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KDE Turns 19
prisoninmate writes: Believe it or not, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE). "Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI," wrote the developer back in October 14, 1996.
While we celebrate, add to this that KDE extended its reach to a huge fraction of the online world with the KHTML rendering engine.
This is just plain idiotic. Qt uses less memory than Gtk+, and is a far superior and more complete toolkit as well. Qt is commonly used in low-resource embedded systems; Gtk+ is not.
Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.
Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.