As a former Apple guy, it pains me a bit to say this, but I’m coming to believe that the whole “It Just Works” thing is a temporary illusion.
Oh, it can be achieved! But the real trick lies in keeping it. This came to mind while I was watching a video about one of Bambu Labs’ very impressive-looking Apple-style “It Just Works” 3D printers, and felt myself drawing a parallel between the world of 3D printing and our more familiar KDE world.
As I mentioned recently, my first real introduction to the world of free software was 15 years ago with 3D printers, back when the field was dominated by RepRap hackers designing open hardware and software. And last year, I bought a new printer for the first time in over a decade. After drooling over a bunch of very cool Vorons, I eventually settled on a Prusa Mk4 instead of a different Bambu printer that looked very impressive at the time: printing faster, having an enclosed chamber and smoother wireless functionality, being cheaper, and looking prettier.
But the Prusa felt like KDE: simple by default, but powerful when needed. Big friendly community. Built by a company led by one of the early RepRap hardware hackers. Buying it was investing in the people helping to keep their part of the industry open, rather than private. No spyware, no lock-in, no phone app or internet connection needed. Can’t be bricked if the company goes out of business. Open, hackable, humane, trustworthy.
I’m making this sound like the decision was some sort of ideological compromise, but the Prusa Mk4 is also excellent. It’s as good or better in many ways, almost as much in others, and its UX still pretty polished. Maybe it’s not Apple polished, but it’s very easy to use and produces great prints. I did have to invest a bit more time and money into the Prusa upfront, but now I have a tool I can truly rely on, not because it’s got a seamless auto-updating cloud-based AI-enabled UI, but because it doesn’t.
And since then, both companies went in exactly in the directions I expected: Prusa released a new version of their printer that’s cheaper and better, plus a $100 kit for existing owners so they don’t have to buy a whole new thing… while Bambu released a firmware upgrade that lets them control how your Bambu printer can be used.
It Just Works… until it doesn’t.
I’m glad I went with the Prusa, the same way we’re all glad we went with KDE over Apple or Microsoft. In KDE we know this well, so it’s up to us to spread the message to everyone else: resist the lure of “easier now, screwed later.” This is where the big commercial offerings start to fail: anything proprietary and closed source that Just Works may simply stop working at any time. You’ll invest in it, and it’ll work out great for a while, but then start to worsen, break, or exploit you.
Even as we invest in making our software easier to use, we need to level the playing field by advertising our advantages in ownership, privacy, personalization, and freedom. Our software is trustworthy because it can’t be taken away by us or anyone else; you’ll be able to use it over the long term, developing skills and efficiencies over time. Investing in KDE is investing in yourself, rather than someone else’s bottom line.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Well the difference is not that big. KDE had lots of cool stuff like window shading, title bar tabs, etc, where them are now? And lots of prominent stuff been written to enhance KDE now and then like Klassy decorations or applets for title bar buttons, etc — still struggling to be a part of KDE I guess. Some vanished already due to developer’s burnout like Latte dock.
My point is: not only proprietary stuff ceases to work one day, it just happens to everything sooner or later.
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The point of open software and formats (and not necessary free) is the possibility to own the tool your using.
I’ll take an example from about 10 years ago, I needed a Mac because the UI designer in my company was using Sketch (paid vector image editor). It’s a neat tool, easy to grasp and pretty fast. It has all the basic Adobe Illustrator functionalities for 10% of the price and allow you to do 90% of the job.
But, every new major version was changing the file format so you were only able to open new files on this very last version.
So one day, I’ve asked myself if I needed a new $1k Mac every few years and $100 license just to peek the last version of designer work and to make some minor changes (the SVG exports where very limited).
We’ve switched to Inkscape, which is not as easy to use (but has many more functionalities), which runs on every OS (and on every version), generate SVG files (with specific Inkscape data that gets ignored by other SVG previewers), and even if Inkscape stops working or stop being developed tomorrow, I can use the current version of it forever, keep reading all the files I’ve ever create, and even pay some dev to fix and improve the code.
At the opposite end, I’ve one asked Sketch support to fix the SVG export to get correct draw shadow, I’ve only had some “it’s planned” answer and the last version I’ve tested few years back didn’t even exported drop shadow at all. Without any possibility to fix and improve it.
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@Minimax I think most of us have stories like this, and yours is a classic. Thanks for sharing it!
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I think the big issue here is independence.
If you have an archive of an old Debian version (the everything CD images that include the whole repos), you can go and install it today and use it forever. Yes, the machine won’t be secure online, but it will work. You can put it on a laptop that never connects to the network and it will be perfectly usable.
If you grab a windows 11 ISO and try to use it in 10 years it won’t even install, because the installer needs an internet connection. Same for most software today – there’s online license activation, always online functionality, automatic driver detection etc. If I got a copy of Solidworks or anything Adobe suite today, it will be as a subscription and it will just stop working in a year.
From the 3d printer land, one of my acquaintances was getting one for kids and ended up with a XYZDaVinci machine. Those have all nicely integrated features, proprietary everything, rfid in filament spools for material auto detection. Well now the company is out of business, the slicer is hard to setup since it was compiled for very old Windows versions, and the rfid spools, which are the only thing the machine will accept, can’t be purchased anywhere. If the software was open, you could compile a firmware that skips the rfid detection (or more likely some hacker online would and you would just download it feom their forum post) and keep printing. Or, you know, it would not have that “feature” in the first place.
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I remember getting all into iPad and iPhone gaming a few years back, around the heyday of excitement about Apple Arcade and all of that. The “It just works” selling point felt big for me after trying to figure out oddities of PC gaming in the past…and then the first iCloud sync issue happened. No visible errors, no clear way to even see the files, just game saves that were in one place but *didn’t* magically appear in the other place.
Opaqueness to the user only really works if the product is literally perfectly suited for the purpose…which very few things in reality ever are. That experience, for as silly of a topic as it was, probably primed me for realizing the societal value of free software.
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That’s exactly it, and I’ve encountered similar issues when helping family members with issues. If it doesn’t Just Work, then you have basically no tools to troubleshoot, work around, or fix an issue you run into.
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The temptation is hitting me now. I just bought a mini PC on sale (it’s hella affordable; I won’t get into it here lol) and it’s gonna come with Windows 11 Pro.
Now’s the time for me to resist the lure of “easier now, screwed later.”
(Ubuntu Studio 25.04 comes out in a couple weeks. They also say that old laptops make for good beginner servers.)
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Just watching my wife’s windows machine this week turn into a nightmare of freezes and blue screens (cause by infighting between windows updates and the video card driver), and also for our favourite game lag’s on both systems (windows and linux) makes me turn off from it pretty quick (and yes, windows updates are disable and the thing just ignores the setting and downloads it anyway)
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These cheap mini PCs are great. I have one running my living room PC, turning it into a little KDE-powered HTPC setup.
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For Linux with Plasma “just works” would translate into looking at what happens if things fail.
For instance, repairing broken dependencies in package management, which still gets you into these loops of not being able to uninstall a faulty package.
All of this has little to do with KDE Plasma but still concerns desktop readiness. So one definitely needs to look beyond the desktop as such.
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This is one of the biggest reasons for us creating KDE Linux, and a major advantage of image-based operating systems in general. No user facing package management means all package-management-related issues are eliminated.
All the package management happens on the OS builders’ side, where they can properly notice and fix issues, apply QA, etc. Pushing this onto the user’s own machine makes the problem effectively impossible to prevent.
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