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Five Years of KDE
Jacek Fedorynski writes: "Looks like KDE is five years old. Five years seems like a lot of time but just look how much they've achieved in this time." I think the hard part is just beginning - KDE has got all the basics down, and now they have to resist adding too much more crap.
yes, MS spread the seeds of this and their own crap is helping it grow.
KDE has got all the basics down
Personally, I prefer Gnome because, despite a lack of some of the "basics", it is much more customizable to my needs. For example, in KDE, I can't rearrange the key mappings to launch a terminal when I press C-A-t. Also, despite what a lot of people claim, KDE is still very much more unstable than Gnome - the panel dissappeared on me twice last time I started a KDE session, and I had to log out to restore it.
Sorry to bitch, but it just seems like while KDE is generally a lot prettier than others, some of the advanced "basics" - the basics that I, as a person who runs Linux and a power user - expect are not there yet. It's too much like Windows or Mac for my taste: it looks pretty and tries to do everything for you.
You may not be a troll, as it is possible you actually believe what you say. For some reason, software often tend to activate the tribal instict in nerds. You (and the moderators who scored you up) obviously belong to the KDE "tribe", in which case the defensive instict when the "tribe" is viewed as thretened tend to overrule logic thinking.
Disagrement about a license *is* a perfectly valid reason to choose another product. No reason to make up conspiracy theories about that.
Anyone knowing the history of RMS would know that licenses matter more to him than to almost all other people.
The "tribe" has for a long time maintained that was no legal conflict between the old Qt license and the GPL, so it is not too surprising that the members of the tribe did not recognize the need for a legal forgiveness, and instead chose to take it as an insult. However, the FSF had all the time maintained that they were incompatible (it is a core feature of the GPL), so such an action was consistent with that. No need to invent other reasons, except to protect the tribal myths.
And of course, with "Go gnomes" RMS openly encouraged his own tribe, which of course could only be taken as an attack by the competing tribe, making him fair game.
I agree with your technical comments, though. While I don't care for desktops, I do care about GUI toolkits. I prefer C++ and Qt for technical reasons, and I believe a C++ based design is better than a C + a lot of language bindings.
I did use Gtk-- because it, unlike Qt, was free software, and I wanted my product to be available as free software with no proprietary dependencies on platforms where that is possible. I like the idea of a complete free soystem. When Troll Tech switched to QPL (and later GPL) I switched to Qt, because it was a more stable toolkit.