Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop (linux-magazine.com) 41
"Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop," writes Linux magazine.
"Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta." Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS's goal is a shift toward "modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system." One big under-the-hood change is that the/tmpdirectory is now automatically mounted astmpfs(in RAM), as opposed to the physical drive. By making this change, Parrot OS enjoys improved performance and reduces wear on SSDs. This shift also means that all data in/tmpis lost during a reboot.
ParrotOS senior systems engineer Dario Camonita explains the change in a blog post, calling it "not only aesthetic, but also in terms of usability and greater consistency with our future goals..."
"While MATE will continue to be supported by us as long as upstream development continues, We have noticed and observed the continuous improvements made by the KDE team..."
And elsewhere Linux Magazine notes two other distros are embracing the desktop Enlightenment: For years, Bodhi Linux was one of the very few distributions that used anything based on Enlightenment. That period of loneliness is officially over, withMX Mokshaand AV Linux 25. MX Moksha doesn't replace the original MX Linux. Instead, it will serve as an "official spin" of the distribution...
The Enlightenment desktop (and subsequently Moksha) was developed with systemd in mind, so MX Moksha uses systemd. If you're not a fan of systemd, MX Moksha is not for you. MX Moksha is lighter than MX Linux, so it will perform better on older machines. It also uses the Liquorix kernel for lower latency. AV Linux has been released with the Xfce and LXDE desktops at different times and has only recently opted to make the switch to Enlightenment.
"Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta." Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS's goal is a shift toward "modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system." One big under-the-hood change is that the/tmpdirectory is now automatically mounted astmpfs(in RAM), as opposed to the physical drive. By making this change, Parrot OS enjoys improved performance and reduces wear on SSDs. This shift also means that all data in/tmpis lost during a reboot.
ParrotOS senior systems engineer Dario Camonita explains the change in a blog post, calling it "not only aesthetic, but also in terms of usability and greater consistency with our future goals..."
"While MATE will continue to be supported by us as long as upstream development continues, We have noticed and observed the continuous improvements made by the KDE team..."
And elsewhere Linux Magazine notes two other distros are embracing the desktop Enlightenment: For years, Bodhi Linux was one of the very few distributions that used anything based on Enlightenment. That period of loneliness is officially over, withMX Mokshaand AV Linux 25. MX Moksha doesn't replace the original MX Linux. Instead, it will serve as an "official spin" of the distribution...
The Enlightenment desktop (and subsequently Moksha) was developed with systemd in mind, so MX Moksha uses systemd. If you're not a fan of systemd, MX Moksha is not for you. MX Moksha is lighter than MX Linux, so it will perform better on older machines. It also uses the Liquorix kernel for lower latency. AV Linux has been released with the Xfce and LXDE desktops at different times and has only recently opted to make the switch to Enlightenment.
waylandx (Score:2)
Perhaps waylandx [github.com] could help? Might not work for a whole desktop, though.
no dude (Score:1)
The reason people like X is not the API.
Remote access of computers is more important than ever. There was one brief moment in history where it seemed obsolete that the computer you were using was not on your desktop. Today virtually every Linux computer is in a data center somewhere. Getting rid of X is pants on head retarded, and even if it were the right move it should have been done for technical reasons not intentionally causing X to die through lack of maintenance. The Xlibre guy is doing God's work.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why I linked to waylandx, not xwayland. I agree that getting rid of X is retarded, and that wayland is not a fit replacement.
There are well-intentioned people who write code using the newest API (as that's usually the right thing to do) thus good programs that require wayland start popping up, that's what waylandx is for. There are also severely misguided folks who drop X like KDE; I don't use KDE myself thus I can't comment on the details.
It looks like X will indeed die due to lack of maintenance,
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You know that it is much easier to write remote desktop software using Wayland? You can implement it as a compositor and you're done. No need for Xdummy servers and similar crude workarounds to get programs run in background. You just provide a compositor that renders to a remote computer instead of to a display.
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It's been many years since I used X for remote access. It was always slow and glitchy and sometimes hard to get working right. On the rare occasions when I need to run a graphical application on a remote computer, I use VNC. It just works, in a way that X never did.
Re: Nice (Score:1)
Agree.
I'll stick to KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll stick to KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
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Xorg has been forked and active development is now done at Xlibre [github.com]. Hopefully that means that there will be enough pressure on Wayland that they actually fully reimplmenent all X functionality that people need. In any case, it provides a clear backup.
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I have KDE under Wayland (kubuntu) on this laptop, and KDE under X11 on others. I barely notice the difference (the main one being that this is KDE 6 whereas the X11 ones are using KDE 5).
I did most of my window manager hopping in the late 90s. Before KDE got the point where I jumped to it, I daily drove Windows and only ran Windows on server machines. Then about 3 years ago I gave KDE another spin and things rapidly changed. Now I only use Windows for creative apps for music and graphics which don't exist
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I tried using Wayland with Devuan Excalibur (Debian Trixie) and my experience with it was not good. I had some games not work and a lot fewer windows could reopen where I left them. This is with AMD graphics. With Nvidia on Devuan Daedalus it really just doesn't work at all for me, and I'm not interested in figuring out why.
This is irritating, but hopefully X will last until my next PC or even my next GPU, which will probably be from AMD. The Nvidia Linux driver situation is unsatisfactory — they will
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Good choice! (Score:3)
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Sadly shade doesn't work current with kwin on Wayland. It's very annoying. Also focus follows mouse is quirky on Wayland. Other than that KDE on Wayland is pretty fantastic.
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Wayland intentionally sabotaged focus-follows-mouse by making clicking on a window raise it unconditionally. Gnome did the same thing (for a while there was an option to turn off the raise, but they made it also ignore any requests from the program itself to raise the window so you could not actually rearrange windows except by closing and opening them again).
There does appear to be a large faction that wants focus-follows-mouse to go away and will do anything they can to achieve it.
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My understanding is that is not true. Click to raise policy is enacted by the compositor which often doubles as a window manager.
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Quite a few WMs (without attached DEs) have shade features. But the unique feature of kwin is focus steal prevention. Never seen that in another WM.
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KDE isn't so bloated that it doesn't run on a 2010 laptop with a first gen i5 and 4GB RAM. Sure that laptop struggles with Chrome and heavy websites, but that is an issue with modern websites, not KDE. I do think there's plenty of room for improvement but when on Windows or Mac, I miss the various KDE and Linux niceties and customisations I'm used to.
An interesting experiment I did on a Lenovo T450 (4th gen i5, 16GB RAM) was to disable all but one core and throttle that core to 800Mhz. Still usable, if a li
I've been using KDE for two months (Score:3)
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> It has its own set of defaults but in no way is it superior to any other window manager
KDE isn't just a window manager, it's the whole desktop experience...
For me it's mainly when I get an idea about how my usage could be more comfortable, so I rearrange stuff, change a few options and experiment.
Now I do have trouble using computers that aren't mine...
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I'm personally GNOME 3 user these days. MATE just wasn't ever that good. KDE is always fun for a while, but I always leave it after a week or two of dealing with random things being broken or obnoxious.
It's really a matter of personal preference- so as parent said, it has its own set of defaults, but in no way is it superior to any other desktop environment.
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Mate was a straight fork of Gnome 2, as such it's a 2 decade old time capsule.
Gnome 3 then made a series of idiosyncratic UI design choices which polarized the Linux community.
And if work imposes Windows 11 for my day job, I find XFCE/Debian on my home machine to be the least drama in terms of paradigms.
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Mate was a straight fork of Gnome 2, as such it's a 2 decade old time capsule.
A fork is not a time capsule.
MATE has had plenty of development in the 15 years that it has been in existence.
It started life as a direct fork, and quickly became its own thing.
Gnome 3 then made a series of idiosyncratic UI design choices which polarized the Linux community.
I think the bigger complaint was the loss of functionality. Simply... gone.
In the intervening time, the GNOME shell plugin ecosystem has effectively filled the gap, and more.
GNOME 3 was pretty fucking terrible at first, which is why I moved to MATE.
And if work imposes Windows 11 for my day job, I find XFCE/Debian on my home machine to be the least drama in terms of paradigms.
I'll never understand you XFCE fuckers ;)
Re: I've been using KDE for two months (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, what functionality do you miss with xfce? I have been using it for a few years and find it overall ok, although I do have a few issues.
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Re:I've been using KDE for two months (Score:4, Interesting)
MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.
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I've been hearing this a bit from very traditional greybeard linux users (I mostly just use linux at work and I'm very much a terminal jocky. tmux is my "terminal manager".) who have come around to KDE from being strong dislikers of it in the past. That Mate is just crusty and old, Gnome hasn't really been fun for a while but KDE has solved most of its nonsense problems and is now a quite complete and useable system, so its become their daily driver.
I just want to get alpine functional again so I can revert
Re:I've been using KDE for two months (Score:4, Interesting)
And what about Cinnamon?
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I find that users who are used to an MS-Windows look react more positively to KDE because it has the same general look and feel, or can with a few setting changes. It also seems to have a lot more settings to customize it so you get what you want, not what the devs or some corp wants you to have.
To me screen cosmetics are irrelevant (Score:2)
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The problem is, developers sometimes get too full of themselves and then start making changes that actively get in the way - which is where Gnome appears to be right now, for instance.
I want a window manager that lets me do what I need but mostly stays out of my way. Right now, for me, that's cinnamon.
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This is why I first went to fluxbox without taskbar/decorations (on Debian) and later bare openbox (on Devuan) because the ctrl key stuck too often after switching workspaces.
There's nothing else but the programs and the unintrusive osd clock on my screen. It's the best "desktop experience" I've had in decades of computer use.
Rearranging the furniture (Score:2)
is less work than building the house.
The odd general fascination with cosmetics is not utilitarian, but piddling with cosmetics gives the illusion of accomplishment as if change were progress.
Excellent decision (Score:1)
What does any "desktop experience" really provide? (Score:3)
I already realised during the Windows days that while changing colours and wallpaper is fun, it's mostly useless when 99.99% of the time the actually used programs obscure everything.
Went from Ubuntu with Gnome 2 on my first private laptop to Debian/KDE to now Devuan/openbox because all I need is the graphical part to display the programs I use. Everything else (taskbar, wallpaper, even window decorations) don't add anything to my "desktop experience" because it either takes up space or can't be seen anyway. The most fancy thing is picom making inactive windows slightly transparent to put more emphasis on the active window.
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The desktop background is the modern customized splash screen.
Window decorations and effects matter to me, for both functional and aesthetic reasons. To me, KDE is a sort of modernized cross between Windows 7 and NeXTStep in that department. And it gets right things that Windows has gotten worse about in 11, like being able to read the fucking clock. I seriously don't know who came up with that idea, but on the same display, I can read the taskbar clock on KDE without glasses and not on Windows unless I sca
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