eh, still beats Discord as far as I'm concerned

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.

This has actually been the most positive reaction to a Firefox announcement I've seen in a long time. I've yet to find a piece of open source software users act more toxic towards than Firefox. It is impossible to find any Firefox-related announcement in recent years that's received broadly positive feedback. For a long time, the top voted comment would always be someone demanding tab groups or vertical tabs. Now they're adding those, which is probably why the reaction has been a bit more positive. But of course, AI and UI changes have become the new things to complain about.

why did it insert and translate some random japanese phrase in the lede

?

can't find any client by that name

No. all KDE config is in the home directory except maybe some SDDM stuff, which should be trivial to reconfigure if needed.

You learn significantly more from actually fixing the problems with your install as opposed to just constantly starting over every time. Doing it just to get rid of a couple of GNOME packages is especially not worth the trouble, considering it's a rather trivial task.

Enlightenment is easily the lightest full DE. It is my recommendation.

The idea that a web application for screen recording is less bloat than OBS is absurd. As this was the idea presented by OP, atzanteol reacted by figuratively saying that the word no longer had any meaning. Given the context, this was quite clearly not an attempt to downplay the effects or severity of software bloat, but simply a figurative use of the phrase meant to point out how badly the word bloat had been misused. You completely misinterpreted their comment. Then, when this was pointed out to you, you proceeded to do the Reddit thing of mockingly editing your original downvoted comment, successfully making an ass out of yourself.

The D3D shader compiler has been open source for many years. This is just a new version of it.

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.

How? D3D9 only needs HLSL 3. Perhaps you meant adding support for newer D3D versions? D3D10 and D3D11 support are certainly possible, though even still D3D11 only needs HLSL 5. As for D3D12, it would be impossible for the same reason Vulkan on Gallium is impossible; it's too low level.

Anyway, I've used Gallium-Nine with RadeonSI. It works fine. It can even be faster than DXVK, sometimes. Other times, DXVK is faster. They're about on par. Which kinda begs the question, what's the point? Gallium-Nine isn't substantially faster than DXVK and is much less portable, since it requires a Gallium3D driver to work, so it won't work for Nvidia. The Nouveau Gallium3D driver is way too slow to come close to DXVK. Zink + Gallium-Nine probably works, but I also can't see that beating DXVK. That's the reason Gallium-Nine died. Not because they didn't have the latest HLSL, but because DXVK killed interest in the project.

Elisa wasn't really meant to be an Amarok successor, it just kinda turned out that way because Elisa popped up around the time of the Plasma 5 release while Amarok never made the Qt5 transition. There were other reasons for Amarok's death (before its recent revival), though Elisa could be considered a factor.

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.

I guess the main improvement is that the panels and sidebars don't cover the desktop, so you can edit all of it more easily.

To me the most annoying thing with edit mode was that auto-hide panels would still hide in edit mode, making them difficult to edit, but that was also fixed a little earlier.

It's not being packaged by distros yet. You need to build from source.

Mesa + DXVK/WineD3D/VKD3D/Gallium-Nine.

CC BY-SA is considered open source. CC BY-NC is not.

Wine doesn't wait for major versions to merge major features. Major versions like Wine 9.0 are considered stable and are preceded by a feature freeze and multiple release candidates. Minor versions like Wine 9.9 are not, they're just released every two weeks from the master branch. This means nearly all of Wine 9.0's killer features were already present in the final Wine 8.21 minor version. The same will be true with Wine 10. Wayland support will continue to improve incrementally in the coming versions.