KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[Awesomeness]

Canonical is just trying to enforce a desktop standard, because they have a big userbase now and they realize the need of uniformity.

https://xkcd.com/927/

[funkSTAR]

Estonia sunk in 1994. A modern titanic catastrophy. To no suprise this years akademy will be an Estonia incident.

KDE news of the year:
Nokia pulled the plug.
Kubuntu was degraded to "community effort" because the developer burden from couldnt be justified.
openSUSE cant keep up with release roadmaps because KDE is a mess.
Digia is seeking "differentation" for Qt Commercial (open core business focusing on closed source for non-linux platoforms).

And now:
Developers quiting and fighting the hoarding KDE bugs is like the battle scenes of starship trooper. Total meltdown is imminent.

[TheBlackCat]

Nokia pulled the plug.

Bullshit. Nokia is still funding Qt development. They cut jobs across the board, but they still employ a lot of Qt developers. ANd they can't pull the plug on Qt, not to mention KDE, since Qt is not an independent foundation with backing from many companies.

Kubuntu was degraded to "community effort" because the developer burden from couldnt be justified.

Bullshit. They pulled the plug on everything but unity because they wanted to focus exclusively on unity. They don't even install Gnome Shell by default.

openSUSE cant keep up with release roadmaps because KDE is a mess.

Bullshit. openSUSE can't keep up with the release roadmap because their build system hardware kept crashing and the gcc4.7 transition was such a mess. There were other problems as well, but KDE was not one of them.

Digia is seeking "differentation" for Qt Commercial (open core business focusing on closed source for non-linux platoforms).

Bullshit. Didia pushes all of their patches upstream. They were a little late doing that for one release.

Developers quiting

Bullshit. Developer, singular, quit. Developers quite projects all the time, and developers join projects all the time. And the developer in question did not have a problem with KDE, but with open-source software in general.

fighting the hoarding KDE bugs is like the battle scenes of starship trooper.

Bullshit. Every desktop environment has bugs. I see plenty of complaints about gnome, KDE, and OsX bugs as well. Unless you have some specific numbers showing KDE has more bugs then you are just pulling this out of your ass.

Wow, that is impressive. You managed to make an entire post without one factually accurate statement. That takes a lot of work.

[Prescience500]

KDE is by far my favorite desktop envirnment. It can be buggy on new releases, but by the time a couple stability updates are released, it's much better. Also, nepomuck is a drain and kde pim performs badly, but those can be disabled/removed in most distros. I use thunderbird in their place. In my experience, KDE is the only DE that can appeal to average windows users. People I've tried to convert to linux loved KDE and didn't get Gnome. I think KDE is ultimately linux's best hope for totally open linux in the mainstream. They just need more devs.

[Sir_Brizz]

I don't really get this.

What other Desktop Environments are making usability improvements that KDE (overall) is not making?

Windows 8 is an unmitigated user experience disaster with a boatload of functionality that is hidden and non-obvious.

OSX Mountain Lion is part 2 of making OSX more like iOS, dumbing down the desktop environment to make it "idiot friendly".

Gnome Shell/Unity/Whatever other crappy forks are making the same mistakes as both Windows 8 and OSX.

It seems to me that KDE is the only mainstream DE that will, in the future, be usable at all. Up to now, they haven't made any concessions to the user experience just because they wanted to be "modern" or "forward thinking". Also, since 4.4, KDE has gotten significantly better and more stable, in my opinion. The design has been cleaned up a lot, and little functionality that I frequently use has been cleaned up and sped up. I keep using KDE because it is getting better and better with each release, for me.

[jirkam]

I do not understand that guy. First he spends a lot of effort on KDE and than he intentionally tries to damage it by a nasty criticism. This is a behavior of some psycho ex-girlfriend and not of an adult man.

I started using Linux on desktop several months ago. If there wasn't KDE, I would probably newer been able to make the switch. Thank you very much to all KDE developers!

[YeeP]

Ok, I just got onto the KDE boat, and I am also having problems, but all in all I love it. I read through this thread and I have to say, I joined this forum purely for the nasty talk between people.... I know that sounds jacked up and really, it is. It reminds me of other forums that I am on which have nothing to do with computers... I didn't think this kind of combination existed.


Glad to be here, continue the shit talk.

[Leon55ia]

As long as I feel my productivity and fun are best served by KDE, I am with it.

[kayosiii]

As long as I feel my productivity and fun are best served by KDE, I am with it.

+1


(and another 8 characters)

[varikonniemi]

Just recently it was announced that kwin gets a full-time developer. So some take off, others take over. I think KDE is really exciting especially now since the transition to qt5 brings so many new features.

And if i recall correctly, the biggest mess to untangle and rewrite was kwin to port it over to qt5 code. The other parts would be more straightforward work. So with that in mind the full time kwin dev sounds really even better.