I’m surprised you could even run a Linux distro with X11 and KDE1 on 8MB of RAM.

Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the “Windows 9x” theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn’t surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn’t depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.

Yeah, I mean Google caring about Linux isn’t exactly breaking news. We knew that already. Android and ChromeOS both exist and as web company they kinda have to care about the OS that by and large runs the web. But this is Phoronix and they’ll make articles about anything as long as they think as it’ll get engagement. “Chromium” and “Wayland” are pretty good buzzwords as far as that goes, thus this article. My point is more so that maybe it isn’t productive to have every acknowledgment of Chromium’s continued existence be overwhelmingly negative regardless of context.

This isn’t something to complain about, IMO. Chromium is a popular app and it is a good thing to see work on supporting FDO protocols and improving Wayland support. I prefer Firefox myself, but it’s nice that Linux support isn’t just an afterthought for Google either and more importantly it trickles down to the countless apps on Linux that depend on Chromium in some form (usually through Electron). I personally use several, including but not limited to Slack, Discord, r2modman and VSCodium.

especially considering KDE already has an application with almost exactly the same name for the same purpose https://invent.kde.org/utilities/alpaka