Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.
I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets
When I see stuff like this, I think it's clear that Linux is not going to be part of that era outside of the CLI. The Linux desktop is never going to recover from this.
Gnome and KDE just keep messing. That's why I stuck to openbox/labwc.
Because, these are not solving problems they are inventing them.
Making LLM/AIs use mouse and keyboard makes no sense. They are a human interface tailored to human strengths and limitations, and arguably even for humans CLI is a superior interface for many tasks.
The open source desktop environments don’t have the profit motivator that drives the commercial alternatives. They’re driven to deliver their interpretation of great UI. We can each debate whether we agree with the vision or execution but that’s the motive.
If they can employ AI to help remove desktop friction - and it’s local and not shipping my data off to the surveillance machine - I’d be open to it.
In fact, if it could sort out KDE wallet’s amnesia for my wifi password, I’d give it a roll now…
What a weird opening.
Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.
I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.
I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.
[0] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-Mouse-Click-Counter-Widget [1] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-AI-Usage-Tracking-Widget
I think the idea of plasma widgets and rails fully being customized per user giving them material control on ones desktop is a good idea.
We need good ideas to counter and take on the omarchy nonsense.
The editor is Liam Proven, a notorious liar who doesn't care about facts and has a massive hate-boner for AI, what do you expect? I'm surprised he is still allowed to write for The Register.