Actually, I've missed KDE 3&4. I think I just used KDE 2, then Gnome 1 & 2, then some years on Mac OS X, then briefly back to Gnome 3.x (which promptly crashed my system due to tracker spiking system load into the stratosphere).
I think I've honestly spent most of my time in #i3wm because it's very efficient on old hardware (I was running on decade-old x86_64 and cheap ARM hardware until late last year), but now I'm taking a shine to KDE for work stuff.
Actually, I'm not hung up on global vs per-window menus. Global menus do save a bit of space, but there's more mouse travel required, and it only works on one framework (GTK or QT, depending on the DE).
I think the debate (if there is one) is a touch silly, as the early Macintosh was a unitasking system, so there was no point in even considering drawing the menubar on the windows themselves.
@RL_Dane@topher i think a lot of why we've lost useful menus and replace with hamburger is two-fold: (1.) The desire to make it "easier" for users to transition from desktop to mobile and back, (2.) The more icons and the fewer Strings used the easier it is to internationalise as fewer translations are needed.
The scariest part is how blindly oblivious the designers pushing this are to the needs and motivation of the specific userbase who are still using traditional desktop.
Yeah, we have a smartphone on us - and yet are deliberately going to a desktop machine where we can actually see what we're doing on larger than a bloody 1.7mm screen and interact with it with proper HID devices and find features and menus that are now buried behind swipes and mystery icons and confusion.
Why it's suddenly necessary to involve arcane swipe gestures and round after round of "guess the mystery icon" to find a simple feature that has always been easily located behind the same menu in the same spot for the past 20+ years - on a desktop! - is absolutely beyond my capacity to understand.
It's so sad.
I'm imagining what smartphones could be like today if the iToy never happened.
Physical buttons, extensive and flexible mobile OSes, non-stupefied userbase.
And most of all, no destruction of desktop UIs to make it look like a 23" iFad.
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