I also switched to KDE after trying Gnome and Xfce last year. It felt very mature in comparison and I was really impressed with the quality and stability overall. It had all the options I was looking for to customize the desktop experience to my liking and it felt like everything just worked. I'd say I now prefer KDE over Windows.
can I ask how it has changed the course of your life?
I've deen daily driving Ubuntu with KDE for about 2 years now. it's been great and I've had a lot of fun exploring things and learning the GNU tools in particular. I've been interested in contributing to some projects but that hasn't been very accessible so far.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But like
2OEH8eoCRo0, I can say that Red Hat Linux changed my life. Experience running Linux from kernel 1.2.13/Red Hat Linux 2.1 onward at home, and contributing small bits of code to a project or two (and RPMs to community repos), got me into a career at Wall Street after college, covering hardware and software companies (including RHAT) as an equity analyst during and after the dotcom bubble.
I got my PC in 1996, replacing my 1990 Amstrad CPC. I was contributing to free software projects a little over a year or so later, working full time customizing free software in house by 2001, made a short film about GNU in 2007 and a consultant at the FSF by 2008.
Introduced me to Linux. Nobody on the school playground had even heard of it. Helped fuel my lifelong interest in computers. The Linux and tech experience contributed to my current role.
Not sure about the person you're directly asking but I have a similar sentiment for Red Hat Linux of the era.
I've been a Linux sysadmin since 1999. Every dollar I've paid for food and shelter since has been a direct result of what I learned getting Linux up and running on a PC and dialed up (later connected via Ethernet/Cable Modem) to the internet.
I have no clue what I would have done otherwise. I'd probably be working in Public Health or recently unemployed from the EPA by the Trumps Doge Squad.
I had the same issue with linux, I am using PcManFM but frankly it's not as good as explorer. I very much prefer the old explorer that drew the tree and branches. None of file managers I tried had this basic functionality.
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.
For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
