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

Re:Partially a lack of interest by users

[causality]

Not sure why this is rated off-topic.

Because some emotionally volatile cunt of a moderator didn't like the way it sounded. Egos think they're "God", egos take everything personally, and you don't offend "God" or you face "God's" wrath.

You know how you cannot criticize a politician on genuine, factual grounds without some moron piping up and saying "yeah, well, Politician X from the Opposite Party did something bad too, so nyaa!" as though that made your original criticism any less valid? I think they say "huh? WHAT?! That's MY TEAM they're criticizing. Quick, activate Us vs. Them mode, NOW! Whatever you do, don't logically refute any of it!"

Yeah, anyway... somebody just did that with X. A down-mod was their way to avoid logically refuting it. Or admitting that they can't.

I wish there were an accurate way to identify people like this. Then we can give them the status of second-class citizens, barring them from ever holding any political office or other position of authority. They're just not emotionally mature enough to be trusted with those things.