KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[Rallos Zek]

What a Trollish headline.

[markg85]

* The System Settings program could be a little better organized

I invite you to go to the KDE forum and post your suggestion to improve System Settings. You can go here http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f...d1a3f1effb66a0 and make a thread or look in a already existing thread to improve system settings like this one: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=226&t=101206

[Teho]

Canonical should hire Martin Gräßlin and let him work on Compiz. Compiz is already getting a lot better now thanks to the work of Daniel Van Vugt and others.

He's already paid to work part-time on KWin if I'm not mistaken and to me it seems to be superior to Compiz in just about every possible way. There are also paid developers working on Plasma, KDE PIM, Calligra and various other parts of KDE. Of course there are people leaving big projects like KDE and Gnome all the time but at the same time more and more new people come in. KDE got 60 slots in GSOC this year which is more than any other project if I recall correctly.

To my experience KDE has gotten better every release since I started using it around the time 4.3 was released. The KDE SC 4.9 seems to be especially good performance and stability wise.

[RealNC]

-1000

I really have to go against that. From time to time i also do some bug triaging on KDE (recently on plasma) and that helped fix a few, close a few invalid ones and more overall progress in those areas. The people doing bug triaging are certainly not people who don't give a shit about KDE. Why would they do bughunting if your statement is true.

That's my own experience, of course. Bugs that are not outright crashers or result in some kind of data loss or corruption, usually didn't get hunted down, but were deemed "not important". More and more bugs are treated that way. The result is that thousands of bugs accumulated, and now, when you report a new one, the answer is "we have thousands of other bugs to care about". Well yeah, surprise! :-P

I guess it could also be lack of manpower, I don't know. It's just that the amount of bugs that didn't get fixed is colossal.

[Alliancemd]

It's bad news, that the main developers leaves his program when, after last changes, it's still in beta phase :/ . He also leaves users without any bug fixes… Some people have also gave their free time, to make KDE a better DE. Now he leaves them in half way. Why hi didn't get other people some time to start continuing his work, and when it's stable situation, then leave KDE? I think that's not OK.

What are you talking about? There is already another maintainer. He made sure first that there is a maintainer before leaving it.

[Temar]

I feel less and less love for KDE and all its microbugs/quirks/general unpolishedness.

THIS

I've been a KDE User since 1.x as well and I'm sick and tired of waiting for a stable KDE desktop. Each release brings new bugs and most of the time many regressions as well. The QA of many KDE projects just sucks and due to the lack of a release manager who is willing to delay the release or even revert some applications back to a previous version, KDE will always be buggy.

Stability has always been more important than features but it seems KDE will never understand that.

[Larian]

I'm a GNOME 2 guy. I've tried KDE, but I can never get it to do the things I want. Features and settings are impossible for me to find. Maybe I'm just used to the GNOME way of doing things, but KDE has always (since 4.0) seemed massively broken. I've heard it said that KDE is superior in terms of customizability but you honestly couldn't prove it by me. Sure it's pretty with slick graphics and all the blue and white, and as a user I can find any program I want to run. But that's not the problem and it never was. Figuring out how to customize my DE to fit my workflow is paramount, and I could never get that "Kdone". Even on the most recent version where tried to help a friend set his audio to route through HDMI, the settings wouldn't work. Switching to a G3 desktop environment solved the problem with a few mouse clicks and a gesture or two.

So... maybe that's what was meant by "no longer competitive?" Maybe the bugs and the "Where the fuck did they hide this setting" factor and the lack of stability (haven't experienced that one), all piles up to just a bad way to go?

[devius]

That's my own experience, of course. Bugs that are not outright crashers or result in some kind of data loss or corruption, usually didn't get hunted down, but were deemed "not important". More and more bugs are treated that way. The result is that thousands of bugs accumulated, (...) the amount of bugs that didn't get fixed is colossal.

That's my experience as well, but what about this bug that has a bunch of duplicates (with new ones appearing regularly) and it took 1 year and a half to change from Unconfirmed to New? It's a crash and apparently no one gives a damn. And before someone says "why don't you fix it then?" I would try to if I was still using KDE, but I got fed up with all the bugs/crashes/graphical artifacts/glitches and apps requiring that I waste 5 minutes configuring them before being able to use them.

Actually when I was still using KDE I thought that Dolphin was an awesome file manager. Unless it got worse recently I don't understand all the bad rep.

[Teho]

Even on the most recent version where tried to help a friend set his audio to route through HDMI, the settings wouldn't work. Switching to a G3 desktop environment solved the problem with a few mouse clicks and a gesture or two.

It's quite easy to do with KMix but for Veromix plasmoid is absolutely fantastic for managin audio outputs. It supports most of the PulseAudio functionality and probably more than any other GUI frontend available. In nine times out of ten changing settings in KDE is easier than in Gnome because they aren't hidden. The problem with that is that the ammount of different settings might get bit overwhelming.

[89c51]

Linux desktop is in a sad state more or less. Unity is ugly, KDE is KDE and Gnome 3 is something that kills puppies, baby squirels, and kittens.

At least i hope E17 will get it right.