Slashdot Mirror
KLyDE: Lightweight KDE Desktop In the Making
jrepin writes "During Hack Week 9 at SUSE, longtime KDE hacker Will Stephenson started working on a project codenamed KLyDE. This project's aim is to bring KDE Plasma to the lightweight desktop market. It applies KDE's strengths of modularity and configurability to the challenge of making a lightweight desktop." Better said, Stephenson was able to devote lots of time to it; he's been working on the project for a few years now.
Removing the more bloated 'features' KDE is laden with by default would get most of us there. I suspect 99% of KDE users would be just fine without the Akonadi MySQL instance in their home directory.
Regardless of size, I recall seeing some performance tests on Phoronix showing KDE being significantly faster at pretty much everything than Unity and Gnome. That was a couple of releases ago, but it was pretty impressive.
Razor QT is a light, QT based DE.
KDE is also using QT, but is an entirely different DE. Razor is not KDE. You can't start plasma widgets on Razor. You don't have the KDE libs either.
KlyDE is actually compatible with large parts of KDE, specifically, plasma.
Will has been contributing to KDE for many, many years and was on the OpenSUSE KDE team until quite recently. There's a lot of work by Will in various KDE projects, and when this is ready for prime time I am sure it will also appear in some form in shipping product.
Lightweight is no longer about size... cheap systems are coming with 8GB of Flash and 2GB of RAM these days.
What's important is speed on relatively (400MHz) slow/weak low power processor cores.
Except speed and size are highly correlated. Computer architectures are still designed in such a way that if you use as little RAM as possible, and have a small computation footprint that's highly localized, then your performance skyrockets. So the available 2GB RAM is irrelevant - if you actually make full use of it, you'll be running a lot slower than if you can fit everything you need to do in 4K.
Already been several mini-distros (the whole system is under 100 MB) that do use KDE. Things like Nimblex come to mind, though that's been a few years ago now. Admittedly not sure they kept Plasma though ...
But as KDE is supposed to be able to run on phones now, it should be easy enough.
That's not how it works.
You're making an assumption that a developer will devote the same amount of time and enthusiasm to any project, and therefore any "Me-too" development is a loss to an established project.
That's more or less how it works in commercial development - you have a developer working 8 hours a day on whatever project you give him. It's not how it works in FOSS, which is actually a selfish development model: you work on whatever you want, as much as you want.
It's better to have someone sit down & bang out a yet another variant of X than to have them not turn out anything at all. The new version of X might be enough of an improvement to attract other developers and get you a new killer product. Not doing anything will result in nothing.
He wants to build a lightweight KDE, so he goes off and writes some code and with any luck creates a working KLyDE WM. If he tried to do this within KDE itself, he'd hit a load of politics and entrenched views and spend all his time arguing. He'd get nothing done. Nobody wins.
What you see as duplication and waste is a vital and useful part of FOSS development. Your recommended alternative would result in stagnation as people stop working on what interests them to fight against each other to drive existing projects towards their vision.
That's what the harm would be.
So.. it has come to this