Eh, even with track creation, I prefer Modnation Racers and its spiritual successor LittleBigPlanet Karting. Shame both games are stuck on the PS3, but then SuperTuxKart still looks like it came out of the PS2. They run well in RPCS3 and online still works for track sharing through fan servers.

Also, I wasn’t that impressed by Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. It does have tons of content, certainly worth the price. Never played the originals and the remake sure does look pretty, but the track design feels pretty simple, probably because they’re from a PS1 game. Simple track layouts, few gimmicks. Some people might prefer that, but not me. I’m sure CTR beat the socks off Mario Kart 64 back in the day, but the tracks in modern Mario Kart are to me far more interesting. I expected more out of it given all the hype. Plus, for some unfathomable reason despite being multiplatform the game was only released on consoles, not PC, so that’s another game you have to emulate to play on PC. And if you do have a console to play it on, it’s locked at 30fps regardless of platform, which is disappointing for a racing game. There’s a 60fps mod if you emulate tho, thankfully.

All-Stars Racing Transformed does have my glowing recommendation, though.

What operating system do you use? On Linux I use Amarok which is great, but afaik there’s no up-to-date versions of it for other operating systems. It should have everything you want dunno about some of these tho like the semicolon stuff. Strawberry is a similar player that works on other operating systems.

You mean VHI bug? Says there are still 36 15 minute bugs.

Calligra’s support for OOXML files is truly garbage and shouldn’t be used. Only use it with OpenDocument files.

Whoa, I was convinced Karbon wasn’t going to see any further Calligra releases. Seemed to have zero maintainers last I checked, thought it’d go the way of Braindump and Author.

Huh? That’s the best thing about Calligra by far. Why waste valuable vertical real estate on toolbars and ribbons when you can shove a sidebar in all of that empty wasted margin space? Plus, the whole thing is customizable. It doesn’t have to be a sidebar if you don’t like sidebars.

Regular Qt themes are compiled C++ programs that use the QStyle API to alter the look of Qt applications. They can do just about anything, but obviously require code to create. Being compiled programs also means they can’t be portably distributed. They have to be recompiled for every different Qt version and architecture.

Kvantum is just one of those themes, and it uses its code to load and display much simpler SVG-based themes. Kvantum themes are actually much less complex than regular Qt themes, which is the whole point, since that makes them significantly simpler to create and much more portable, which is why they’re so popular. The vast majority of Qt themes nowadays are made for Kvantum. Before Kvantum, it was mostly the less powerful QtCurve. Regular themes can do a lot of things Kvantum themes can’t, but Kvantum is usually good enough.

This is excellent news. I was always annoyed at the fact that Dolphin had to use its own thumbnailer API. Now apps can bundle one thumbnailer for their file formats that works with all file managers, which is great.

One thing that I always thought would be really interesting to see would be a Wine thumbnailer that would generate thumbnails using Windows thumbnails for Linux file managers. So for example installing Sketchup on Wine would give you skp thumbnails, since Sketchup is bundled with a Windows Explorer thumbnailer for those files. I know Wine already supports thumbnailer shell extensions in its built-in file manager, so it would just need to be able speak with Linux file managers.

Now I just hope to see something similar happen with service menus. Every file manager has its own unique format, but it’s IMO the biggest obstacle to interoperability remaining with Linux file managers.

No third party icon theme that I’m aware of makes of use of accent colors.

Huh? How did you narrow it down to just GIMP? Are you excluding all non-GUI software or something? GUI has never been a big focus for GNU (which I assume is what you’re referring to when you say FSF), though they do have a couple of projects like GIMP and GNUCash. Most notably as far as GUI is concerned, they instigated the GNOME project, though they later split off. But yeah, they still maintain extremely important tools, especially for developers and UNIX systems, such as glibc, coreutils, gcc, emacs, gdb, make, bash, grub, octave, guix, etc.

like most apps on Linux, kde connect was never exclusive to any desktop. you don’t need gsconnect.

The Steam Deck works well if you have a particularly twisted definition of “working well”. SteamOS is certainly among the worst Linux distros I’ve used. It is certainly significantly worse than the average desktop-oriented distro. Sure, Valve has done good work with Proton, but basically every other piece of their stack is broken in some way.

Just a couple of days ago I had an issue where after the battery died and I plugged my Steam Deck into the charger, it simply failed to turn on. The fans would start spinning and that’s it. Nothing else worked. I could not get into the BIOS menu. I could not get into the recovery menu. The solution? Unplug the Deck, let the battery die from spinning fans and plug it back in, hoping that time it’ll turn on. Spinning fans take a long time to drain the battery, so this took me a couple of hours even though I’d only been plugged in for about ten minutes. I am not the first to deal with this issue. You can see posts online about it more than a year old. Those posts are how I was even able to figure out the solution.

I will never understand why SteamOS gets any kind of praise. This kind of issue is unacceptable. Any non-tech-savvy user will assume their device got bricked. I’ve seen several people mention they did RMA over this. And despite being a critical failure known for over a year, it hasn’t been fixed.

If you’re not a techy, SteamOS is garbage. It is ridiculously unpolished and keeps breaking in ways that can be difficult to fix. Every update (especially the client updates) has a 50/50 chance of breaking something, even on the stable update channel. You have to switch to desktop mode just to use a web browser. In fact, you have the switch to desktop mode for a lot of things, because gaming mode doesn’t let you do things like adding non-Steam games, install Flatpak applications or use a file manager. But desktop mode is entirely unsuited for gamepad controls and the on-screen keyboard feels particularly sluggish (though it can also get sluggish in gaming mode, just not as often).

If you’re a techy, SteamOS is also garbage. It is still ridiculously unpolished and the immutability is implemented in such a way that completely neuters the whole OS as anything you change gets wiped on every update (you can’t layer). There are hacks to do most things from gaming mode. You can run Firefox with some kind of weird setup where you run it inside a nested KWin session, because Gamescope is completely incapable of handling multiple windows, which would normally break all of the context menus and the hamburger menu in Firefox. Similar deal with Dolphin for file management. You can even run the entire Plasma desktop nested inside Gamescope, albeit with some caveats. Still need to switch to Desktop Mode to add non-Steam games tho, since you can’t run the desktop Steam Client from Nested Desktop. Things break occasionally, but it’s manageable. Figuring out all of these workarounds is quite time consuming though. This would not be the case if SteamOS was actually a good distro.

What, the grey bars? Crappy is a rude way of putting it, but yes they look pretty bad. I think that’s probably an artifact from the Qt4 days. It looked fine with Oxygen. Rest looks fine to me. If you think it looks busy, well the screenshot has a lot of panels enabled, just to showcase the features. IIRC many of them are not shown by default and a user would only keep the ones they need, since the interface is customizable.

Amarok uses Qt, just like every other KDE project. Likewise, I don’t think GNOME has any project not using GTK.

I am not. Clementine is not developed as part of KDE.

afaik they’re all dock widgets, meaning they can all be hidden, moved and resized at will. you can even split them off into their own windows if you want

Amarok, Elisa and JuK. That’s three, which is a lot, but it’s not entirely uncommon for KDE to have three (or more) applications with a similar purpose.

The problem with gaming mode is how quickly it falls appart the moment you try to use it for something other than gaming. Something as simple as having more than one window is impossible under Gamescope. That’s pretty problematic when a toolkit decides to implement something as a stealth window, like GTK context menus. Qt doesn’t do this as much as GTK does so using Qt applications isn’t as problematic, but it’s still a pain. For instance, you’re extracting a file with Dolphin and a pop up window shows up to report progress, making you completely unable to access the main Dolphin window until the operation has been completed.

The best part is that SteamOS displays a little “Switch Windows” section under the “Exit game” button when you have multiple windows opened, which literally just doesn’t work and as far as I can tell never has. The only thing that menu does is show you the names of the opened windows and let you close them by pressing X. Switching windows, the thing the section is literally named after, doesn’t work and never has since I got a Steam Deck last year. You select a window, it gets highlighted in the menu and that’s it. Nothing else happens. It doesn’t switch focus or switch the window displayed by Gamescope, it does nothing.

Another thing that’s often problematic is that you can’t maximize windows. Say your app decides to open itself windowed, Gamescope is just going to blow that 480x360 window up to full screen and makes zero attempt to actually resize the window to fit the screen, so you’re stuck with a very blurry and zoomed-in window. The maximize button in apps with CSD does nothing, but other built-in means of resizing windows or achieving full screen do often work. But these built-in means often don’t exist, because applications expect to be running on a window manager that’s actually capable of managing windows.

And then there’s just all kinds of bugs. Say you open a game with a certain aspect ratio/resolution while also having apps with a different aspect ration/resolution open, you’ll often find that when going back to your app you can’t move your mouse outside the boundaries of the window for the game you just opened. Another thing I’ve seen with many games is that the view often gets shrunk to a tiny square in the center of the screen. There’s a lot more, but I’m sick of ranting about gaming mode.

My personal take is that SteamOS’s Big Picture/Gaming Mode shell sucks balls. It’s impossible to make most desktop apps work well in Gaming mode without bending over backwards to work around the myriad of issues it has (for the ones that can even be worked around) and since it’s closed source there’s nothing you can do about it. Thus, the best solution would be to develop a new Gamepad-centric open source shell to replace it. I also think rather than repurposing Plasma Mobile applications like Angelfish it would be better to design new ones that are truly designed for gamepads. Perhaps Plasma Big Picture could be used as a starting point. But it would be a really big undertaking and there probably aren’t enough devs interested right now.

KDE3’s Plastik style was closer to XP’s Luna than Vista/7’s Aero. The default icon theme CrystalSVG had a colorful pastel and cartoonish style. There’s a full port of it to Plasma 5 here. It should still work fine in Plasma 6.

The Plasma 4 Oxygen style was much closer to the detailed realistic skeuomorphic style of Aero (though it was probably more so inspired by early OSX Aqua). It is still usable on Plasma 6 and packages for the theme should be available in your preferred distributions’ repositories.

Crystal Remix is really a mix of three icon themes designed by Everaldo Coelho in the 2000s. Only the first of these, the aforementioned CrystalSVG, was ever an official KDE theme. The second is Crystal Clear, the successor to CrystalSVG. It had a more detailed and realistic style compared to CrystalSVG, looking far closer to Aero. The third one is Crystal Project, the final iteration of Crystal. It went further into Crystal Clear’s direction and erased the last vestiges of CrystalSVG’s more cartoonish style. Crystal Project’s icons are particularly detailed and I’d consider it a really underappreciated piece of skeuomorphic icon design.

Personally, I’m not that big on Crystal Remix. I’d prefer either a complete CrystalSVG-styled icon theme or a complete Crystal Project-styled icon theme. Preferably the latter because the former already pretty much exists. The two styles don’t mesh together all that well, IMO. Crystal Remix’s coverage (especially for action icons) is also a bit lacking and it’s pretty common to run into unthemed Breeze icons in some applications.

Crystal Dock doesn’t strike me as particularly KDE3-ish. It’s basically nothing like KDE3’s Kicker, though there were a lot of popular third party docks in the KDE3 era like KoolDock, which were actually quite similar to this project. All of them are gone by now and there’s been a lot of demand for new third party docks since the death of Latte Dock. So I anticipate this project will make quite a few people happy.

Kontact is on Flathub, so it is definitely possible.

EDIT: Merkuro is apparently bundled with the Kontact Flatpak. Seems like they’re just shoving anything that uses Akonadi in that package. So on one hand, it seems there is a Merkuro Flatpak already. On the other hand, it’s bundled with a bunch of extra stuff you probably don’t need if you’re using Merkuro (like the entire Kontact suite), so you’re probably better off with distro packages.