Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness?

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Penz has been a user of KDE since version 1.2, and he led the development of the Dolphin file manager for the past six years. Now, he's quitting KDE development and handing off Dolphin. His reasons for quitting KDE development are described in a blog post. Penz speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons. 'Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging, and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for. But if there are not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and if no company is willing to invest fulltime-developers to work on this... well then we are losing ground.' Are open-source desktops losing?"

Comments

No problem here

[vlm]

My productivity has never been higher using "awesome" at home and work
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Installation was quite painless, apt-get install awesome and its all done, pretty much. It is... awesome

Oh wait, were they talking about those gigantic slow clunky things that include a kitchen sink and everything? Yeah, those can just go away... please.

I kind of liked xfce4 also but thats getting a bit too desktoppy. Too much extra junk I'll never use. I want my apps not the desktop environment's selection.

Figured this out in 2003

[Yeechang Lee]

I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using LInux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it, but OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

Re:Figured this out in 2003

[h4rr4r]

You like the OSX desktop?
I hate it. It is like it was designed for children and gets in the way too often. I want focus follows mouse, I want to get rid of the idiot dock bar thing, I want menus on every screen not just the main monitor.

On top of it, SHIP WITH THE FUCKING GNUTOOLS YOU MORONS. The half baked commercial versions of these tools lack way to many features.

Re:Yes

[RabidReindeer]

I never thought twice about the desktop until I upgraded recently. It "just worked".

Gnome3 is an insult. It's almost totally useless. Half of the basic functions I require to do my daily work aren't even available at gunpoint.

Cinnamon was better, but the whole screen freezes except for the mouse pointer and the only cure is to kill the desktop and all apps running in it.

XFCE was closer to Gnome 2 and the screen doesn't lock. But it randomly resets the accessibility and power settings so that on the one hand, hibernation doesn't work and on the other, the keyboard effectively quits working right in the middle of typing things.

I haven't even tried KDE. I didn't like KDE all that much before everyone hated it.

HOW can we have so many desktop choices and all of them be BAD???

Re:Partially a lack of interest by users

[MasaMuneCyrus]

Things I very much do not like about OSX.

• - There is no address bar in Finder, so I can't type where I want to go.
• - No move command in Finder (at least up to Snow Leopard, which is what my research institute uses because Apple basically said "we don't care about long-term support" when it moved to Lion). I have to copy files, move deep into some other directory, paste, and then go all the way back to where I came from (which I can't use the "back" button for because I've gone up and down in directory trees) and delete the files from their old folder. Or I have to open up yet another window and drag the files over. The fact that I can't type a path into an address bar makes this even worse.
• - You can't navigate via dragging. Sometimes I just want to move files up a directory. Sometimes I want to drag files into a second Finder window, but I forgot that the other Finder window is minimized. I can't just hover my mouse over the Finder icon and then over the minimized window.. I have to let go of all of my files, unminimize the second Finder window, and then select them all again and drag them over. (I heard that a long time ago some OS had a shelf where you could temporarily drag files to and from. That sounds like a good idea.)
• - If you drag a folder into another folder with an equal name, it doesn't merge, it just deletes the old folder and totally replaces it with the new one. OK, it's a fairly logical behavior, but that means that I can't merge directory trees without the commandline. Worse, if I accidentally screw up and replace a folder I didn't want to, it permanently deletes it. And Command-Z or Undo doesn't work in this case. It should at least ask you twice or mention "WARNING: This will replace the previous folder and remove all files permanently."
• - As others have said, the single menu bar behavior is stupid. If you like it on a single window, that's your opinion, but the whole concept goes to hell when you have multiple monitors. There should be a way to either duplicate the menu onto all monitors or make the menu appear on whichever monitor currently has an active program.