>Progress is often only possible by breaking things. It's not a choice, it's the only way forward.

See you think it's Progress, but it's actually Regress. It's not a moving forward, but backward.

Do not break contract. Do not break API. Do not break muscle memory. Everytime you do, kittens die horribly. Just Say No!

>I really, really do not think that's one of the reasons it doesn't happen in America.

It really, really is the biggest reason it doesn't happen.

KDE 3.5 -> 4 was its Gnome moment. The fall wasn't as hard, they have come up somewhat from there, but they still don't touch their KDE 3.5.10 Konqueror-primary days. Dolphin was a great example of the rot setting in during those days; Konqueror was the all-in-one browser application and Dolphin was the simplification cancer coming in. THAT particular KDE (which is TDE today) was peak KDE. Yes I am still this buttmad about Dolphin's introduction.

I use XFCE now.

Digital sovereignty is woefully undertaught. Things like FOSS software, cryptography and its many uses, digital rights management, ownership rights, right to repair, etc. We are turning computers into monkey-friendly appliance devices, when we should be molding tiny humans into digitally sovereign supermonkeys on advanced universal computation devices. How does anyone graduate high school not having heard of the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange? In my ideal, that would not happen. Students taught properly in digital sovereignty should be extremely difficult to surveil or control digitally with almost any kind of local, network, or service lock. This is a good thing, we want digital barbarian warriors and not digital slaves.

IMO a good interface should behave like it gives priority to the universe of workflows, that it respects the universality of Universal Machines and doesn't just merely resemble an appliance. Siemens NX, MSOffice/LibreOffice, Adobe CS6 Master Collection, and KDE 3.5 (Konqueror > Dolphin) are all examples off the top of my head of applications which, in varyng amounts, respected this universality principle in UI/UX design. They were fields to put your workflows together on, like ComfyUI is in image generation. Gnome has been the antithesis of this. Any kind of "simplified design" just seems to me like an artist has control and not an engineer-mathematician.

Great UI/UX will foster emergence in habits and workflows, AND AVOID BREAKING MUSCLE MEMORY AT ALMOST ANY COST! Terrible UI/UX will create hard but beautiful chutes to push cattle through and into the money fleecing machine.

>I mostly use XFCE and there are just a few small things I'd like changed or fixed. Nothing that I even notice frequently.

I know what you mean. XFCE today is reminiscent of what KDE 3.5 (TDE today) was in its era. XFCE seems to be arriving in a place somewhat similar to KDE 3.5 in relative customize-ability and feel. KDE 3.5 gave me wallpaper thumbnails on my desktop switcher, XFCE doesn't. It would be nice to open my 12 or 48 or whatever desktops drawer and see all the desktops' wallpapers collage into their master image, like I used to fifteen years ago!

Adding SteelSeries to my never buy list, along with Unicomp (Unicomp's literally died on me weeks after the 1 year warranty ended. Got told to buy another at full price, went to Ellipse instead at modelfkeyboards dot com for 4x the price and never been happier).

I've had two Unicomps as my daily drivers since December 2011. No issues so far, other than having to use PS/2 adapters.

I assume this is meant to be an insult but it fails. Not everyone paid exorbitant prices for their tuition. By the way, student loan debt is the largest thing on the asset side of the Federal balance sheet. They won't let it go unless they figure out a new way to screw everyone over.

Your steadfastness against the politics of the "Modern Lens" astounds me. You are a refreshing drink of cold water on a hot Mojave summer day.

Imagine if they analyzed all the user-blacklisted domains and deranked them from other (new) users' results. Death of SEO!