KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[asdx]

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.

My thoughts too. I couldn't agree more.

[bnolsen]

It seems the modern desktops have been about adding more eye candy and fancy junk instead of improving productivity. Productivity meaning the desktop should basically get you what you need and *go away* when real applications are running. And the desktop paradigm has been hammered to death for 20+ years, there's not much more that really can be done with it that isn't generally side stepping and change for the sake of change. Btw I use windowmaker on my desktop dev machines and xfce on others. I tried kde for a short time last year and wasn't impressed, took that to xfce as well.

[Panix]

It seems the modern desktops have been about adding more eye candy and fancy junk instead of improving productivity. Productivity meaning the desktop should basically get you what you need and *go away* when real applications are running. And the desktop paradigm has been hammered to death for 20+ years, there's not much more that really can be done with it that isn't generally side stepping and change for the sake of change. Btw I use windowmaker on my desktop dev machines and xfce on others. I tried kde for a short time last year and wasn't impressed, took that to xfce as well.

You took the words out of my mouth. KDE and Gnome (3) are junk. The design for Gnome 3 and Unity, for e.g., it's totally obvious that they only care about eye candy and designing these atrocities for mobile devices. I haven't heard of them making any ground so the desktop user gets to experience the garbage result.

As for KDE, it's another beast. Full of WTHs and constant freezes. Also, k-this, k-that but really they don't seem to care about functionality. It's just as long as it's pretty and people know they are using kde-junk.

[Dan555a]

I'm trying my best where I have something to say.