KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[kraftman]

Luckily you are on my ignore list. Your words clearly indicate the level (not the lowest, just missing entirely) of argumentation you can provide.

If I ever care. I don't care about idiots and you're the one without any logic in your posts. I can destroy your moronic list if you want just to make you and other morons look even more stupid. But what do I get for this? Btw. while I'm on your ignore list how the hell your know what I wrote? It's so stupid, you know? Oh, you don't.

[Awesomeness]

Developers come to and leave FOSS projects all the time. Heck, even the KDE initiator uses GNOME since years. So what?
There are parts within KDE that are not doing well and there parts that do well. As it's all modular, it's easy to use alternatives. E.g. I do not use Konqueror or Rekonq as web browser but Firefox.
Peter leaving is sad but the world is not ending. Dolphin is in good shape and a new maintainer is already filling the gap. Hey, maybe it's for the better?
Who would've thought that KWin would so greatly improve after Lubos Lunak was reassigned by his employer Novell to work on OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Martin stepped in and turned KWin fron a second-grade WM to the best out there.

[RealNC]

Rather from moron problems.

I have encountered many of the problems listed there. They are annoying, and it's impossible to work around them.

[Temar]

File bug reports then

There was never a need to file a bug report because all bugs I encountered were already in the bug tracker. In most cases they were even filed a long time before the relase. The project manager of that piece of software just didn't care and released his code none the less.

or even fix them yourself and then contribute the fixes back to the code. Or do some work to improve the test suite so that you make sure there are tests in place to avoid regressions.

Honestly? I would do that if there were only a few KDE projects which needed help with proper QA. The truth however is that most of the KDE projects are in desperate need of QA. You can't work your way into the code of each and every project. Besides the way they handle their relases shows me that many of the KDE developers have absolutely no interest in proper QA. They don't delay releases, they never revert back to an older version of a project, they never release an early bugfix release but instead they just go on, no matter how bad the release is.

Of course there are also some people within the KDE community who do care about quality. The kwin developer for example is such an exception.

However, just looking at the taskbar, which still does not work properly 4.5 years after the release of 4.0, shows me that there is no point in trying to improve QA because the developers just don't care about it. Come on, the TASKBAR, one of the most basic items of a desktop environment is still unable to align icons properly!

[Alex Sarmiento]

Developers come to and leave FOSS projects all the time. Heck, even the KDE initiator uses GNOME since years. So what?
There are parts within KDE that are not doing well and there parts that do well. As it's all modular, it's easy to use alternatives. E.g. I do not use Konqueror or Rekonq as web browser but Firefox.
Peter leaving is sad but the world is not ending. Dolphin is in good shape and a new maintainer is already filling the gap. Hey, maybe it's for the better?
Who would've thought that KWin would so greatly improve after Lubos Lunak was reassigned by his employer Novell to work on OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Martin stepped in and turned KWin fron a second-grade WM to the best out there.

Who is the KDE initiator uses GNOME now?
Nice comment overall

[birdie]

kraftman,

Sometimes I make myself open and read your posts but all I see is "Linux has no problems", "You're a moron", "the list is moronic", and "all the people agreeing with it are stupid idiots".

Way to go, sir!

However most amusingly and contrary to your one-dimensional knee jerk reaction, people do agree and support this imbecile list. Maybe it's because you don't actually use Linux? ;-)

[jvillain]

KMix and Veromix may be just awesome, but there was no getting it to pipe audio through the HDMI cable. We dug through sound systems for two hours trying and applying settings to no effect. We took the "engineer's solution" route and killed the problem by installing an alternate distro with the GNOME3 environment, where audio just worked out of the box (Mint 13 with KDE to Mint 13 with GNOME, if you care to know). It wasn't an overabundance of settings that caused the problem - KDE simply failed us. We were under PulseAudio in both distros, and the exact same thing which worked under GNOME didn't do squat in KDE. That's a problem, and I'm frankly amazed that the desktop environment was causing it. Two hours of trying to get something as basic as audio piped to the correct port is more than a fair shake, I'd say.

Don't blame KDE here. The audio component of Gnome is Pulse. The audio component of KDE is Phonon. The fact that a number of the distros through their arrogance have tried and tried and tried to force Pulse down our throats even though it is drastically flawed is not KDE's fault. I had nothing but problems until I yanked Pulse out except for the libs which I can't remove because of some stupid dependency shoved in by the Fedora package maintainers. It meant having to add in a config file to get the ALSA mixer working but since then (several years ago) my audio has run flawlessly. Yo, distro maintainers if I want to run Gnome I will run Gnome. Until then stop trying to force Gnome down my throat with stupid stunts like forcing us to take Pulse. Seriously who ever though that was a good idea? I mean other than Pottering?

[Larian]

May I ask which distributions?

Looks like I mis-spoke there, but didn't Canonical kill off their Kubuntu branch? I was honestly under the impression that it was becoming a rare bird and losing funding left and right. Am I mistaken?

[FutureSuture]

I am way too technically inept to understand what all the fuss is about but I use Linux Mint KDE via a USB and am more than happy with it. The MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce variants of Linux Mint have given me problems, always causing me to return to the KDE variant. It gives me the most customization options and also happens to closely resemble Windows 7 (although I've been told that Windows 7 actually closely resembles KDE). I do hope KDE continues to stick around.

[Teho]

Don't blame KDE here. The audio component of Gnome is Pulse. The audio component of KDE is Phonon. The fact that a number of the distros through their arrogance have tried and tried and tried to force Pulse down our throats even though it is drastically flawed is not KDE's fault.

PulseAudio is not Gnome technology nor is Phonon replacement for it. Phonon-GStreamer doesn't even support non-PulseAudio setups offically. I have no idea what makes you think that PA is somehow flawed as to me it seems like the best thing that has ever happened to audio on Linux. It supports many features that I couldn't live without like:
-Multiple simultaneous outputs
-Easy output and channel swapping
-Proper bluetooth support
-Application specific and systemwide volume control and equalizers
-Jack detection
...among others.

Seriously who ever though that was a good idea? I mean other than Pottering?

Considering the fact that it's used by all popular desktop distributions and all non-Android Linux mobile operating systems I would say that quite a few. Pottering hasn't even worked on PulseAudio for years now and it's still the most actively developed open source audio server out there.

Looks like I mis-spoke there, but didn't Canonical kill off their Kubuntu branch? I was honestly under the impression that it was becoming a rare bird and losing funding left and right. Am I mistaken?

Not quite. Canonical moved their only paid Kubuntu developer to work on other stuff but then he was then hired by Blue Systems to continue his work on Kubuntu. Canonical still provides the developement infrastucture and hostring for Kubuntu. So essentially nothing has changed.