From what I've read on the Qt blog, this is something they're tackling with their own models and tooling. GenAI is banned where I work and I'd picked up QML pretty quickly and got productive faster than WPF/XAML
The editor is Liam Proven, a notorious liar who doesn't care about facts and has a massive hate-boner for AI, what do you expect? I'm surprised he is still allowed to write for The Register.
the register has a red masthead for a very good and intentional reason. i think that people, especially americans, are into a bit of the british snark, but the site is by and large taken way more seriously than it deserves to be.
Yes, the set of dotfiles by DHH for Arch that has raised 18.5 million dollar, while real distributions and desktops are struggling to get donations. Having a few billionaire friends who share your techbro politics helps I guess.
DHH having to deal with gatekeeping attitudes like this and particular political prerequisites is the reason he created these “dotfiles” in the first place. I actually know several people who are not very technical and never Linux users who installed and switched to it as their main operating system. So I think what’s actually going on here is a lot of people are butt hurt that this is getting attention and having success when nobody else has before has.
You don't think it is unfair that projects that have basically been xkcd 2347's "a project some random person in Nebraska" don't get a penny, while DHH who gets millions for a bunch of dotfiles, is unfair? I don't contest that his dotfiles may be useful to some people, only that all these companies didn't care to give significant money to open source projects that they all rely on to make their billions. But when one of the 1%ers shows up with his hobby project, they all stand in line to donate millions.
To give an example: Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship a month before [1].
Jake, non super-nerd in Ohio, never picked up Linux because they either never heard of it or the barrier to entry was to complex. Basic-ass stuff like drivers not working, etc - going on for decades now. Then along comes a personality like DHH who created an opinionated setup and now Jake has Linux on his computer for the first time ever. And now a bunch of people have been attracted to and have started hacking on linux, getting driver support working which is good for the entire Linux community - see the list here for ARM support: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-dragon
Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now.
Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.
Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!
An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.
If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.
If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)
I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all.
The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (if at all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions.
I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.
Is it going to just be an Omarchy + KDE iteration? The article was very light on content but DHH is definitely driving more results and new contributions which is great for free software.
Although Xfce 1.0 appeared slightly earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known as the Kool Desktop Environment one of the earliest entirely FOSS desktop environments for Linux. Version 1.0 was released in July 1998.
What a weird opening.
Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.
I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.
I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.
A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user – what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.
Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.
That was my thought exactly. I don’t even remember last time I looked at the desktop because I always have some app open full screen.
I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets
To be fair i think in KDE terms, the desktop refers to the whole experience: the panels, the notifications, the menus, the decorations, the file manager, etc. Also to be fair i think widgets are still mostly focused on the actual desktop part of the "desktop environment"
Sorry to be annoying, i do think the idea in general is bad, i just think i have a better idea of what the devs are thinking if i consider the idea where the entire desktop environment as a whole reacts to how you use it instead of making every single nanoscale decision user-configurable (KDE) or deciding you know better than the user, your way or the highway (Gnome). I don't think they mean the actual like desktop view specifically, or building a dashboard
I still remember opening Firefox one day to test something (I primarily use Vivaldi), and since it had recently updated itself, it showed its "what's new" page, with the big words "Thank you for loving Firefox!".
KDE does a lot more than launching apps and window management. Mounting storage devices, settings, widgets for managing a whole lot of stuff (power, printers, networks...), managing remote file systems, a huge integrated set of apps (from PDF reader to file manager), managing switching displays....
This is a proposal to be discussed. KDE activities are a useful feature few people use because its different and a pain to set up so something that might benefit from a but of automation. Given KDE's approach it will be configurable and optional. The people behind i seem to be drawing on past work on looking at what users actually liked.
It’s going to happen in windows and most likely Mac too. In both cases, all your data will be shipped off to the model providers and then out into the panopticon.
The open source desktop environments don’t have the profit motivator that drives the commercial alternatives. They’re driven to deliver their interpretation of great UI. We can each debate whether we agree with the vision or execution but that’s the motive.
If they can employ AI to help remove desktop friction - and it’s local and not shipping my data off to the surveillance machine - I’d be open to it.
In fact, if it could sort out KDE wallet’s amnesia for my wifi password, I’d give it a roll now…
And in Windows it will doubtlessly be implemented such that the AI will be very helpful and make subtle UI changes based on your usage patterns, without telling you, so that your muscle memory becomes useless. And insert ads, obviously. Also, the AI should definitely have a cute animated avatar that pops up when you don't need it and offers useless advice.
The best way that my desktop can show me love is by being a glorified application launcher and nothing more. Also, the less meta/data that it sends back to its vendor the more love I feel that I am receiving.
The desktop is a solved problem. Now we are moving into the era of agents using the mouse and keyboard and interacting with the windows manager.
When I see stuff like this, I think it's clear that Linux is not going to be part of that era outside of the CLI. The Linux desktop is never going to recover from this.
Gnome and KDE just keep messing. That's why I stuck to openbox/labwc.
Because, these are not solving problems they are inventing them. Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI. And I can see that will not change. Sure there are things like Niri and thats cool, but for agent use. It's redundant.
We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai. Humans will use them less and less. Because they will have better things to do. And likely better interactions. After all a mouse and keyboard while I still prefer it over voice, is still from an era where that was the best we had.
Now, I actually think I prefer tmux in a terminal on my phone on a software keyboard. Over a desktop with mouse and keyboard. As clunky as it is. Because I can use that anywhere, anytime to talk to agents.
CLI is the era and likely gonna be until some more LLM/AI-focused interfaces appear, and they are not gonna look like human UIs. There's a reason all models use bash and code, not a GUI shell, for their internal sandboxen.
Making LLM/AIs use mouse and keyboard makes no sense. They are a human interface tailored to human strengths and limitations, and arguably even for humans CLI is a superior interface for many tasks.
Can't agree with this, there's clearly room for improvement
Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI.
Do agree with this though. Fragmentation is not ideal for having a consistent UI and a consistent UI is needed to develop muscle memories so it can be used effectively.
We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai.
I don't think that will happen while AI costs dollars per minute of actual use. Being able to use a computer for free will be valuable for a long time still I think.
A desktop is a tool, and the last thing I want from my tools is intelligence. Tools need to be predictable. My desktop should respond to my commands the exact same way every time so I can use it without conscious thought.
If you want to introduce AI to a desktop, the best way is to add an interface for automating that desktop and add a separate AI agent that can use that interface. This also benefits accessibility tools that can use the same automation interface.
A desktop is many things to many people, some of which use computers very differently from how engineers use them. If a desktop was only a tool, background images, Xeyes, theming, and many other standard features wouldn’t exist. There are no themes for power drills.
So a few months ago for various reasons I started to use ubuntu/gnome again (after 15 years on MacBooks / OS X / MacOS) on my home PC. I have to say, in my case, command line llm made the desktop so much more enjoyable.
Sadly still a lot of things did not work correctly out of the box, and everything was kinda fixable, but would have needed some bigger time investment from my side.
Instead just telling llm cli that something does not work correctly, and waiting a few minutes until it fixes it is just so much better for me.
Do I want LLMs all over the place in my desktop? Probably not. But having an LLM fixing all kind of broken or miss-configured software is just so convenient.
Guess they never used QtQuick with LLM. LLMs are really bad at QML/QtQuick, they often use older APIs/syntaxes and generate total garbage.
From what I've read on the Qt blog, this is something they're tackling with their own models and tooling. GenAI is banned where I work and I'd picked up QML pretty quickly and got productive faster than WPF/XAML
This article has no content whatsoever... Just sending the links of relevant materials to AI would produce a better-organized result than this.
News piece with unnecessary annoying editorializing.
I think the idea of plasma widgets and rails fully being customized per user giving them material control on ones desktop is a good idea.
We need good ideas to counter and take on the omarchy nonsense.
The editor is Liam Proven, a notorious liar who doesn't care about facts and has a massive hate-boner for AI, what do you expect? I'm surprised he is still allowed to write for The Register.
the register has a red masthead for a very good and intentional reason. i think that people, especially americans, are into a bit of the british snark, but the site is by and large taken way more seriously than it deserves to be.
When you say omarchy, are you talking about this https://omarchy.org/ ?
Yes, the set of dotfiles by DHH for Arch that has raised 18.5 million dollar, while real distributions and desktops are struggling to get donations. Having a few billionaire friends who share your techbro politics helps I guess.
DHH having to deal with gatekeeping attitudes like this and particular political prerequisites is the reason he created these “dotfiles” in the first place. I actually know several people who are not very technical and never Linux users who installed and switched to it as their main operating system. So I think what’s actually going on here is a lot of people are butt hurt that this is getting attention and having success when nobody else has before has.
You don't think it is unfair that projects that have basically been xkcd 2347's "a project some random person in Nebraska" don't get a penny, while DHH who gets millions for a bunch of dotfiles, is unfair? I don't contest that his dotfiles may be useful to some people, only that all these companies didn't care to give significant money to open source projects that they all rely on to make their billions. But when one of the 1%ers shows up with his hobby project, they all stand in line to donate millions.
To give an example: Digital Ocean is giving Omarchy $3M, while they cancelled their $50 per month GNOME/Flathub VM sponsorship a month before [1].
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006...
Jake, non super-nerd in Ohio, never picked up Linux because they either never heard of it or the barrier to entry was to complex. Basic-ass stuff like drivers not working, etc - going on for decades now. Then along comes a personality like DHH who created an opinionated setup and now Jake has Linux on his computer for the first time ever. And now a bunch of people have been attracted to and have started hacking on linux, getting driver support working which is good for the entire Linux community - see the list here for ARM support: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-dragon
You are arguing a point that I'm not even making. I will just stop here.
Much of the visuals and features in Omarchy is config yes but going from a blank drive to useful development environment in one minute is not just a set of dotfiles. It's clearly a distro now.
Don't let politics cloud your thinking. There are a lot of good reasons to like Omarchy, and other distros should pay attention to the substance.
Omarchy shows how it's possible to realize a very clear, distinct vision of how desktop computing should be. I'd like to see the same amount of effort put into realizing several other visions!
An LLM will happily take an instruction like "my currently super-tweaked Debian install is awesome, create a set of scripts that recreates the exact setup starting from a minimal netinstall". It will create a VM, install the base debian, iterate until it's right. You can have it make a user-friendly UI on top of the scripts, have it install drivers, commercial software that Debian shuns from their distro, and so on.
If you have good taste and attention to detail, your setup might have universal appeal. You will have created a Debian flavour that might be better than anything anyone gets when installing official Debian.
If you have poor taste and attention to detail, at least you have a one-command way to get your familiar janky setup installed from scratch. :)
I didn't say anything about usefulness. Even a bunch of dotfiles can be useful, Oh My Zsh and others were very popular after all.
The thing I complain about are that these companies that build their fortunes partially on open source benefitted a lot from systematically underfunded developers. But they only make small contributions to those projects (if at all). But if their millionaire buddy shows up, they all stand in line to donate millions.
I am not sure what it is. I guess partially they want to associate with the popularity of Omarchy, partially they are doing a favor to another rich techbro, some may agree with DHH's politics to 'drive woke out of open source'. But it still sucks that they don't give that many millions to Debian/OpenSSL/LibreSSL/Rust/pick your other favorite infrastructure project that they highly depend on to make their money.
Is it going to just be an Omarchy + KDE iteration? The article was very light on content but DHH is definitely driving more results and new contributions which is great for free software.
I love making kustom KDE widgets with LLMs[0][1]. If you like customizing your desktop, I highly recommend you take advantage of this new era.
[0] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-Mouse-Click-Counter-Widget [1] https://github.com/dginovker/KDE-AI-Usage-Tracking-Widget
Although Xfce 1.0 appeared slightly earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known as the Kool Desktop Environment one of the earliest entirely FOSS desktop environments for Linux. Version 1.0 was released in July 1998.
What a weird opening.
Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.
I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.
I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.
Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.
That was my thought exactly. I don’t even remember last time I looked at the desktop because I always have some app open full screen.
I kind of understand the intention like show a custom compiled widget stuff, but then that would be a custom dashboard and not a desktop. Even if it was a dashboard, I don’t wanna burn tokens to create gimmicky widgets
"Desktop" here means "desktop environment" aka the whole shell, not just the literal desktop part of the desktop metaphor.
To be fair i think in KDE terms, the desktop refers to the whole experience: the panels, the notifications, the menus, the decorations, the file manager, etc. Also to be fair i think widgets are still mostly focused on the actual desktop part of the "desktop environment"
Sorry to be annoying, i do think the idea in general is bad, i just think i have a better idea of what the devs are thinking if i consider the idea where the entire desktop environment as a whole reacts to how you use it instead of making every single nanoscale decision user-configurable (KDE) or deciding you know better than the user, your way or the highway (Gnome). I don't think they mean the actual like desktop view specifically, or building a dashboard
Yeah, this may be a case of "this project is really important to me so it must be really important to the users, too".
I still remember opening Firefox one day to test something (I primarily use Vivaldi), and since it had recently updated itself, it showed its "what's new" page, with the big words "Thank you for loving Firefox!".
Eww.
KDE does a lot more than launching apps and window management. Mounting storage devices, settings, widgets for managing a whole lot of stuff (power, printers, networks...), managing remote file systems, a huge integrated set of apps (from PDF reader to file manager), managing switching displays....
This is a proposal to be discussed. KDE activities are a useful feature few people use because its different and a pain to set up so something that might benefit from a but of automation. Given KDE's approach it will be configurable and optional. The people behind i seem to be drawing on past work on looking at what users actually liked.
It’s going to happen in windows and most likely Mac too. In both cases, all your data will be shipped off to the model providers and then out into the panopticon.
The open source desktop environments don’t have the profit motivator that drives the commercial alternatives. They’re driven to deliver their interpretation of great UI. We can each debate whether we agree with the vision or execution but that’s the motive.
If they can employ AI to help remove desktop friction - and it’s local and not shipping my data off to the surveillance machine - I’d be open to it.
In fact, if it could sort out KDE wallet’s amnesia for my wifi password, I’d give it a roll now…
And in Windows it will doubtlessly be implemented such that the AI will be very helpful and make subtle UI changes based on your usage patterns, without telling you, so that your muscle memory becomes useless. And insert ads, obviously. Also, the AI should definitely have a cute animated avatar that pops up when you don't need it and offers useless advice.
The best way that my desktop can show me love is by being a glorified application launcher and nothing more. Also, the less meta/data that it sends back to its vendor the more love I feel that I am receiving.
The desktop is a solved problem. Now we are moving into the era of agents using the mouse and keyboard and interacting with the windows manager.
When I see stuff like this, I think it's clear that Linux is not going to be part of that era outside of the CLI. The Linux desktop is never going to recover from this.
Gnome and KDE just keep messing. That's why I stuck to openbox/labwc.
Because, these are not solving problems they are inventing them. Everything that makes Linux great, simply hasn't translated to the desktop GUI. And I can see that will not change. Sure there are things like Niri and thats cool, but for agent use. It's redundant.
We are done with desktops. They will be handed off to ai. Humans will use them less and less. Because they will have better things to do. And likely better interactions. After all a mouse and keyboard while I still prefer it over voice, is still from an era where that was the best we had.
Now, I actually think I prefer tmux in a terminal on my phone on a software keyboard. Over a desktop with mouse and keyboard. As clunky as it is. Because I can use that anywhere, anytime to talk to agents.
CLI is the era and likely gonna be until some more LLM/AI-focused interfaces appear, and they are not gonna look like human UIs. There's a reason all models use bash and code, not a GUI shell, for their internal sandboxen.
Making LLM/AIs use mouse and keyboard makes no sense. They are a human interface tailored to human strengths and limitations, and arguably even for humans CLI is a superior interface for many tasks.
XFCE is also a good option.
It would be great if Windowmaker was still being actively developed as in the 2000's, but yeah devs moved on.
Can't agree with this, there's clearly room for improvement
Do agree with this though. Fragmentation is not ideal for having a consistent UI and a consistent UI is needed to develop muscle memories so it can be used effectively.
I don't think that will happen while AI costs dollars per minute of actual use. Being able to use a computer for free will be valuable for a long time still I think.
Sorry, but a string of ones and zeroes will never "love you back".
I'm good, thanks. AI bros can all gather at Omarchy if they want slopOS experience.
Nowhere is safe, is it? All that is holy is profaned.
A desktop is a tool, and the last thing I want from my tools is intelligence. Tools need to be predictable. My desktop should respond to my commands the exact same way every time so I can use it without conscious thought.
If you want to introduce AI to a desktop, the best way is to add an interface for automating that desktop and add a separate AI agent that can use that interface. This also benefits accessibility tools that can use the same automation interface.
A desktop is many things to many people, some of which use computers very differently from how engineers use them. If a desktop was only a tool, background images, Xeyes, theming, and many other standard features wouldn’t exist. There are no themes for power drills.
So a few months ago for various reasons I started to use ubuntu/gnome again (after 15 years on MacBooks / OS X / MacOS) on my home PC. I have to say, in my case, command line llm made the desktop so much more enjoyable.
Sadly still a lot of things did not work correctly out of the box, and everything was kinda fixable, but would have needed some bigger time investment from my side.
Instead just telling llm cli that something does not work correctly, and waiting a few minutes until it fixes it is just so much better for me.
Do I want LLMs all over the place in my desktop? Probably not. But having an LLM fixing all kind of broken or miss-configured software is just so convenient.