I wouldn't attach too much weight to negative comments. People love to complain, and on the other hand those who are perfectly content often don't feel the need to advertise that. That is not to say that Linux DEs are perfect, mind you, but maybe not as bad as comments on HN would suggest.
Yeah, I use GNOME on my laptop every day, and I say it's pretty good. Things "just work" enough for me to focus on doing my work or enjoying myself without having to worry about the DE, and I like the defaults, mostly; it's not just a matter of convenience. And the keyboard shortcuts and mousepad gestures on GNOME are great as well. But from the way GP complained you'd think the Linux desktop were ruined.
I just switched my work computer from a Linux laptop running Gnome (on Wayland, with working drag and drop) to a MacBook Air M2. The hardware is a great improvement, the desktop environment is not.
I think it’s also a matter of getting used to it. I used Linux from 1994-2007 and Mac since. I had some Linux desktop excursions in between and I always come back surprised how broken the Linux desktop experience is. Let alone there would be something great like Shortcat or Raycast app menu search.
The only thing that is annoying in macOS is the lack of good tiling, but there are good third party options that add tiling.
I’m not sure there is a piece of software in existence that doesn’t have a group of angry HN users posting about their pet bug that no one else has heard of.
> I’m partial to KDE myself, but honestly anything with a sensible panel is usable
I’m the same! I’ve never understood how people have such strong emotions when it comes to a desktop environment. They all (including Windows, macOS, and even iPadOS) feel like they are good enough to me and I enjoy switching to something different once in a while.
Desktop mode is KDE on X. In that case your comment is true, steam will just run on KDE.
Game mode is a wayland session with gamescope as a WM, but it isn't controlled directly by the user. The steam client controls the WM and exposes those controls to you through menus and handles stuff like notifications and being a driver for the controller, so you could call it a DE in game mode.
More like X session running under XWayland. gamescope doesn't really expose Wayland interfaces to clients (well, technically it does expose some stuff, but I wouldn't qualify that as anything else than implementation detail - although that may have started to change recently, I've seen some stuff being done around xdg-shell there).
Can't find any "kde" or "plasma" references in the process list under normal operation. It's only after you reboot into the desktop mode that you start seeing process names like "plasmashell", "kded5", "startplasma-x11" and so on.
I'm not entirely convinced that using SteamOS can really be counted as "using KDE" in any way.
Well, I wouldn't make that statement so strong. KDE Plasma is the default desktop environment on SteamOS, it's just that it doesn't boot into its desktop environment by default (but you're two buttons away from switching into it).
