the appeal of KDE, because the appeal of KDE is that you can literally do anything. So let's take Dolphin for an example. This is Dolphin right here, obviously we can minimize this. There's just a ton of stuff here that you can do. Now they've gone through over the last year and simplified the user interface quite a lot. And they've done that by moving all the stuff that used to be up here in the bar to the hamburger menu. And that's fine. I don't really care where it's at, as long as the features are still there. But you can go through and do just a ton of stuff to Dolphin that you may not even know. You can go through and say you wanted to go through and put your bar on this side. You could do that. You could go through and hide every single one of these sections. I've gone through and hidden several of the sections that come by default. You can rearrange the sections. You can go through and show in split playing mode, like I mean several file managers now do this, but this is another one that does it. This one also goes through and remembers your position, which is really good, right? It's one of those things that I kind of preach about a lot when I talk about file managers. So there's just a ton of stuff here that you can do. You can go through and configure Dolphin and you can just see there's just tons and tons and tons of settings. And this holds true for every single KDE app. They're all highly configurable if that's the way you want to put it. They're just customizable to the absolute 100% degree. So the argument that KDE is bloated a little bit because of too many settings is kind of holds true. The question is then what do you do with it? Because like I was saying, if you take the settings away from KDE, you no longer have what makes KDE special. You have GNOME, right? So that's where the idea of an easy mode kind of comes in. So what they're kind of talking about doing is hiding all this stuff in like an advanced mode and then creating like a layer that's on top of it that would just have your basic settings, things that every desktop environment has that don't really deal with customization, things like power modes and languages and keyboard settings and stuff like that. Anything about customizing your theme, your colors, your fonts or icons or any of that stuff. No K-Win scripts to be found. It would just be a panel of settings that you would normally see in something like GNOME or Budge or Mate or whatever. And then if you're a power user, you can then get to the setting by clicking show advanced settings or something. The question I have then is does that dilute the attractiveness of KDE? And I don't actually think so because as long as those settings, these settings that I was talking about here a minute ago, as long as all the stuff that we have right now is still there, even if it's hidden away, I don't think that bothers me all that much. Maybe it will actually make KDE more attractive to distro maintainers because one of the, I think probably the primary reasons why like Ubuntu did not choose KDE as their desktop environment when they switched from Unity to GNOME, why they didn't choose KDE instead, is because KDE is really, really complex. And Ubuntu at least for the most part tries to focus on new users and KDE is not the most new user friendly desktop environment. So by adding this so-called easy mode, perhaps more distributions out there will be interested in using KDE, especially now that GNOME has gone through and pissed literally everybody off, which I'd like to say I told you so they always do that. So I think that perhaps an easy mode for KDE settings would be a good thing. And I'm kind of excited to see it even if I would never use it myself because for me, I like all the settings. I like being able to tweak every little piece of software that I have all the UI elements of my desktop environment. I like doing that. Now, the one thing that I would urge the developers of KDE to be cautious of is that at the moment, the defaults for KDE apps are kind of bad. So if you use things like Kmail or Dolphin even or several other K apps, the apps that have K in front of them, they're all their different defaults are kind of horrible. And you have to go through and do a lot of stuff to tweak them in order to make them good. And a lot of that has to do with the UI itself, some of the UI elements that they have just by default just aren't all that great. The thing is, if they transition to this easy mode, most people who would then use this, the new users, the people who are the target of the easy mode, would just assume that the K apps are supposed to look and work that way, even though technically they can still change all that stuff. And what I think has to happen if they do go through and implement this easy mode settings panel is that they also have to go through and try to make the stock experience better. Not only in K apps, Kmail and Crusader and all this stuff, they also have to go through and make this the UI of the desktop environment better a little bit because a lot of that stuff, a lot of the things that make up the plasma desktop are also kind of complicated and not necessarily easy to hide, you know, I mean, like adding widgets and moving things around and adding a separator and changing the bar height and all that stuff. All that stuff is kind of clunky and in order for the easy mode thing to work, all that stuff either has to go away or it has to be made a lot easier. So it'll be interesting to see where plasma goes in the next couple of years because if they implement this like they're talking about on their blog, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out because I think I'm kind of excited for it because more people using KDE, I think is a good thing. I don't particularly like GNOME. I don't really want GNOME to die or anything, but I think that KDE is really good and doesn't get the usage by distros that it should. And if this new easy mode thing that they're talking about, they're not calling it easy mode. That's that's what I was kind of calling it. But if this new kind of pared down settings apparatus that they're talking about actually happens and more distros use it, I think that that can be a good thing. And I also think that it's a good thing for GNOME because more competition in the desktop space is always a good thing. Maybe it'll get, you know, have the GNOME guys get their shit together and maybe it'll kind of spur development in other areas as well. Like the new Cosmic desktop that will be coming out in a couple of years and the budget changes into the EFL. More interest in the desktop by distro maintainers is always a good thing. So that is it for this video. 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