My bet is that this happened because they do develop both the Enlightenment desktop and the E libraries, which is a tremendous amount of work. Add to that that if they are a small team, they’re not going to go relatively fast (afaik E17 took years…). Maybe it was the reason GNOME/GTK(+) and KDE (which began with an already developed GUI library) caught up.

But as I always say in this kind of posts, both Enlightenment and E are amazing and I so wish they were more rich featured and popular and, if I were the XFCE mouse and got fed up with the bullshit of the GNOME-ization/libadwaita-zion of GTK, I’d consider porting all my shit to E - it would be awesome if those two merged into one. GTK and E are both written in C, XFCE has a robust set of apps and a seemingly bigger team behind it…

Because choices, freedom… that kind of stuff. And I say this as a now long time KDE user who used to use GNOME in the beginning.

That being said, what made me flee to KDE was realizing that its devs somehow think they know their users better than their users know themselves so they decided to develop a software metaphor with a utterly specific way to do things. Not that it’s a bad thing per se, they can do whatever they want if they don’t hurt anything or anyone else - but I wish people coming into the Linux and FOSS world could have that as a kind of warning when the distro they choose to begin their journey happens to ship GNOME as default.

No, because we’re telling to use : as a separator with the -F flag

Not sure if I’m understanding, but can’t you just pipe the whole thing to awk and capture the first field? Like

echo "/dev/loop0: [2081]:64 (/a/path/to/afile.dat)" | awk -F: '{print $1}'

Which would print

/dev/loop0

I’d suppose if you ask this on KDE Reddit someone with enough time could make something like this with Kvantvm, though the difficult parts would be (1) the web browser theme, and specially (2) the icon theme - I have never ever seen an icon theme like that for Linux

Everyone seems to poke on the vim vs emacs/gnome vs kde/systemd vs everyone else but it seems to me the most toxic feud in the foss world has been x11 vs wayland. People had throwed shit at it because of their own specific issues and its “slow” development pace without realizing it’s a titanic endeavour and the hate and toxicity brings absolutely nothing positive to the table nor the development of Linux & FOSS in general.

My strongly held suspicion is that it’s a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.

You just answered yourself. They’re just tools.

I’m a professional graphic designer and I will never EVER support any initiative trying to get privative support into Linux and this kind of shitty mindset from colleagues actually irks me. I will support any initiative trying to improve what we already have. You don’t even need to be a developer nor donate money to help - bug reports and translations are also a thing. That’s how we got to get high quality software like Krita, Inkscape or Blender.