The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said.
Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.
Windows is far and away the OS of choice for consumers and businesses. Why? Because anybody whose uses Windows at home knows how to use it at work. Repeat after me. The Linux user interface blows because itâ(TM)s not consistent.
Windows dominates because of technological lock-in. At one point it managed to grab by far the largest slice of the desktop market when it was young. The Linux desktop wasn't that much of a thing back then, it was too young and undeveloped to offer serious competition. Now everybody is used to Windows, and often has software that works only under Windows, hardware that works only under Windows, etc. It's a positive feedback loop, the fact that Linux desktops exist and actually work quite well on a variety of hardware (typing from a Linux distro right now) is a testament to the platform's resilience and capability.
The only OS seriously taking on Windows and thriving is one whose roots go further back than Windows, and which is made by a hardware manufacturer. Even that is a niche market and tied to only one hardware platform.
Meanwhile Linux has, via Android, become the Windows of the smartphone world. Due to the consistency of the user interface? Well, no, look at the differences between stock Android and the various manufacturer's flavours (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei LG, etc.), as well as the differences between Android versions (my phone recently upgraded to a new Android version and I flipped after realizing they moved around really important stuff, like where some settings I check and change often are, etc.). It's because Android grabbed the market while it was young. Windows too has changed its interface, Office at one point changed everything, yet Microsoft still dominates these markets...due to lock-in.
You would obviously be surprised the things one can buy "under the table".
Look, I come from (and lived in) a country where at one point "under the table" was the only way to buy pretty much anything at all. I am well-versed in how black markets work.
However, in advanced and rich Western societies (like the one I'm typing this from now), such things are marginal. Where I am right now booze and cigarettes are heavily taxed (booze is a government monopoly, 80 cents out of each dollar spent by the consumer on legal alcohol purchases goes to the government one way or another). Does a black market for alcohol exist? I'm sure it does, but it's a marginal phenomenon. I've never bought black-market booze, no one I know has either, and I buy booze frequently. Everyone complains about the prices, yet very few people do something about (because they can, ultimately, afford them).
A tiny black market in plastic bags (which, based on the price of a plastic bag, would be very tiny indeed) is tolerable if the use of plastic bags in society at large is extremely reduced (which is what plastic bag bans, or mandatory charges to plastic bags, do achieve).
Excessive taxation drives underground markets. So good luck with that.
For flimsy plastic bags? Lolz. It's not booze, or cigarettes. Also, charging 5-10 cents per bag is not "excessive", and even if it were, there are inexcessively priced substitutes.
There are whole huge states where the stores have handy disposable bags at the ready. Some of these states are even contiguous.
It would indeed feel quite weird to suddenly encounter stores demanding that you bring your own bags.
Nobody "demands" you bring your own bags, but if you want bags at the cashier, you have to purchase them, they are not free. Hence, people buy sturdy reusable bags and sacs and bring them with them when they shop, in order to avoid having to purchase new (often flimsy and easily breakable) bags each time. It's quite normal.
You should make it easier to use plastic bags responsibly, not force people to do the "right" thing at the point of a gun.
Government is seriously a dumb man's way to organize society.
You know how you build a nice society? You get people to agree with your idea of a nice society; you don't bully them with the threat of force. Government must follow society, not lead it.
Government has been empirically shown to be the best way to organize a large society. It's probably and usually not necessary in a relatively isolated society of a few hundred people, where everybody knows everybody. Maybe also for a few thousand, where even when you don't know a person, you know someone else who does. Beyond that, you need some form of government.
A government-less or state-less large society is not some libertarian paradise, it is an oppressive nightmare. Without a government or a state authority of some kind, you get anarchy at first, but since anarchy is not good for most people, order gets imposed "organically" by people who use violence to do it. So you get either some flavour of feudalism (big land owners, rich people, using their wealth to take control and lay down the rules), clan-based society, or organized crime (mafia-type) structure. Go visit a failed state and you will see one or more of these mechanisms at work. After spending a few months in Somalia or Afghanistan, I'm sure you'll yearn for Sweden or Switzerland.
There are many flavours of government, to be sure. Some are terribly oppressive and awful. Others allow an individual to be far more free than he would be in a clan-based system (let alone a feudal of mafia-style one).
Now, government works best when the laws are simple: simple to follow, simple to enforce, and simple to evaluate. If something is bad, it's easier to just ban it than to devise complex regulations about it. How do you propose the government should "make it easier to use plastic bags responsibly"? Start by defining "responsible use of plastic bags", proceed to defining "easier to use" (first figure out what makes them hard to use responsibly today?), and then try to figure out how to put in place the proper laws and regulations to do what you want. You'd find that banning them is just way easier, and way cheaper.
I'll buy whatever is cheapest to do the job. Ebay direct from Shenzhen works for me.
Maybe we will soon need bag police at the borders.........
An excellent explanation why polluting products need to be taxed to become more expensive and therefore convey their full environmental cost, passing that cost (and information about it) on to consumers (who can then choose to buy something cheaper). The price mechanism at work.
We re-use plastic bags to line wastebaskets, and to throw away wet materials. We always throw paper bags away.
You don't use paper bags to carry and throw away your recycling? I love doing that.
I can fill a paper bag with cardboard and paper waste, and just chuck the whole thing into the paper recycling container. I can also use it to carry plastic, metal and glass, and after sorting those out into their proper containers, throw the empty paper bags into the paper recycling container. Hands clean, everything recycled.
When I use plastic bags for that, I either have to walk over to the nearest garbage container and throw them away, or carry them back home.
For this reason most well-designed social science experiments have moderate sample sizes. Experiments with a moderate number of subjects are affordable, practical, and are biased to false negatives; that means you are less likely to get statistically significant but practically insignificant results. Typical sample sizes (when they can be gotten) are in the 20-50 range. 80 is on the high end, but a *negative* result from a largish sample size is actually pretty robust. Either the differences between fans is non-existent, or it's very small, which is practically speaking the same thing.
Most social science experiments, well actually probably the overwhelming majority, are not well-designed. Have you heard of the replication crisis?
The problem is that most social scientists do not understand mathematics, let alone statistics (a complicated subject with many caveats and nuances) very well. They rote-learn the equations and methods without fully understanding them (or understanding them at all) - I've seen in this practice.
Therefore, whenever you see a study with a sample of 80 (or a few hundred) claiming this or that, the default reaction should be extreme doubt in the results.
4) private profiling. government is only 1 risk. you can't get a job and you just don't know why.... but 3rd party HR services keep telling places to not hire you. you won't know why; they won't disclose it, the employer will not even know-- that is part of the reason they hire a 3rd party. your purchase history will just be part of it.
Walmart got into trouble for running credit checks on people to decide if they should hire--- they wanted people with bad credit because they can abuse them more!
5) META DATA. you buy X every X at this kind of store. you likely have Y health condition. raise insurance! or don't hire them... lay them off. you might be cheating because why do you buy in these places at these times? The REAL money is in providing guesses from interpretation of the meta data. This information YOU DO NOT OWN and no privacy measures apply because their profile of you is not your property. again, potential for government abuse is HUGE -- your self-centered life might not matter-- but already with no tech--the FBI went after MLK spying on him and trying to even get him to kill himself. your influential leaders can be taken down; hell, you will help them do it by judging others so easily joining the MOB that social media is.
6) Stupid AI profiling. your vague pattern is the same as a pedophile 60%. anybody seeing the profile will act differently to you. We all see stupid Netflix and amazon suggestions based on our profile. Imagine those being actually used for stuff...
We need to print this in bold and put it up in lots of places. People are usually afraid of the government doing something to them via data collection...the private sector can be just the same or even much worse.
Q: Why use lambdas? A: You give a name to something when it has proven important enough to give a name to.
Er, I can always give a name to something in Java. Without lambda expressions.
I'm not talking about lambda expressions in general. I'm talking about them in Java. They're fucking up the established language paradigm. If someone wants to write in a functional language, let them go write in something other than Java. There are plenty of functional programming languages out there. Leave my OO Java code alone.
I mean, the key is to realize that the Earth does not only spin around its axis, but that it also tilts. That is why we have different season north and south of the equator. Therefore different time zones as you move away from the equator also make sense.
Well, the timezone map is already complex. It's not nice straight lines anyway, and there are already some north-south differences.
As for working across borders...well, I live in Southern Europe, and work for a company on the west coast of North America. The time difference between us is 9 hours. We manage. I'm sure that a one hour difference between Palermo and Nijmegen would be absolutely manageable. Just like the current one hour difference between London and Paris, or Berlin and Helsinki is too.
We don't all live in the south. Here, sunrise on 1st Jan is 8:40. With yearlong DST, that would be 9:40. And there are people in Europe a lot further north than here.
As I said:
It has occurred to me through these discussions about DST that time zones should not only be made east to west, but also north to south. What makes sense in Scandinavia might not make sense in Central Europe and neither of that might make sense in the Mediterranean.
Denmark and Italy do not need to be in the same time zone.
Grumpy old man here, but a Java developer. Java is not, and never will be a functional language. Nonetheless, Java 8 just had to introduce lambda expressions, so that wannabes could kinda, sorta pretend that Java was functional. The main effect of lambdas, however, is to hide data types, so that weak developers don't actually know what interfaces and data types they are using.
So, doubling down on stupid, they introduce "var", so those weak developers really don't have to know what types they're using. Java will figure it out, or you can play pinball till it works.
I find lambda expressions infuriating. I've done Java for a long time, sticking to the original OO paradigm. Then a smart ass kid decided to refactor / rewrite a bunch of code I have to maintain and extend using lambda expressions all over the place. Probably because it's "the cool new thing" or whatever. For the first few times it felt like reading a foreign language.
Why does Java have to be "functional" and who cares? They keep on going this way, they'll make it into a C++-type mess.
If you are a Java guy - would you start anew with Java today or pick something else? (Scala, Kotlin,... Go, Python, whatever).
Que opinions below, and thanks for that.
I would pick Java again but for the GUI stuff I would do it all in JavaFX instead of Swing. Swing for me is the most annoying part of Java. Everything else is fine. I do desktop applications in Java.
Personally I don't care if we abandon DST. I live in the Netherlands, which is quite northerly. We get about 8 hours of sunlight in winter, and 16 hours in summer. But please for the love of god don't establish DST year round. I'd like to have the sun up before 9:30 please.
I'm in Southern Europe. We're not on DST yet, and sunrise this morning was at 6:04 AM. I rarely get up before 7:15-7:30 AM. Sun at 6? I don't care. Neither do most people, standard working hours are from 8:30. In January, sunrise is around 7:15. With permanent DST, it would be 8:15. It gets lighter (morning twilight) about an hour or so before sunrise of course. And January days here are usually grey and gloomy anyways, most days you won't see the sun.
With DST, sunrise in August is around 5:30-45 AM. In June it's 5:00 AM, which means morning twilight is already at 4. Without it, it would 4:30 AM in August, 4 AM in June and twilight an hour earlier. Pretty useless for most people, and also sleep-interrupting.
In conclusion, I want DST year round, i.e. to move permanently to the GMT+2 time zone. The "natural" time zone in most of the country is about GMT+1.5 anyways, so we're off by half an hour either way.
It has occurred to me through these discussions about DST that time zones should not only be made east to west, but also north to south. What makes in Scandinavia might not make sense in Central Europe and neither of that might make sense in the Mediterranean.
I've just been delaying trying to switch to KDE to see if it's better, but I need to suck it up and just do it.
I've been running KDE Neon for more than a year now and I think it's great.
Kubuntu which I used before that I found to be crappy because it wasn't a "clean" KDE desktop, there were GNOME/Unity things here and there, two or three places to change the same settings, really confusing. Neon is a 100% KDE experience and in my experience it works very well. They've abandoned experimenting with the desktop, and you have a classic desktop experience on top of which you can place widgets if you like (but you don't have to).
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The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said.
Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.
Windows is far and away the OS of choice for consumers and businesses. Why? Because anybody whose uses Windows at home knows how to use it at work. Repeat after me. The Linux user interface blows because itâ(TM)s not consistent.
Windows dominates because of technological lock-in. At one point it managed to grab by far the largest slice of the desktop market when it was young. The Linux desktop wasn't that much of a thing back then, it was too young and undeveloped to offer serious competition. Now everybody is used to Windows, and often has software that works only under Windows, hardware that works only under Windows, etc. It's a positive feedback loop, the fact that Linux desktops exist and actually work quite well on a variety of hardware (typing from a Linux distro right now) is a testament to the platform's resilience and capability.
The only OS seriously taking on Windows and thriving is one whose roots go further back than Windows, and which is made by a hardware manufacturer. Even that is a niche market and tied to only one hardware platform.
Meanwhile Linux has, via Android, become the Windows of the smartphone world. Due to the consistency of the user interface? Well, no, look at the differences between stock Android and the various manufacturer's flavours (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei LG, etc.), as well as the differences between Android versions (my phone recently upgraded to a new Android version and I flipped after realizing they moved around really important stuff, like where some settings I check and change often are, etc.). It's because Android grabbed the market while it was young. Windows too has changed its interface, Office at one point changed everything, yet Microsoft still dominates these markets...due to lock-in.
You would obviously be surprised the things one can buy "under the table".
Look, I come from (and lived in) a country where at one point "under the table" was the only way to buy pretty much anything at all. I am well-versed in how black markets work.
However, in advanced and rich Western societies (like the one I'm typing this from now), such things are marginal. Where I am right now booze and cigarettes are heavily taxed (booze is a government monopoly, 80 cents out of each dollar spent by the consumer on legal alcohol purchases goes to the government one way or another). Does a black market for alcohol exist? I'm sure it does, but it's a marginal phenomenon. I've never bought black-market booze, no one I know has either, and I buy booze frequently. Everyone complains about the prices, yet very few people do something about (because they can, ultimately, afford them).
A tiny black market in plastic bags (which, based on the price of a plastic bag, would be very tiny indeed) is tolerable if the use of plastic bags in society at large is extremely reduced (which is what plastic bag bans, or mandatory charges to plastic bags, do achieve).
Excessive taxation drives underground markets. So good luck with that.
For flimsy plastic bags? Lolz. It's not booze, or cigarettes. Also, charging 5-10 cents per bag is not "excessive", and even if it were, there are inexcessively priced substitutes.
Plastic bags are meaningless either way.
Just like all your posts on this topic. Empty sophistry.
There are whole huge states where the stores have handy disposable bags at the ready. Some of these states are even contiguous.
It would indeed feel quite weird to suddenly encounter stores demanding that you bring your own bags.
Nobody "demands" you bring your own bags, but if you want bags at the cashier, you have to purchase them, they are not free. Hence, people buy sturdy reusable bags and sacs and bring them with them when they shop, in order to avoid having to purchase new (often flimsy and easily breakable) bags each time. It's quite normal.
We only have one habitable planet, thus far
It's a big wet rock. It doesn't care what bags you use.
-- pays to treat it kindly.
It doesn't care about your feelings or about the stories you tell yourself about your so-called kindness.
You won't be receiving any sort of payment. Sorry. I know how people love to fantasize.
You know how they say - "it's not the end of the world, it's just the end of you". The planet doesn't care but we should.
You should make it easier to use plastic bags responsibly, not force people to do the "right" thing at the point of a gun.
Government is seriously a dumb man's way to organize society.
You know how you build a nice society? You get people to agree with your idea of a nice society; you don't bully them with the threat of force. Government must follow society, not lead it.
Government has been empirically shown to be the best way to organize a large society. It's probably and usually not necessary in a relatively isolated society of a few hundred people, where everybody knows everybody. Maybe also for a few thousand, where even when you don't know a person, you know someone else who does. Beyond that, you need some form of government.
A government-less or state-less large society is not some libertarian paradise, it is an oppressive nightmare. Without a government or a state authority of some kind, you get anarchy at first, but since anarchy is not good for most people, order gets imposed "organically" by people who use violence to do it. So you get either some flavour of feudalism (big land owners, rich people, using their wealth to take control and lay down the rules), clan-based society, or organized crime (mafia-type) structure. Go visit a failed state and you will see one or more of these mechanisms at work. After spending a few months in Somalia or Afghanistan, I'm sure you'll yearn for Sweden or Switzerland.
There are many flavours of government, to be sure. Some are terribly oppressive and awful. Others allow an individual to be far more free than he would be in a clan-based system (let alone a feudal of mafia-style one).
Now, government works best when the laws are simple: simple to follow, simple to enforce, and simple to evaluate. If something is bad, it's easier to just ban it than to devise complex regulations about it. How do you propose the government should "make it easier to use plastic bags responsibly"? Start by defining "responsible use of plastic bags", proceed to defining "easier to use" (first figure out what makes them hard to use responsibly today?), and then try to figure out how to put in place the proper laws and regulations to do what you want. You'd find that banning them is just way easier, and way cheaper.
I'll buy whatever is cheapest to do the job. Ebay direct from Shenzhen works for me.
Maybe we will soon need bag police at the borders.........
An excellent explanation why polluting products need to be taxed to become more expensive and therefore convey their full environmental cost, passing that cost (and information about it) on to consumers (who can then choose to buy something cheaper). The price mechanism at work.
You can use them again as, say, trash bags, or to hold your dirty shoes when you travel, etc.
Why is the left is so myopic and un-creative?
Single use?! No wonder leftists are always in debt!
Yeah, you can reuse the ones that don't tear apart on your way home from the supermarket, which is like 50% of them...
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or if you've really never travelled more than 500 km from your place of residence.
We re-use plastic bags to line wastebaskets, and to throw away wet materials. We always throw paper bags away.
You don't use paper bags to carry and throw away your recycling? I love doing that.
I can fill a paper bag with cardboard and paper waste, and just chuck the whole thing into the paper recycling container. I can also use it to carry plastic, metal and glass, and after sorting those out into their proper containers, throw the empty paper bags into the paper recycling container. Hands clean, everything recycled.
When I use plastic bags for that, I either have to walk over to the nearest garbage container and throw them away, or carry them back home.
I don't think this follows at all.
Let me rephrase: when you see any social science or psychology study claiming anything, the first reaction should be extreme doubt in the results.
For this reason most well-designed social science experiments have moderate sample sizes. Experiments with a moderate number of subjects are affordable, practical, and are biased to false negatives; that means you are less likely to get statistically significant but practically insignificant results. Typical sample sizes (when they can be gotten) are in the 20-50 range. 80 is on the high end, but a *negative* result from a largish sample size is actually pretty robust. Either the differences between fans is non-existent, or it's very small, which is practically speaking the same thing.
Most social science experiments, well actually probably the overwhelming majority, are not well-designed. Have you heard of the replication crisis?
The problem is that most social scientists do not understand mathematics, let alone statistics (a complicated subject with many caveats and nuances) very well. They rote-learn the equations and methods without fully understanding them (or understanding them at all) - I've seen in this practice.
Therefore, whenever you see a study with a sample of 80 (or a few hundred) claiming this or that, the default reaction should be extreme doubt in the results.
4) private profiling. government is only 1 risk. you can't get a job and you just don't know why.... but 3rd party HR services keep telling places to not hire you. you won't know why; they won't disclose it, the employer will not even know-- that is part of the reason they hire a 3rd party. your purchase history will just be part of it. Walmart got into trouble for running credit checks on people to decide if they should hire--- they wanted people with bad credit because they can abuse them more!
5) META DATA. you buy X every X at this kind of store. you likely have Y health condition. raise insurance! or don't hire them... lay them off. you might be cheating because why do you buy in these places at these times? The REAL money is in providing guesses from interpretation of the meta data. This information YOU DO NOT OWN and no privacy measures apply because their profile of you is not your property. again, potential for government abuse is HUGE -- your self-centered life might not matter-- but already with no tech--the FBI went after MLK spying on him and trying to even get him to kill himself. your influential leaders can be taken down; hell, you will help them do it by judging others so easily joining the MOB that social media is.
6) Stupid AI profiling. your vague pattern is the same as a pedophile 60%. anybody seeing the profile will act differently to you. We all see stupid Netflix and amazon suggestions based on our profile. Imagine those being actually used for stuff...
We need to print this in bold and put it up in lots of places. People are usually afraid of the government doing something to them via data collection...the private sector can be just the same or even much worse.
Q: Why use lambdas? A: You give a name to something when it has proven important enough to give a name to.
Er, I can always give a name to something in Java. Without lambda expressions.
I'm not talking about lambda expressions in general. I'm talking about them in Java. They're fucking up the established language paradigm. If someone wants to write in a functional language, let them go write in something other than Java. There are plenty of functional programming languages out there. Leave my OO Java code alone.
I mean, the key is to realize that the Earth does not only spin around its axis, but that it also tilts. That is why we have different season north and south of the equator. Therefore different time zones as you move away from the equator also make sense.
Thanks :)
Well, the timezone map is already complex. It's not nice straight lines anyway, and there are already some north-south differences.
As for working across borders...well, I live in Southern Europe, and work for a company on the west coast of North America. The time difference between us is 9 hours. We manage. I'm sure that a one hour difference between Palermo and Nijmegen would be absolutely manageable. Just like the current one hour difference between London and Paris, or Berlin and Helsinki is too.
We don't all live in the south. Here, sunrise on 1st Jan is 8:40. With yearlong DST, that would be 9:40. And there are people in Europe a lot further north than here.
As I said:
It has occurred to me through these discussions about DST that time zones should not only be made east to west, but also north to south. What makes sense in Scandinavia might not make sense in Central Europe and neither of that might make sense in the Mediterranean.
Denmark and Italy do not need to be in the same time zone.
Grumpy old man here, but a Java developer. Java is not, and never will be a functional language. Nonetheless, Java 8 just had to introduce lambda expressions, so that wannabes could kinda, sorta pretend that Java was functional. The main effect of lambdas, however, is to hide data types, so that weak developers don't actually know what interfaces and data types they are using.
So, doubling down on stupid, they introduce "var", so those weak developers really don't have to know what types they're using. Java will figure it out, or you can play pinball till it works.
I find lambda expressions infuriating. I've done Java for a long time, sticking to the original OO paradigm. Then a smart ass kid decided to refactor / rewrite a bunch of code I have to maintain and extend using lambda expressions all over the place. Probably because it's "the cool new thing" or whatever. For the first few times it felt like reading a foreign language.
Why does Java have to be "functional" and who cares? They keep on going this way, they'll make it into a C++-type mess.
Just a quick question, sorta on topic:
If you are a Java guy - would you start anew with Java today or pick something else? (Scala, Kotlin, ... Go, Python, whatever).
Que opinions below, and thanks for that.
I would pick Java again but for the GUI stuff I would do it all in JavaFX instead of Swing. Swing for me is the most annoying part of Java. Everything else is fine. I do desktop applications in Java.
Personally I don't care if we abandon DST. I live in the Netherlands, which is quite northerly. We get about 8 hours of sunlight in winter, and 16 hours in summer. But please for the love of god don't establish DST year round. I'd like to have the sun up before 9:30 please.
I'm in Southern Europe. We're not on DST yet, and sunrise this morning was at 6:04 AM. I rarely get up before 7:15-7:30 AM. Sun at 6? I don't care. Neither do most people, standard working hours are from 8:30. In January, sunrise is around 7:15. With permanent DST, it would be 8:15. It gets lighter (morning twilight) about an hour or so before sunrise of course. And January days here are usually grey and gloomy anyways, most days you won't see the sun.
With DST, sunrise in August is around 5:30-45 AM. In June it's 5:00 AM, which means morning twilight is already at 4. Without it, it would 4:30 AM in August, 4 AM in June and twilight an hour earlier. Pretty useless for most people, and also sleep-interrupting.
In conclusion, I want DST year round, i.e. to move permanently to the GMT+2 time zone. The "natural" time zone in most of the country is about GMT+1.5 anyways, so we're off by half an hour either way.
It has occurred to me through these discussions about DST that time zones should not only be made east to west, but also north to south. What makes in Scandinavia might not make sense in Central Europe and neither of that might make sense in the Mediterranean.
I'd love to invest in BAISCMDFISCMC! If they will accept East German marks that is.
if its in LISP or Prolog then its probably AI.
What makes Prolog so special? It's a language based on formal logic, and formal logic is only one aspect of intelligence.
I've just been delaying trying to switch to KDE to see if it's better, but I need to suck it up and just do it.
I've been running KDE Neon for more than a year now and I think it's great.
Kubuntu which I used before that I found to be crappy because it wasn't a "clean" KDE desktop, there were GNOME/Unity things here and there, two or three places to change the same settings, really confusing. Neon is a 100% KDE experience and in my experience it works very well. They've abandoned experimenting with the desktop, and you have a classic desktop experience on top of which you can place widgets if you like (but you don't have to).