KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[Alex Sarmiento]

english is not my first language and I live in europe so its not midle of the day like in amerika at least maybe there where you are? so yes my english is maybe not the best, or for shure its not the best ^^ but at least good enough that you understand me... so I am very effektive with my small range of english words I know ^^.

But yes Distrowatch... and yes I know that there are not more mint users right now that ubuntu users, but there are switching people to mint that can you see there... and I never saw any possitive reactions to unity only the hud seems to be good, but that is nothing that could not be done in gnome-shell... so most of the time you have the be happy if somebody is neutral about unity... and even if you look in the webstore of unity only gets 3 from 5 stars and gnome-shell has 4 from 5 stars... and there are nearly 50% of the comments like it was for unity so I guess it seems to be 50% of the people that installs ubuntu switch away from unity and thats hard because ubuntu-standard is the only unity distribution...

Ok, but do you realize that gnome-shell has been such a fiasco that had to be forked 2 times(unity, cinnamon)? and even LinuxMint attempted a gnome2 revival with their Mate fork so make that a third fork... Which give us at least 3 gnome3 versions and 4 gnome versions, and if you want to include gnome2 it would be 5 gnomes. Even more, if you want to count all gtk desktops including XFCE, it would be 6 gtk+ desktops versions. None of then might be more popular than KDE http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-year-919888/

[blackiwid]

There is no need to eliminate one or the other... KDE, Gnome, Unity, etc, all of them can coexist well if they agree and share basic standards...
Linux needs basic changes, like a common file dialog or a common system settings application...

KDE, Gnome and the other DE's should have frontends to common backends...
For example, we have gvfs and kio... Gvfs feels more transparent, and could be used on both sides in order to share work...

If they shared some important parts, there would be less bugs, and we would have a better experience...
There would not be reason to fight, because in a pair of years things will be rewritten and/or improved to suit everyone's needs...

thats maybe true but then the problem exists that a company would still have to support at least 2 if not even 3 desktop environments to fully support 99% of the linux users. than in some cases it does not happen... or we get such crappy interface like we did have in openoffice or something like that...

but go for it... I dont care... I know which one will win... kde is no opponent against gnome(shell) unity a bit, but then again its only used in one os on one distribution... that looses users right now... and had his biggest lost of users since it exist because of unity... so I dont see it have a change seperated with it alone... so gnome will (as I belive) win anyways but... with that ubuntu desition it will take much longer... but I can live with that... I just say that such problems ( a fight about the standard desktop (and if you dont have that, they will never use the same backends...) and even the the frontend is a problem) but whatever... ^^ go for it... you said maybe the same about gnome2 for 10 years and loosing market share with kde3 vs gnome2 each year... shurely also because of ubuntu... but still ubuntu did not change to kde.... but fedora switched from kde to gnome-shell as standard... so its clear for me where the journy is going...

but I could also say why its technology-wise a good thing... and no crap... lets begin with that its most polished of all des... but I forget you cant say that I am true here because you love the look of kde ^^ because you hate gnome-shell it cannot be nice looking ^^ then the technologies they used, I needed a while to get it, thought why would they switch to javascript but then I did understand it they just made the switch from 1/10 the developers to the 9/10 so that most developers can easily writh themes animations (with css) and functionality for it. they also are creating a cloud-os with it... (I hope here a kde product gets support soon, owncloud) but except me most noobs where the desktop-market is targeted dont care about data privacy, is that even a known wording in amerika? in facebookland?

it looks great its focused on keyboard what is great too or for tablets but less for mouse... thats where I think most users will use that inputs more in the future... then they made such genious stuff like dynamik workspaces the killed the desktop -forders stuff that is stupid streamlined it here (yes I now you can turn that all off but its the default)... it works way better on laptops where also most users dont want to use the mouse to much... than gnome2.

its a really big step, it was pretty stable in the first 3.0 version where maybe kde is now... or maybe a few months ago it was there... they are great... look about the plugins, they have even way more plugins than libreoffice and owncloud which did have plugin-support or existed much longer... they are genious... activity journal sucks at the moment... they removed the search opened files or folder stuff right now... but thats also good concepts... that is such a big step forward... yes some people dont wanted the switch because there are some regressions to gnome2 and some dont like to see changes at all... but its pretty solid its the web2.0 os.

[blackiwid]

Ok, but do you realize that gnome-shell has been such a fiasco that had to be forked 2 times(unity, cinnamon)? and even LinuxMint attempted a gnome2 revival with their Mate fork so make that a third fork... http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-year-919888/

thats just not true... the develoopment of gnome2 was stopped by the gnome team so someont other made patches for it, thats no fork thats a attempt to keep it running, and they realised later that that was a bad idea and that gnome-shell is so good that its easy to make extentions that the migration unwilling people dont have problems with it... unity was a fork yes but not because gnome-shell was bad... they forket basicly gnome2 because it worked not good on netbooks... than they were to proud to kill it or to stuborn to agree that gnome did make something better so they made it... the reasons can be seen different, but it was not because gnome3 is to bad... maybe to bad from their view as developer, but nobody said wähh gnome3-shell is so bad please give us unity it will be better, the difference is true at the beginning where unity was way older but still was more unstable and not as fast as gnome-shell unity gots mass critics... while gnome-shell got less... ( yes there was also some people who did not like it but they all hated unity too... and more people could make there peace with gnome-shell than with unity ) last unity version gots accepted more because it finally got as stable and fast than gnome-shell was.

so unity is a fork of gnome2 that uses some newer gnome-3 libs now, but was not there because all users cried about how bad gnome-shell is... and the extentions that revert some changes in gnome-shell is no fork, so I use a fork of chromium because I installed some plugins or I use a fork of gnome-shell because I use this nice transmission extention? it lets you make a very custom ui, so maybe one did not like the switch on the one place (as example no big application menu) the other dont like this... and they can go all the way back so it behaves nearly like a gnome 2 or make their own mix like they want it... thats great for all people... everyone that liked gnome2 or gnome3 or something between gets what he wants... but looking nice now ^^

[rainbyte]

thats maybe true but then the problem exists that a company would still have to support at least 2 if not even 3 desktop environments to fully support 99% of the linux users. than in some cases it does not happen... or we get such crappy interface like we did have in openoffice or something like that...

but go for it... I dont care... I know which one will win... kde is no opponent against gnome(shell) unity a bit, but then again its only used in one os on one distribution... that looses users right now... and had his biggest lost of users since it exist because of unity... so I dont see it have a change seperated with it alone... so gnome will (as I belive) win anyways but... with that ubuntu desition it will take much longer... but I can live with that... I just say that such problems ( a fight about the standard desktop (and if you dont have that, they will never use the same backends...) and even the the frontend is a problem) but whatever... ^^ go for it... you said maybe the same about gnome2 for 10 years and loosing market share with kde3 vs gnome2 each year... shurely also because of ubuntu... but still ubuntu did not change to kde.... but fedora switched from kde to gnome-shell as standard... so its clear for me where the journy is going...

but I could also say why its technology-wise a good thing... and no crap... lets begin with that its most polished of all des... but I forget you cant say that I am true here because you love the look of kde ^^ because you hate gnome-shell it cannot be nice looking ^^ then the technologies they used, I needed a while to get it, thought why would they switch to javascript but then I did understand it they just made the switch from 1/10 the developers to the 9/10 so that most developers can easily writh themes animations (with css) and functionality for it. they also are creating a cloud-os with it... (I hope here a kde product gets support soon, owncloud) but except me most noobs where the desktop-market is targeted dont care about data privacy, is that even a known wording in amerika? in facebookland?

it looks great its focused on keyboard what is great too or for tablets but less for mouse... thats where I think most users will use that inputs more in the future... then they made such genious stuff like dynamik workspaces the killed the desktop -forders stuff that is stupid streamlined it here (yes I now you can turn that all off but its the default)... it works way better on laptops where also most users dont want to use the mouse to much... than gnome2.

its a really big step, it was pretty stable in the first 3.0 version where maybe kde is now... or maybe a few months ago it was there... they are great... look about the plugins, they have even way more plugins than libreoffice and owncloud which did have plugin-support or existed much longer... they are genious... activity journal sucks at the moment... they removed the search opened files or folder stuff right now... but thats also good concepts... that is such a big step forward... yes some people dont wanted the switch because there are some regressions to gnome2 and some dont like to see changes at all... but its pretty solid its the web2.0 os.

Gnome here, gnome there... We know you prefer gnome, but that's a subjective opinion... Both desktops have interesting technologies...

I don't hate gnome3, but I feel more comfortable now with KDE SC... I like it being modular, so you can configure your desktop as you like...
In KDE I can arrange things as I like, or even use other configurations like Plasma Netbook instead of the default desktop...

Gnome3 doesn't give me that posibility... Their users have to live with the gnome devs decisions... They can't change even the window buttons...
I know that there is a new market, the tablet pc's... But I don't want my desktop to be transformed into a big tablet...

Desktops and tablets are different, that's why we need different workspaces (like Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook)...
Gnome3 doesn't seem to be modular in that way... At least no by default (like the Plasma Workspace)...

But, as I said before, I like some gnome technologies and apps... Like glib, gstreamer, gvfs, evince, anjuta, etc...
This things can be integrated in other desktops (KDE can use gstreamer for example)...
I have no problem using some gnome/gtk apps under KDE: evince (better printing support) and pcmanfm (for network shared filesystems, because of gvfs)

[rainbyte]

I don't think that KDE is no longer competitive... Maybe it has reached a stage where there are other priorities...
It has many features and it's highly modular... Now it needs to be more polished... More testing and QA will help with that...

Also I think that integration and uniformity is something important... That's why I'm interested in projects like oxygen-gtk now...
I'm using it now and gtk apps doesn't seem like aliens like before, even gnome ones feel as if they were native apps...

The general quality of the desktop is improving, and maybe that's the reason why the development seems to be slow...
It's not easy to deal with bugs and code cleaning... That's why KDE needs new people with new ideas to improve things...

[m_gol]

but go for it... I dont care... I know which one will win... kde is no opponent against gnome(shell) unity a bit, but then again its only used in one os on one distribution... that looses users right now... and had his biggest lost of users since it exist because of unity... so I dont see it have a change seperated with it alone... so gnome will (as I belive) win anyways but... with that ubuntu desition it will take much longer... but I can live with that... I just say that such problems ( a fight about the standard desktop (and if you dont have that, they will never use the same backends...) and even the the frontend is a problem) but whatever... ^^ go for it... you said maybe the same about gnome2 for 10 years and loosing market share with kde3 vs gnome2 each year... shurely also because of ubuntu... but still ubuntu did not change to kde.... but fedora switched from kde to gnome-shell as standard... so its clear for me where the journy is going...

Jeez, man. You don't have to excel in proficiency in English to be understandable but you don't even adhere to basic inter-language grammar rules as starting sentences with big letters or not ending every (very short, by the way) sentence with an ellipsis. It really hurts to read that, try to put more effort in your posts.

Gnome3 doesn't give me that posibility... Their users have to live with the gnome devs decisions... They can't change even the window buttons...

Guys, what's with these ellipsis everywhere?!

[m_gol]

Let's focus on Ubuntu which is the main desktop distribution. Ubuntu is in the best position to address things you mentioned, because it's developed at a single company which has QA and test farms that will pay off in the near future.

Oh, don't get me started with Canonical's QA. What serious QA would accept putting into production an environment with 1 pixel wide grabbing areas for resizing windows?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/160311
And they still didn't manage to fix it completely. This is a pattern, actually. Bugs get ignored or the progress is very slow, to the point when a new release gets shipped and the reporter is asked to test it against a new release like the old one didn't matter (although officially supported). Or a fixed bug going back to an unfixed stage in the next Ubuntu version because someone forgot to re-apply the patch. Etc.

Another long-standing issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/484252
which can make people wipe their whole pendrives because of improper wording and a misleading selection panel for devices to format.

These were both GUI-only issues, completely fixable by Canonical. If we go beyond GUI, there is an ocean of new annoying bugs:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/493645
making settings for the delay before blanking the screen ineffective.

Or this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/93847
System monitor CPU reporting is useless because of its own overhead.

Or when each Firefox upgrade wiped custom search settings:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/428306
Etc.

Now, those ones might be not easily fixable by Canonical, maybe it's just an inherent problem with how Linux distributions are glued together from smaller parts which makes interactions buggy. I'll tell you something - users don't care who's to blame.

But OK, let's go back to Canonical. Let's forget about things they don't control so tightly and focus on their newest in-house baby - Unity. Granted, now it's much more stable than it used to be (which proves, by the way, where Canonical has its QA... Users are beta-testers, basically). But, still, they designed a hell lot of new interfaces not inter-operating with the old ones, used by everyone. This makes installing external applications a huge PITA; they randomly lack their buttons in indicator panel (you have to manually white-list them from the console! Duh!), not all register correctly in the dock (or whatever it's called).

But there is more. Canonical tries to imitate OS X GUI as much as they can, completely forgetting about paradigms. The global menu is a good example - in OS X it works because of an application-centered model. Linux GUIs are window based, though. Try opening GIMP and activating any of this windows except for the main one. Bye bye, global menu! You have to first activate the main window and only then go to menu. This is even more annoying as GIMP focuses not on the main window after exiting the menu making re-entering the menu very cumbersome. Global menu requires a special setup from installed applications, otherwise it doesn't work. Thus, Netbeans has its own window menus. They are, by the way, almost invisible because of some font color fuck-up for non-global menus.

Or look how they manage multi-desktop setups. It's a 2x2 grid and applications treat it like that. It happens for me very often that an application containing a very large content (like an HD video) when unmaximized extends past the right and bottom edge of the active desktop. It seems like it's going out of screen but not really - it just extends to the bottom desktop! So annoying.

And there are all these little bugs that just show lack of proper testing. Like compiz bugs that can lock a semi-transparent orange rectangle on the screen, a remnant of some GUI action that was interrupted and hasn't been properly cleared. Too bad if it locks your mouse, too! Sometimes even going to a text terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6) doesn't work. Or when mouse driver gets crazy and recognizes my left clicks as right until I right-click with my touchpad at least once. I also challenge you to try to drag a file and drop it in the browser when both Nautilus & Firefox are full screen. No way, dock just doesn't get what you try to achieve.

And it's much better than it was in 11.04 or 11.10! You can only imagine how broken those releases were.

To conclude, the polishness of Ubuntu GUI is nowhere near this of proprietary OSs. I know what I'm talking about, I've used this freaking OS as my main for 5 years now!

[rainbyte]

To conclude, the polishness of Ubuntu GUI is nowhere near this of proprietary OSs. I know what I'm talking about, I've used this freaking OS as my main for 5 years now!

Canonical is just trying to enforce a desktop standard, because they have a big userbase now and they realize the need of uniformity.
I'm sure that other companies will try to do the same, like Google is doing with Android (they have their own Linux standard).

I know that open source software works that way. Anyone can produce things, but I would not like a company to decide instead of the community.
What about if some company monopolizes the Linux desktop and begin to take all the important decisions?
Even if that increases the userbase, it will be similar to the actual Windows vs. Linux marketshare situation, but with the same kernel.

This is just the beginning. If Linux distros continue with this fragmentation thing, the situation will get worse.
That's why we need uniformity, common standards and code sharing between projects.

P/D: I'm sorry for the ellipsis, I didn't notice before.

[TobiSGD]

That's probably selection bias as the linux people often know a little bit more about how stuff works so they can fix more themeselves...

When I write "computer illiterate" then that is exactly what I mean. Except you think how to start Firefox using a desktop icon is Linux knowledge. One does not have to be a geek anymore to use a Linux desktop.

[blackiwid]

Jeez, man. You don't have to excel in proficiency in English to be understandable but you don't even adhere to basic inter-language grammar rules as starting sentences with big letters or not ending every (very short, by the way) sentence with an ellipsis. It really hurts to read that, try to put more effort in your posts.



Guys, what's with these ellipsis everywhere?!

I maybe will try to not use the "ellipsis" didnt know that word before I looked it up on a site, so I will maybe use more commatas instead of the ... .

But about the big letters stuff, thats the first time someone cares about that in a english forem I saw . But maybe I did overdo it with the bad grammar and stuff, but on the other hand, I write here no letters to english teachers, I just "talk" about stuff... and at dont know 1-3 a´clock at the morning my english and grammar even goes worse it seems.

But when I want to make a point and still be able to "talk" in a way someone can understand me (what seemed to not be the issue) I think I still go for it ^^

To the customizablity of gnome-shell: First I find it funny that somebody talks about that they dont want to have a tablet as there desktop or something like that but prefers unity over gnome-shell, what was/is netbook/tablet ubuntu edition. Secondly I like that gnome-shell is by default very strict... that guaranties that you have a clean desktop, you cant have 1000 files on the desktop I even think its stupid to have icons there at all... because most time its under the applications anyway... starters there suck totaly and finding files with a fast search function or even folders and stuff is way better (in my opinion) but here you can easily show them, but I think its a good default to not show them. In the default gnome-shell is more not static but more standardised, thats a difference what do I mean with that.
In gnome2 if you would have on your screen the clock exactly in the midle you use another bigger/smaller screen its not in the middle anymore... because it did not save possition 50% in the middle it saved 500 pixels from the left side or something like that. that sucked totaly between different screens selecting some stuff to keep exact position others tried to float but did not work, too. So you have a totaly standised very dynamic desktop (as example dynamic workplaces or dynamic menu thats way better than the static menu where you have a menu with 10 categories and 50 apps where most of the time you use 5-7 apps.
And then from this very good defaults you have MORE possibilty to customise it with the extentions...

I as user dont want to have to manage if I want starter xy on the panel be 2pixels more right or left or if its staticly or dynamicly placed there... I just want good defaults, I also know that there are people there are better in gui designes than me, they maybe not make all perfekt in 1-2 minor updates but they get pretty close if something really bothers me (which did not, only the removing of the file-search in the dash) then at least there are this extentions where solutions for that are there. thats btw the only thing I dont like right now about gnome-shell that they reverted that file/folder search... when thats activited you have nearly a perfekt desktop (good the empathy integration could be more nice but it works too) you search get all... you maximise all and its ok, even on my 23" I love it, maybe it does not work good if you have more than one monitor and want to work with more desktops... they also should mix their desktop with some other features... the project/homes was a nice idea. So its not perfect yet shure, but when I compare it against the old gnome2 its a big step in the right direction and even against unity its way more better.

So my main point was that I somewhat agree to the stuff this kde-developer said... than somebody said that gnome-shell would suck even more that unity, that was the point I startet to say why I think its better. First I did not even say that gnome is or was better I just said that it did won, because of ubuntu, and kde only got used by some suse and kubuntu people... what was a minority, ok count in sidux but I think that distribution have also way less people using it than as example ubuntu. And then I said that ubuntu made that even worse, because you got some people that didnt like to change their habits they wanted to use gnome2 with minor releases for the next 50 years ^^ so gnome-shell did here loose some userbase, but with the unity which nearly nobody really prefered over gnome-shell and I did not see till now much people that really love unity but hate gnome-shell so the userbase again get splitted in 50/50... so now maybe really same omount of people use kde than gnome-shell or unity... (yes they dont share exactly 33% of the market and I did ignore the other smaller DE´s, but it comes close to that) so the main point here was that unity does not help that issue this kde-developer talked about, because even if gnomes not "winning" against kde... there are now maybe (if unity will really not die) for a long time 3 major desktops... that splits even more man-power (yes they share some stuff on some points but not all) and forks or projects that do basicly the same are not good in other fields... because its a waste of time and its not good here, and like the kde developer said, it will lead to even less or not more company support if you have to support 3 desktop environments if even 2 was a problem.

unity does even hurt the gnome-movement more than if ubuntu would have switched to kde4 as new default... because then all gnome2-lovers would go away, now they get this semi-gnome feeling and maybe can arange with that bugs and ubuntu gets it to a state where its somewhat usable that takes more people away from gnome... not even because they choose too but because they use whatever is installed as default if its not totaly broken over a long time, and it will end like their upstart, what did sound like a good idea but never got the love it needed. Ubuntu often makes his own non-upstream shit... and that works not good most of the time because they are not invested enough to really force some projects... what was good stuff for the linux-community from them yes they did have a good gnome-2 distribution but other than that, all they did just only is there for ubuntu, their softwarecenter I did not see it somewhere else, upstart, this closed cloud thing... also ubuntu only... I would switch to fedora, installed it, if it would support (like ubuntu does) my usb soundcard I use with a usb-switch on all my pcs, because they are the best gnome-shell distribution but they also do most work on upstream stuff I like and care more about freedom. But thats another point, again my main point was that I agree with the sentences from this developer to a certain degree, but ubuntu made that problem even worse.