Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is KDE Dying?
A long-time loyal KDE user "always felt that it was the more complete and integrated of the many Linux desktop environments...thus having the most potential to win over new Linux converts." And while still using KDE exclusively without any major functional issues, now Slashdot reader fwells shares concerns about the future of desktop development, along with a personal opinion -- that KDE is becoming stale and stagnant:
KDE-Look.org, once a fairly vibrant and active contributory site, has become a virtual ghost town... Various core KDE components and features are quite broken and have been so for some time... KDEPIM/KMail frankly seems targeted specifically at the poweruser, maintaining over many years its rather plain and arguably retro interface. The Konqueror web browser has been a virtual carcass for several years, yet it mysteriously remains an integral component...
So, back to my opening question... Is KDE Dying? Has innovation and development evaporated in a development world dominated by the mobile device? And, if so, can it be reinvigorated? Will the pendulum ever swing back? Can it? Should it?
The original submission has some additional thoughts on Windows 10 and desktop development -- but also specific complaints about KDE's Recent Items/Application Launcher History and the KDE theming engine (which "seems disjointed and rather non-intuitive".) The argument seems to be that KDE lacks curb appeal to fulfill that form-over-function preference of the larger community of users, so instead it's really retaining the practical appeal of "my 12 year old Chevy truck, feature rich for its time... Solid and reliable, but definitely starting to fade and certainly lacking some modern creature comforts."
So leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does desktop development need to be reinvigorated in a world focused on mobile devices -- and if so, what is its future? And is KDE slowly dying?
So, back to my opening question... Is KDE Dying? Has innovation and development evaporated in a development world dominated by the mobile device? And, if so, can it be reinvigorated? Will the pendulum ever swing back? Can it? Should it?
The original submission has some additional thoughts on Windows 10 and desktop development -- but also specific complaints about KDE's Recent Items/Application Launcher History and the KDE theming engine (which "seems disjointed and rather non-intuitive".) The argument seems to be that KDE lacks curb appeal to fulfill that form-over-function preference of the larger community of users, so instead it's really retaining the practical appeal of "my 12 year old Chevy truck, feature rich for its time... Solid and reliable, but definitely starting to fade and certainly lacking some modern creature comforts."
So leave your own thoughts in the comments. Does desktop development need to be reinvigorated in a world focused on mobile devices -- and if so, what is its future? And is KDE slowly dying?
Perhaps the users have spoken and most prefer the Gnome2/MATE/Cinnamon style interface. The rest of us are on Awesome, Xfce or something else.
KDE is the Gold standard in Linux Desktops. It has the most utilitarian behavior of all of the existing Linux desktops.
I'm not sure how active desktop development needs to be for a single *nix desktop environment. I am a big KDE user myself, and I'm happy with where it is. Sure, some of the applications from the KDE team have been neglected quite a but but they're not fully broken either. KDE runs GNOME stuff quite well when there are GNOME applications that I just can't get by without.
That and of course I still do a huge part of my most important work from the command line. That won't change any time soon, so as far as that is concerned it matters not at all whether or not any additional new features are ever incorporated into the environment.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Konqueror would seem to be the best file manager for power users and programmers. it's very configurable. I don't think I could find as good a replacement for it.
Because of this stupid bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug....
If they could fix it I could stop using XFCE.
Konqueror is a much better file manager as far as usability goes.
At least a 12 year old Silverado will still run quite well. You can get a lot done with an old Silverado, unlike a Toyota Tundra or a Ford Super Duty. If KDE is like an old Silverado, then Windows 3.1 is like an old Tundra or Super Duty. They're completely obsolete and useless now, and probably have long since ceased to work.
As long as you remember it.
#DeleteChrome
No
Well, it or Kubuntu. I don't know which since I've only used KDE on Kubuntu for the past five years. I manage about six hundred laptops, admitted most older and none with SSDs, and we've been in the process of switching to Xubuntu since January, and my users are much happier. People change from Windows to get a faster UI, so being just as painfully slow doesn't provide a reason to switch.
I never got over the KDE3 to KDE4 transition, and switched to something else. I think KDE4 was too complex to survive long-term.
Face it. We are dying off. The contributors. The hackers (in the 70's sense of the word). KDE is a thing of the prior decades. Sit down and ask yourself: How many people under 30 know what KDE is? Is it a higher or lower percentage than last decade? The decade prior?
Smart phones got better. Distractions got more distracting. The canonical hacker breed is dying. You feel it. We all feel it.
Where's that fucking apps appidy app guy when you need him. He's got it right you know. The borg-like proliferation of technology has reached the point such that there is no wonder to the up and coming generations in terms of "how can I make this better", moreover it's become "how can I get moar"
Is this new? No. Bread and circuses have existed for decades. But the rate of new bread and new circuses is unprecedented. Enjoy tomorrowland. It will be fucking lame and owned by Pepsi and Microsoft.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Every time I checked it out over the years, it always seemed to have the massive kerning bugs. So I just bounced off. It's been several years since anyone mentioned it, though. The only reason I ever encounter it is due to the excellent kcachegrind.
Who the fuck cares what the cast thinks. They are paid to do a job, not be stewards of a TV show they didn't create.
People that try to complain COMPUTERS to mobile devices :\ When will it ever end.....
Mobile devices are toys, they lack the balls to do any serious number crunching. It's like comparing an elephant to an ant; completely out of its league.
Laptops and/or desktops are for doing real work, and tablets/phones are toys. Trying to "merge" these two, or treating them the same, is the stupidest idea ever
For me, KDE was too feature rich with more sizzle than steak. I gave it up when KDE 3 was launched and moved to Icewm, then to LXDE, and now using LXQT.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
FOSS developers are free to do what they like. I was quite happy with KDE3, although it was getting a bit outdated. However starting with KDE4 it seemed like too much attention was being given to gimmicks and core functionality and stability were suffering. I tried to go back a few times but never could. IMO that was the beginning of the end. I've run most of the major desktop environments on linux, and many of the minor ones, and for workstation use I'm currently happy with i3. On laptops Gnome is fine or Unity is acceptable. I'm not a teenager/20-something who cares about customizing everything on every computer anymore. I just want something stable and that works consistently across releases.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
I've already seen two other stories today (where? Can't remember) about the Linux Desktop development slowing down or dying.
Who cares? There are plenty of desktops. Pick one - any one at all - and use it to do some work or play some games. It's way past time to forget about setting gradients in menu bars, 3D effects in cursors or whatever. Do people really sit and look at their desktops and play with the configurations more than doing actual work? Like with programs?
Honestly, yes. KDE was the first desktop environment I tried when I started dabbling around in Linux back in the late 90's. I continued to use KDE for several years into the 3.0 series because compared to Gnome it just felt more polished and capable. As a matter of fact I remember at some point one of the big Linux groups (may have been a branch of Red Hat) announced that they'd be adopting Gnome as their "official" platform and I immediately though "Well, that's the end of Linux as a desktop option, because Gnome sucks.".
Somewhere along the way though KDE did indeed stagnate, and Gnome and even XFCE started to feel just a little more put together. Eventually Gnome went a little off the rails too but thankfully Mint forked off Cinnamon and it is wonderful IMHO (though I did successfully use XFCE for a bit while Cinnamon was still stabilizing). I still will download and boot into some of the other DE's like KDE every now and then, but none of them feel right. Cinnamon on the other hand has manged to keep pace with technology and looks like not trying to upend the entire UI paradigm.
Unless it changes drastically though, I no longer have any interest in KDE - and my interest in Gnome is limited only to backporting the useful bits into Cinnamon.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
there are too few developers volunteering their time and expertise to open source projects.
there are too few companies donating their workers' time to open source projects.
there is way too much fragmentation. too many options. too many projects. not nearly enough manpower to go around.
just on desktop environments... how many desktops is enough? the answer is not n+1. the answer is more like 3. lightweight, desktop, and mobile/touch-centric, preferably with the same underlying codebase (e.g. gtk vs qt). how many do we have? fifteen? twenty? more? imagine if these projects combined their efforts into three. holy fuck... microsoft wouldn't stand a chance against a united open source movement.
right now, every time someone forks a project or another one gets abandoned, microsoft laughs their asses off. they aren't worried about linux because linux is a complete clusterfuck of a disorganized egotistical mess.
captcha: coolest
another problem is that projects always try to be 'cool' with flashy effects and other bullshit and they forget about the most important thing: the user. we just want stuff that WORKS, dammit. documentation not written to a techhead's level would be a bonus, but if you made your program right, documentation wouldn't really be needed, now, would it....
I tried Plasma pretty quickly and loved it from a UI perspective. But my excitement died down pretty quickly when certain quirks became too irritating to learn (I grew up on Windows. The conversion to Unity, Cinnamon or MATE was very easy). It's a shame because KDE has potential (even with the annoying 'K' branding of everything)
I no longer follow Aaron Siego's blog or planetkde very closely, but KDE seems to be improving and remains the least annoying DE for me. However, the curb appeal is an issue and Konqueror does indeed seem dead and I don't think there are enough developers who want it working to revive it. I think most of the problems are from the heavy redevelopment for Plasma 5+ combined with the lack of a major distro to underwrite it. We see Gnome flailing around and paying developers to do the things users hate, and a small contingent of hobbiests and grantees keeping Mate going. KDE is trying to push things forward with a similarly small developer base. I don't think there are many users who want to return to KDE 3.5 (as good as it was). Kontact/Kmail is retro looking, but only marginally compared to the Evolution screenshots I just looked at. The problem with Kmail is the backend, Akonadi, which frequently misbehaves and offers no practical advantage (except to developers, who could access the unified backend if they were working on PIM programs, which they aren't.)
One of the problems with anything desktop-related is the fact that it's all getting drowned out by people beating the phone-and-tablet drum. Developers are cargo-culting the mobile design paradigm, even on applications that are aimed at desktop users. I do systems integration work with a focus on end user computing, so I see lots of user-facing software from many vendors. I swear that the big offshore code shops have all just started using the same "touch-first" AngularJS user interface framework and swap in company logos when they build a new web front end for something.
I'm a big desktop fan - and a big terminal/command line fan. People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing! The problem is that the desktop and even the laptop form factor isn't the default anymore for most people. They've become almost a niche now, even in businesses. Most people want the Surface-style convertible tablets now where I work, and I've still got my boring ThinkPad collection.
I'm also a cross-platform kind of guy, but I find myself on Windows machines most of the time. Microsoft actually did the right thing with Windows 10, walking back some of the 8.x "touch-only, tablet-only" craziness. It's not Windows 7, but in my mind it's a good compromise between the two worlds. If most people are mashing the screens on their Surface, you can't get away with Windows 7-sized user interface elements. I wish they'd let people theme Windows 10, but that's a different story. On the Linux side, I do wonder if having several choices for desktop environments, all with extremely different ecosystems, is the right thing. It's nice to have a million ways to do things, but Apple was able to do a decent UI on top of UNIX that hides everything UNIXy about MacOS until the user gets down into the details. The fragmentation of the Linux desktop is one of the things slowing adoption. Some of the more modern Linux desktop environments have gotten more love recently, and are a better choice for the new user. But, just like CDE on the old UNIX platforms, I'm sure KDE will be kicking around for ages. Just like me and my Midnight Commander...
and all the others. I now install Ubuntu Gnome to avoid that crap they call Unity, and add gnome-flashback to get a traditional desktop. Don't bother suggesting some other *DE, I've tried them all.
XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon all ripped off GNOME and work better.
KDEPIM/KMail frankly seems targeted specifically at the poweruser, maintaining over many years its rather plain and arguably retro interface.
If 'power user' in this case means 'not technical but very proficient at using the computer', then there is no problem here. The last thing linux (or anything really) needs is yet another one of those stupid hipster interfaces with oversized widgets, wasted whitespace, reduced functionality, and 'cloud integration' user-hostility disguised as we-care-about-you plastered all over it.
Fits all my and family's needs. Most of my GUI apps are GTK but QT ones fit in fine.
Twinstiq, game news
The only advancement to any desktop environment which seems to really exist compared to KDE 3.x is search. I'm seriously thinking of returning to KDE 3 and putting my money into helping the developers of the Trinity Desktop Environment (KDE 3.x) resurrect it. It needs some work to bring it up to speed, and more so properly maintain it, but it seems to have the most potential of all the desktop environments. I thought it was dead, but I'm no longer convinced of that. Mainly because it's not an impossibility, but it does need a financial backer with sufficient assets to make it happen.
When they went to 4 it died for me.
I used to use KDE, when it looked like a desktop. I like icons lots of them. I like a menu bar. I liked Konqueror, I like the easy access to change browser ID signature user agent.
I loved KMail.
I absolutely despise mobile phone interfaces pretending to be workstation graphical user interfaces!
For example Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE!
I don't care for missing icons misty Windows wobbly windows fuzzy Windows or simply fucked up Windows!
For goodness sake just die already.. Did you know that none of these "graphic user Interface designers" actually use it themselves.
I'm using Mint 17.1 Cinnamon, and it's not because I am "old-fashioned and unable to change"
it is because I'm using a powerful workstation and I'm not in the fucking bit interested in using a fucking smart phone on a workstation.
Just die already. My goodness it makes me angry I'm so sick of these people.. You no longer spend a couple of hours turning it back into a workstation desktop graphic user Interface you have to spend literally weeks undoing that abomination to turn it back into a workstation graphic user Interface!
Oooooooooooooooh for goodness sake fuck off.
This article is post bait. 1. Lure passionate people into highly upsetting or controversial hypothetical statement. 2. Popcorn 3. Watch the war break out between the factions 4. Profit SEO comments and data 5. Popularity++ KDE is not dying. On GamingOnLinux statistics KDE is the #1 used Desktop Environment https://www.gamingonlinux.com/... Is the author blind? Perhaps specific tools and websites that were once cutting edge have gone stale, but seriously - Konqueror? You mean that thing that was replaced by Dolphin? Someone should tell the author there's a reason why X Y and Z tools have not been renovated - usually because there are better options available.
And the ideal of "break everything, we have a new idea!" rose.
Plasma took it further down that road.
Plasma5 dug the grave
A lot of tech people tend to forget that for most people, a computer is not an end unto itself. It's just another tool for getting their real work done. Why "advocate" a desktop if people can get their work done on a tablet or phone? A desktop system has a lot of complexity that, for most people, probably tends to get in the way of actually getting their work done as much as it helps them. I say, just use the simplest tool fit for the job, nothing more.
People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing!
I'd argue that very few people's productivity is measured in how efficient their file operations are. It's sort of like believing you're going to be vastly more efficient as a programmer if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or type 60wpm instead of 30. Unlike the movies, programming isn't about how fast you type.
If it works for you, fantastic. But don't kid yourself... you use it because it's what you know and you're comfortable with it. People hate change, because change forces cognitive dissonance, meaning you have to focus more on the task rather than the work you're trying to get done until the new system is committed to muscle memory. That means many people hate change even if it's change for the better, let alone if it's just change for change's sake.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It never lived.
It was ridiculously bloated and psychedelically confused from the absolute beginning, and it still is.
They had a small windows of opportunity when Gnome was abusing its users in a most foul way, "starting all over again" and basically delivering a window interface lacking even the most basic functionality for a fairly long time. But that time has gone.
CBS and Paramount aren't required to follow the wishes of the cast. You're right in that matter. However, you're wrong about everything else.
CBS and Paramount didn't create Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry did, and it originally aired on NBC. Rod Roddenberry is Gene Roddenberry's son, so he's part of the Roddenberry estate.
Star Trek is nothing without fans to watch on TV, pay to see the movies in theatres, and buy the merchandise. The most loyal fans to the franchise are the ones who spend the most money, so it's never a good thing to alienate them. The cast help keep the fans interested in Star Trek by doing things like going to conventions, signing autographs, and generally representing the franchise to fans. The characters and the cast that play and help define those characters are often the most recognizable aspects of a show.
Moon landings. Kennedy assasinations. Elections. Refugees. Somehow, KDE and/or linux in main doesn't come in any list that isn't a mile long.
Despite the industries' desire to convince us that change for change sake is a good thing, if it isn't broke don't fix it, and don't screw with things just to add a new paint job. That kind of thinking gets us a 'new' version of windows that is just a Botox job and contains no real functionality. That kind of thinking gets us an all 'new' car model or a brand 'new' iPhone model every year despite the fact that there is really nothing new to add, just a newer model with a minimally incremental H/W upgrade. I think you might be confusing stale with stable and dependable. Should you really care that your desktop manager isn't exciting ?
I could never understand the drive to upgrade to the latest and questionably greatest bleeding edge technology. Stay a year or two behind the bleeding edge and don't get cut, or pay the top dollar for something that really does very little more for you. You should only upgrade when there is a clear and definitive reason to do so, when you can't perform a task that you need to do. Does an extra second or two really justify the expenditure of so much resources ? Money, and time to learn a new interface, not to mention wasted resources and increased trash ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Since my transition from windows to linux 4 years ago I've been through a few environments with the following issues:
* Ubuntu 14/Unity - Fast and not very buggy, but the interface is just - NO. Give me my taskbar, systray and start menu on the bottom. It works fine on a desktop.
* Ubuntu 14/Cinnamon - Interface is OK, but I can't see my battery status and it doesn't warn me for low battery. Biggest problem with Cinnamon is that it's extremely slow - takes 20-90% cpu constantly. It's been the same on another Ubuntu 14 at work, a Ubuntu 16 at work and my brothers' Mint 17 installation. Searching in the start menu is also extremely slow.
* Ubuntu 14/XFCE - Interface can after much configuration be OK. Lighting fast but too buggy. Lots of V-SYNC errors despite new graphics drivers, changed settings etc. Cannot bind shortcut commands to key-up event. Quite a few other graphics bugs. Feels broken. Also doesn't show my battery status.
* Xubuntu 16 (from live usb) - Most bugs (but not all) still present.
* Kubuntu 16 - Interface is not just ok, but actually NICE. After configuring for a black theme and enabling half transparency on the task bar it's beautiful. The systray icons look modern. And I like the smooth hardware accelerated animations. It's fast too. A lot faster than Cinnamon and quite close to XFCE. I don't see any cpu spikes. It does recognize my battery and warns me if it's low. There are bugs however - sometimes the taskbar crashes (and restarts), and I can't get my Guake console to bind the "open" key at login - that has to be done manually after each login. The system settings can be a bit messy as well, especially bluetooth.
I don't care much about outdated KDE apps as I think the only one I use i KCalc and Dolphin. Except those I mainly use Chrome, Firefox, SpiderOak, Spotify, Libreoffice, Guake.
I'd say that some stagnation in the KDE development would actually be good if they instead focus on bug fixes. The interface is good enough for the moment.
I have preferred GTK applications mainly because they seem more structured from a user's standpoint. My preferred desktop experience is with Cinnamon.
KDE seemed to have a lot of configuration, but many apps that were written for KDE, all look strikingly dissimilar from one another. It's not that they weren't "clean" because "clean" really means that we are removing useful functionality for the sake of over zealous artistic motivations or when people are too lazy to maintain the code under the buttons, but the applications lacked uniformity.
I am sure that a lot of people really worked hard on it. It helped move the Linux desktop forward--especially in the late 1990s.
There were questions as to whether or not it was really open, or perhaps Gnome wouldn't have been created.
I wonder of the implications of a KDE failure, when a good number of applications use its toolkit.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I say, just use the simplest tool fit for the job, nothing more.
So give them a pencil and a pad of paper, right? Simpler is not always better. Even for someone who hunts and pecks, a keyboard with properly designed local software is a lot more productive for most people than laggy, underpowered touchscreen devices coupled with badly designed SaaS interfaces.
If it works for you, fantastic. But don't kid yourself... you use it because it's what you know and you're comfortable with it. People hate change, because change forces cognitive dissonance, meaning you have to focus more on the task rather than the work you're trying to get done until the new system is committed to muscle memory. That means many people hate change even if it's change for the better, let alone if it's just change for change's sake.
That's just it. The foisting of mobile interfaces on everyone is a case of change for change's sake. This is an appeal to novelty. Newer isn't always better. Changing a long held process better come with some serious improvements in performance out the other end. This is not likely the case for desktop->mobile for all but the simplest and least time consuming tasks.
the only thing anyone ever needs IMHO is XFCE - the rest is all candy
kde works, and imho keeps getting better with each release.
It has too many colors and skumorphism with 3d icons showing what the computer can do with even file menus!! eww like soo last decade.
I want a cell phone interface. It needs to be like 1990 to be more modern with no multitasking and complete flat with low colors and blinding white in the background. Man, we just want to consume content and nothing elzse. These things like options are for old people. Why can't there be decisions made for us with humburger menus like our phones to emulate 5 inch screens.
Man unhip and these things called desktops are so old school for old people who think you need to write scripts and thing and stuff. Guess they haven't discovered the app store to solve every problem
http://saveie6.com/
Why is lack of development necessarily a problem? Lots of very useful programs have seen little development recently because they already do well what they are supposed to do. In the case of user interfaces, it is far from clear to me that development represents progress. Personally, as someone who makes heavy use of the command-line and has zero interest in copying MS Windows, I was quite happy with the window managers of a decade ago and currently have to spend time setting up a new machine to configure Gnome Classic the way I like it. Developments like Unity are just an impediment. I recognize that other users, and in particular, other types of users, have different preferences, but I see no reason to impose the type of interface that one class of user likes on everyone else.
So what about the projects? What about the users? With Microsoft having gone from fee-for-product to "you're the product", Apple being vertically integrated, and free projects depending on the fickle whims of the benefactor-community dynamic, whither the poor user who just wants a stable desktop at a fair price?
KDE is still my preferred Linux desktop. It does what I need and I find its features make my workflow more efficient. I still find valid users for lighter weight desktops, but day to day its KDE for me.
>A lot of tech people tend to forget that for most people, a computer is not an end unto itself. It's just another tool for getting their real work done. Why "advocate" a desktop if people can get their work done on a tablet or phone? A desktop system has a lot of complexity that, for most people, probably tends to get in the way of actually getting their work done as much as it helps them.
Tablets and phones are consumption devices, not creation devices. They are a hideously bad match for trying to do any sort of serious development work, or even your bog standard PowerPoint deck. A Surface is about as tablet-y as you can get while still being able to do reasonable work, but a Surface is still a real computer under the hood. Anyone who works with touch-only systems could probably give you a long list of design decisions that slow them down when trying to do anything serious.
>I'd argue that very few people's productivity is measured in how efficient their file operations are. It's sort of like believing you're going to be vastly more efficient as a programmer if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or type 60wpm instead of 30. Unlike the movies, programming isn't about how fast you type.
I think his point isn't just doing file operations, but rather that everything from the CLI is going to be faster and more powerful than a GUI when you know what you're doing. GUIs are great when doing graphical stuff, but for text-based work, text-based interfaces work better. UNIX is an operating system that is also an integrated development environment.
And typing fast really does make a difference. I mean, sure, Amdahl's Law and everything, but when you know what you're going to do, your typing speed will linearly translate into productivity.
Bloated pieces of shit... Well, Linux all in all really. Being inspired by Microsofts software design is not a good thing for open source (or any software).
BSD FTW!
Kwindows Kwill Kalways Kwin, Kfreefards.
Kleenux Kruulez
Once again, I think we can turn to Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." :)
Haven't used KDE since the V4 release myself, but I still tend to suspect that Betteridge probably applies here.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted. :)
"getting their real work done"
this is laughable. you mean their real make-work done. america is getting filled to the brim with people who shuffle back and forth and around: emails, spreadsheets, word docs, pdfs, etc etc etc.
their actual contribution to society? net negative. they're not covering the cost of their own oxygen use, much less energy and caloric consumptions.
service economy is a circle jerk economy,
Does desktop development need to be reinvigorated in a world focused on mobile devices...
Huh? In the same article as a complaint the KDE is dead! Just goes to show the "author" didn't even do basic research on the subject they're trolling. Granted that KMail is a broken piece of shit worthy of Canonical, aside from that the entire "story" is pure wrong.
So give them a pencil and a pad of paper, right? Simpler is not always better.
You didn't read the entire sentence. "Fit for the job". If there are two tools fit for the job, a simple and a complicated then simple is nearly universally better. The job needs to include not only the task but the intended output too. If I want to write a good argument to a colleague, then then a typed email is the the best tool for the job. If I want to let him know that when he gets back to his desk his boss was looking for him, a scribble on a post it in the middle of his screen is the best tool for a job.
If I want to draw something quick for a colleague, I'll reach for a pen and paper. If I want to draw something complicated that I will erase over and over again, annotate and then send to someone on the other side of the world, I'll reach for my tablet and draw on the screen.
If two tools are fit for the job, then the simpler one will win.
The foisting of mobile interfaces on everyone is a case of change for change's sake.
Anyone who uses the words change for change's sake don't understand the change.
Anyone who ... don't ...
Ladies and gentlemen my grammar skills brought to you by Sunday morning and a broken coffee machine.
So give them a pencil and a pad of paper, right? Simpler is not always better. Even for someone who hunts and pecks, a keyboard with properly designed local software is a lot more productive for most people than laggy, underpowered touchscreen devices coupled with badly designed SaaS interfaces.
Not at all. "The simplest tool fit for the job." If that's a desktop, fine. But not all work is that complex, or requires what are literally the equivalent of yesteryear's supercomputers sitting on a desk. Maybe some people need a laptop, since they're on the go. Or maybe even just a tablet with detachable keyboard, if all they really need is a browser to run some lightweight web apps.
My point is that we as techies really shouldn't be so attached to a particular form factor that not everyone requires. Is KDE dying? Yeah, I guess, but only because the desktop itself is... if not dying, then shrinking a bit in significance. It's becoming just one of many viable form factors or computing paradigms. Sure, we developers will always need a desktop environment because of what we do, but the world at large is not like us.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Mobile vs. desktop BS? The headline doesn't really represent the actual topic.
The foisting of mobile on everybody was a solution to how to leverage network advantages over a huge range of physical typographies. Whole classes of problems like maintaining phone contact lists (what's Bill's mother's phone number since he goes over to her place every other Wednesday night) are simply gone. Literally billions of new people have a programable high powered digital device in the last decade who did not before. Among the 1st world who had computers they not only have a computer somewhere in the house but they have a fully internet capable device with them 24x7.
Newer in this case is vastly better. Its not even remotely close. Mobile is the source of the massive performance gain. Now desktop now has to adapt to mobile. That's not some pointless quest for shiny but rather trying to keep desktop relevant.
KDE 4/5 appear to me to be perfect examples of the Second system effect. KDE 4 brought the semantic desktop; as far as I can tell, a pure write-only function; the only visible effect was a drastic performance hit. KDE 5 then spent years shuffling code in the libraries to make something better/faster/easier, though again, I've no idea what, since the actual shipped function remains almost exactly the same.
The trouble is, these system-level improvements seem to have discouraged developers from writing new applications, or indeed updating the old ones (for example, the file search application still uses slocate, not the semantic desktop search!).
All that said, I still use KDE, as has the best selection of applications for my purposes.
I've always found KDE amazing. KDE 4 was great and I was using it for pretty long time. When I get new hardware I'll install KDE Neon with KDE 5.
Some of KDE applications sure are bad, but I see devs trying very hard with Plasma 5 and, IMHO, Xfce and lxde got nothing on it. Many great feature, insane customizability and focus on power users that want to have things their way. For that I respect KDE and will always use KDE
Integrating allows code to merge with failure rather than purge it.
This is exactly the kind of stupid talk that drives clueless developers into a breaking-change-everything-new-and-shiny-just-because-frenzy that alienates all users and fucks up completely adequate solutions beyond repair (see KDE 3, among others).
I'm using the same dead simple wm since 1999, and guess what, it still works fine. Nothing to miss except useless eye candy.
Just because Microsoft, Apple and Google are playing "fire and motion" with each other, it does not mean you have to chip in. Linux is still about choice, if you're smart enough to break out of the recent windowification efforts.
It all depends on where you're coming from. I've seen quite a few "old farts" installing the latest shiny windows 10 with uber-smartphone UI, and about the first thing they do after getting it back to a sane UI and "windows classic" style is to install a hopelessly antiquated norton-commander-style filemanager.
I've been using KDE for over a decade, and in fact am using it right now. Feel free to call me a noob if that makes you feel better, though.
Better yet, I'll call you a n00b.
If it works for you, fantastic. But don't kid yourself... you use it because it's what you know and you're comfortable with it.
I don't use MC because I prefer a GUI I don't have to memorize to use properly. All those keystrokes? I use a lot of keystrokes. If I'm going to use that many keystrokes I'll just use a shell. But you can't really deny that sort of interface is much faster for many types of operations. It's the vi of file managers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And the younger ones use their phones for everything. Kde is as good as dead :)
Besides the KDE4 debacle many years ago, KDE Plasma 5.x has seen a lot of improvement, complete rewrites in some areas and delivers a rather nice desktop experience. Being an XFCE user myself, I opt to use only KDEs windowing/compositor with XFCE to spruce it up with a more modern theme engine, appearance and 3D effects.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
it never invented, but tried to copy Windows and OS-X GUI and lagging 3-5 years behind, and never achieve the stability of both references.
One main thing is, that desktop development on Linux deals with hundreds of different APIs, where none gets stable and backward compatible, hence, all apps, unless backed by big names like Google, never really mature enough, and quickly become outdated, and so KDE itself too.
when you fill your drive with 90% of applications and command line tools that begin with the letter K its just annoying
What are these desktop experiences you're all talking about? I'm using twm and my desktop is of a plain, solid color. Although sometimes I go wild and set xv to decorate my desktop with an easy-on-the-eyes pattern.
No.
Stupid question, simple answer.
KDE works pretty good. It sounds like the submitter wants them to keep changing things just for the sake of change. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Who the hell has "gleefully adopted" Windows 10 apart from MS fanbois? It's so appalling I'm literally thinking of quitting .NET development rather than eventually being forced to use it.
And no, its UI isn't even good. It's shitty monochrome icons and minimalistic 2d bullshit. Windows 7 and Mint Cinnamon look a lot nicer.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I got introduced to Linux back with Ubuntu 8.10 and shortly thereafter discovered Kubuntu with KDE. I've tried the others, but still always come back to KDE. When KDE 5 came out on Kubuntu, I gave it a try, but had issues with Dropbox working. Hopped around several distros, before finally settling on Mageia 5, which uses KDE 4.
So I've been using KDE 4 in one form or another since 2008 or so. It works for me, and I know how to use it. I like how familiar everything is eight years later.
I'm at the point in my life where I want it to "just work", and quit changing icons and programs around just for the sake of it. My Galaxy S5 just updated the icons yet again, and introduced new programs I don't want.
As the mainline distros switch to KDE 5 I'll probably be forced to upgrade, but in the time being, going to ride the KDE 4 train as long as I can.
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.
I'm also a cross-platform kind of guy, but I find myself on Windows machines most of the time. Microsoft actually did the right thing with Windows 10, walking back some of the 8.x "touch-only, tablet-only" craziness. It's not Windows 7, but in my mind it's a good compromise between the two worlds.
You can't just ignore the fundamental problems of Windows 10. It's endless telemetry, shoving ads in your face, basically turning the OS into software-as-a-service. This for me is a total dealbreaker, no matter what they've done with the UI.
As an aside, I *hate* the Windows 10 UI. The new control panel is extremely bland looking, and the icons tend to be tiny, composed of black-on-white or white-on-$background_color. Compared to the colourful Windows 7 icons they are horrible.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Back in they day when I 1st ran 2 monitors, I had a different WM on each screen. I did this in Solaris and later Linux. I had FVWM on one and CDE or Gnome on the other.
I had 6 workspaces on each monitor. I couldn't drag windows from monitor to monitor, but I could cut & paste and switch workspaces independently. It was very productive to have my mail/editor/browser on one monitor and a workspace of terminals/apps on the other monitor.
Sometime after RedHat Desktop 9 (before Fedora), all monitors switched to extending the desktop only. No independent screens for the user.
This one size fits all mentality is a problem. I'm glad that I can easily choose Xfce, LXDE, Gnome (and MATE & Cinnamon) or KDE on Linux. I'm glad that Apple has a different UI for a desktop/laptop and a tablet/phone. Microsoft has 1 UI for desktop/tablet/phone and one for Xbox. Many are probably switching to Mac because it's closer to the Windows 7 UI than Win 8 or 10. Apple can do multiple UIs. Linux can. Why can't Microsoft?
it went from a desktop where the user had complete control over everything to a flashy, colorful thing where everything interrupts the user all the time. the only still-usable kde component is Kwin when used on another desktop environment.
I have moved on.
I have tried KDE various times over the years, and always ran into two big hurdles:
The biggest one was that various KDE apps had a predilection for crashing. When day one of using a fresh OS installation that was shipped with KDE involves a couple of notable crashes, there is a huge disincentive to abandon it. There is also very little incentive to actually try to solve the problem because very little has been invested into the environment.
KDE also tries to do too much that doesn't appeal to broad audience. Feature rich applications may appeal, but a glut of applications that aren't even needed does not. In some cases it leads to an urge to purge unwanted components. In cases where the user has a prefered application, it lends to the impression that KDE suffers from NIH syndrome.
back when the transition to 4.x was just beginning. I've also tried it briefly a couple of times since then. My experience is perfectly described from a phrase in TFS:
form-over-function preference
I always felt that in most things KDE cared more about form than about function, and I always found its 'form' to be eye-wateringly blingy. I've always been a form-follows-function kind of guy. One of several reasons I left Windows for Linux was the crappy eye candy that came with XP. (We used to call it Windows 'FP', for 'Fisher-Price'). KDE seemed even worse than XP that way. And at least I could make XP look (mostly) like 2K; but I couldn't find sufficient tools and options to make KDE not look like a tarted-up whore on Saturday night.
And it's too bad, because in my estimation Dolphin is the only file manager in the Linux world that's worth the name. I never liked the look of it, but at least it had the function that I'd been missing from Windows Explorer. I'd be using it now, except its dependencies are pretty much the entire core of KDE; I don't want that bloat, nor do I want the ongoing hassle of resolving config conflicts between KDE and XFCE.
It's sad to think that KDE might be on the ropes, because choice is always a good thing and a sign of health and vibrancy in a community. But if the devs are the narcissistic asshats that have been described in other comments here, and nobody else is stepping in to take up the slack, then maybe its time has come and gone.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
And some sort of marketing strategy. Especially finished FOSS.
KDE was matured, by just about all metrics. Konqueror was one of the most brilliant pieces of software, unmatched in utility and power, both as a filemanager and as a browser. They had to fiddle with it and take 5 steps back with dolphin.
Same goes for quite a few other components. Instead of constantly rehawling everything, they should iterate and replace dated but working components only when the new thing is truly finished and a worthy replacement. Branding and marketing is also all over the place. There's this new shiny flat design with plasma and Kubuntu and simular project, but the logos, icons and websites of some appstacks and toolkits go back to the year 2000.
Just compare these four websites to see what I mean. In my opinion that says everthing about the state of KDE and quite a few other software projects. Look at the Gnome disaster a few years back. A little marketing and brand management and all would have loved the new strategy. Gnome did a half-assed thing - at least that was the perception and perception is everything - and all hell broke lose and the Gnome project fragmented beyond repair. Mate, Cinamon, Evolution, Whatnot. ... That's a shame.
People are fed up of fussing about with new totally redone software packages that break existing workflows and intoduce new ones that are only half finished. Especially the FOSS experts.
KDE isn't dead, but if they are interested in gaining traction, they need to offer a compelling system and present it consistently. That doesn't even mean they need to develop much - a brand strategy and a working consistent and complete distro and the will to keep it easy to install and up and running would be enough. KDE is good enough to take it from there.
Bottom line: It's like I've said before - "It's called marketing." FOSS projects need to learn the neccessity of that, or else they will die of lack of attention, users and finally maintainers.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I think kde 3.xx, 4.xx, 5.xx are better than windows xp/7/10 gui's when it comes to usability and customization. Yes, Themes are all over the place but once you get used to KDE it won't be an issue. The problem with KDE for me it's the gui rendering it's too bright and too fuzzy no matter what I do and this causes eye strain. GTK based desktops like gnome and unity are sharper and easier on the eyes. Bring all kde versions to the gtk.
Anyway, all windows os's have utilities and other programs that you simply need as an administrator scattered all over the place and some just hidden so kde is not the worst.
I've rarely gone off the "default" for the the desktop since the early aughts. I put on a wallpaper that I like and that's 99.9% satisfaction. I used to like to see the various themes and try a few out. Then some of them would not be updated upon an OS update and then be back at the default.
Jokes aside, I was a huge fan of KDE3 and I think the transition to version 4 was wrongly handled. First iterations were buggy and scared away the user base, the Oxygen theme is ugly (OK, that's a subjective reason) and it felt overall bloated. They screwed key applications like Amarok and complicated the desktop experience. I wish a project like Trinity had the same traction as MATE or Cinammon. As for kde/gnome-look.org, it's sad, they bring me a lot of good memories. I do think they still have a chance to reinvent themselves, it's just matter of cleaning up the house and start from scratch, catching up with the new versions and branches/forks.
Right now I'm bouncing between XFCE and Openbox and I'm not looking back.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Together with Gnome, KDE died in my desktop when change for the sake of change, and innovation for the sake of innovation became more important than functionality. I hate both Gnome and KDE with passion for both push the my-way-or-the-highway philosophy - Gnome more than KDE. They both insist in being the start of the show while my ideal desktop would always be in the background, almost unnoticed, letting you do your work and waiting there to tell it what to do, and do it promptly. I am not surprised that Linux is a nobody in the desktop, with these two shitty, me-too imitations of the worst that Microsoft and Apple have to offer.
I think a general problem in KDE (may be true for other software projects, too) is that the developers are always driven by stuff that's challenging and fun to implement, but they (understandably) don't enjoy taking care of the "easier" but more time consuming details. They start out with great plans and change everything from scratch, but they totally underestimate how much work it will actually be to get everything right again, so they run out of time to do it.
The loser in all of this is the end user, who wants to have a working desktop. Whenever it is working "too well", the developers come up with some great new plan how to do it all better. But in reality, this means that 80%-90% of the time the users will have to put up with a system that is broken to varying degrees. Seems just like a broken design model to begin with. It was like this in both KDE3=>4 and 4=>5 transitions.
And when the users complain, they are told that it's all the work of volunteers and that they should not have any expectations. They are told to fix it themselves, because it's all FOSS. But from a user's point of view, one could say that it's the developers who actually broke it. The ambitious developers get to steer a project into a certain direction, even if the community suffers from it. That's a very fundamental unsolved problem.
KDE has been my preferred desktop for many years now, but it has clearly been dying (at least in terms of its usefulness to me) for quite a while. I noticed it first when they introduced that whole "Plasma" thing, and it's been downhill ever since.
It hasn't yet reached the point where I'm uncomfortable enough to put the effort into changing my desktop, but I can see that day coming fast.
Microsoft is moving toward Server Core - i.e. run the OS without a desktop environment at all, use PowerShell instead. Which is what Linux admins have been doing for years.
All GUI desktop environments should die. What an enormous brain drain they are. The only desktop environment of any significance is a web browser. Let's get on with HTML 6, build up Javascript or supplement it with another industrial quality language, bring web programming as feature-rich as traditional desktop GUI programming (getting close already), and desktop GUIs will be a thing of the past.
...to dumb KDE down, fuck it all up, and completely destroy it. Goodbye KDE.
Just like a wife you can't quite make it whether she's being abused by her husband, it's difficult to know -- but it certainly looks hurt.
BTW, had no time to read TFA but I whish to do it later... I just want to jot down my own perceptions. Feel free to skip, ok?
Most Linux DEs think they need to invest in new amazing features or revised code or even new icons to get some improvement; this is specially the case of Gnome (which I don't even want to try!) and KDE, in its last incarnation (Plasma 5).
About Gnome, it has been said it makes traditional options hidden from the user -- thus they cater to a different public, the masses which aren't really power users. Which would these be, at this point in History? If I'm not mistaken, we're not there quite yet with Linux regarding mass adoption.
KDE 5: you know things are bad when you find you have to long press (with the mouse!) a thing to delete it. Besides, it won't work with two monitors (with X11) -- and they're ok with it! Mind you, I use a TV to see Netflix and don't want to turn off the notebook screen. This is what, 2001?
KDE 4: it's unmaintained. No, wait, it's not unmaintained, just unsupported. Please! It's ok when you don't have the resources of a multinational corp to keep both versions -- and not even M$ (can/wants to) do it. But people -- and mainly enterprises -- rely on it. So we need a KDE LTS.
A friend of mine asked me to help her replace the original Linux she had on her notebook. She used KDE4 and apparently made some confusion with that "activities" thing. My own very young son can make a terrible mess with the powerful features KDE4 has. From all that, I conclude they need to use Xfce, while I would risk using unsupported KDE4 myself. KDE5? It's not funny if people see it having problems with two monitors at work; doesn't look good for Linux and not for me.
LXDE is nice, but it's becoming LXQt. That will be great but it's not ready as of yet (just tried the other day, something was missing, I think it was the option to choose a keyboard layout). But I've read Xfce will also adopt gtk+ 3... will it also require a "modern" video card like Gnome 3? Will it also try to compile things JIT like Cinnamon? (that LLVM thing, if I'm not mistaken)
KDe is not dead, but its developers have their own ideas about how to treat a woman...
Sorry to say that, but the main focus of a DE should be usability -- and KDE4/Xfce/LXDE are already quite good at that, they run circles around Mac and Windows competitors. But we need more:
- we need ways to save and import configurations which take an evening to do;
- we need ways to do desktop governance -- both for houses/small offices with 5 computers and big corporations with thousands of workstations.
- we need ways to prevent the younger from defacing a computer;
- we need ways to hold the hands of the lay users;
- we need to keep the good features that are in KDE4 and not get weird ideas about gestures in Plasma 5 that no one in sane mind would ever guess.
Will we see History repeat itself, like when Trinity came to be?
Go fuck yourself, shill.
Kdenlive live says you're full of crap. What do you use for video editing?
I have always found KDE/Plasma to be bloated, slow and clunky on my systems.
The Konqueror web browser has been a virtual carcass for several years, yet it mysteriously remains an integral component
Not at all.
Konqueror was not installed by default in Linux Mint KDE 17 (2014, KDE4-based), nor Kubuntu 16.04 (2016, KDE5-based), nor Linux Mint KDE 18-beta (2016, KDE5-based).
I would hardly call something an "integral component" if distros feel free to deliberately omit it from the default install.
For years now, konqueror has been an obsolete component that few KDE distros have been interested in. Even years ago when konqueror was routinely included by default in KDE systems, it was always to supersede with another browser.
I had a conversation on this just Friday, so weird that it's on /. a day later. As a KDE user and Qt developer (who uses Qt). The widget's-only Qt of old was solid. The QtQuick that KDE4 was based on didn't really fit. It's a transition that's still being made. Couple that with Aaron Siego, who I called out for making non-user-centric design decisions, was more intent on showing off what they *could* now do rather (plasmoid rotation? what's the use case?) than using QtQuick to better the UI. Couple that with some integration problems between the classical widget/Quick environments, it was not the best of all transitions.
Unfortunately, that transition is still going on today. It results in a paralysis of direction and focus. Qt used to, with widgets, have seamless theme management so that a KDE App would look native. Unfortunately, the QtQuick primitives that were initially released don't. The higher order QtQuick Controls, came later, and with not the best license or quality. Internally Qt has been pulled in many directions and a changed hands several times. Trolltech, Nokia, Digia and now the Qt Company.
That being said, I think we are there now, finally, 6 years later, to really do software transition to QtQuick. QtQuick 2 is amazing and up-coming Qt 5.8 will be that release which is the completion of the concept.The 5.6/5.7 that is out now is really great, 5.8 will be the last bit of polish.There are still some holes, there always will be, but QtQuick is something so new and different it took a while to figure out.
As a developer who uses Qt, and has been using Qt professionally since 2004, QtQuick makes it trivial to write applications. The next easiest was with PyQt.
In addition there is a port of QML (the language of QtQuick (Javascript with markup)) to Wed, called QMLWeb. This has the capability to revolutionize web development - no more HTML or CSS, bringing the ease of app development to the web.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I was a KDE user, now I'm a Mac user. Mac OS X is without a doubt the best unix desktop in the market.
The only walk back Microsoft did with Windows 10 was removing the full screen start "screen" for a start "menu". The rest of it is the same or more touch-ish than Win 8 and that's good if you use a touchscreen for desktop users not so much.
Of course it "works" but I find a classic interface (a la Win 7) much more suitable for keyb+mouse usage. Did it cost them so much to make a Win 7 UI an option?.
TOO much eye candy and customization. So much that if you are just the slightest bit OCD, you'll never be done. It also makes it hard to work one system and jump to another because they could be so different.
But then, I'm an iPhone guy...
I'm 42, and just began using/learning Midnight Commander last week, am totally sold on it. Not only can I navigate my local files with ease using the keyboard, but also SFTP my Web site files. Previously, I was quite used to Nautilus and PCmanFM, but neither exist on my machine anymore. Change is awesome when it's an improvement, and in some cases the old is that over the new.
I've been a long time KDE user - since the 2.x days, though I started using it more seriously when 3 was released, and I still use it daily both at work and at home. There's no denying that the transition from 3 -> 4 and 4 -> 5 were difficult. In the first instance it was clearly a rush to get things out before they were ready. In the latter case it wasn't quite the same, though some functionality did regress due to rewriting - but there was an added dimension of KDE relying more on Qt's inbuilt functionality instead of its own libraries, but unfortunately they weren't quite ready (or complete) yet. Multi-screen and session restore in particular were broken for quite a while in various ways. Both are mostly fixed now, which is good because I rely on them heavily; in the interim I just made do - unfortunately I know not everyone was prepared to do that.
I do follow dot.kde.org and there are definitely passionate people still working on KDE - even some who have been around since the old days, though sadly many have drifted away. It would be nice if this article had a positive effect and brought some attention back on KDE. in any case as a user I won't be giving up on KDE any time soon - as I type I have Konsole, Kate, Konversation, Okular and Kontact (4.x version) open and I would have a hard time using alternatives to any of these.
Indeed. What's handy about MC is how it resembles Norton Commander, which I started using when I was 8 years old.
Hitting F3 (on my ANSI keyboard of course) to view a file etc., it still works the same, all burnt into my brain for a quarter century.
If I didn't know all this, and had to choose a tool today, I'm sure I wouldn't want to learn. There are more intuitive/simple options and life's just too short and my attention needed elsewhere.
But, I do know, so for now, MC (and ANSI keyboard) it is!
I hope this helps:
https://youtu.be/1UG4lQOMBC4
Tablets and phones are consumption devices, not creation devices. They are a hideously bad match for trying to do any sort of serious development work, or even your bog standard PowerPoint deck. A Surface is about as tablet-y as you can get while still being able to do reasonable work, but a Surface is still a real computer under the hood. Anyone who works with touch-only systems could probably give you a long list of design decisions that slow them down when trying to do anything serious.
No one's talking about developers or other power users here, of course. They'll need a true computer with a more traditional desktop and powerful OS. But if all you need is web apps like Google Docs, or maybe even MS Office apps, and you attach a keyboard, what exactly prevents you from getting actual work done on a tablet? Or what if your work involves reading books or reports, research, communication, or other "consumption-friendly" tasks for large portions of the day?
I've noticed many tech people have a somewhat narrow view on what "work" can be done with a computer. It generally equates to "stuff I do with a computer." Note that I completely agree with you that tablets and phones ARE more suited for consumption than production, but as these devices and operating systems get more powerful, and as web-based work becomes more feasible by the day, the lines are beginning to blur a bit.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I always found the entire KDE culture to be academic. They always had laudable goals, but not the goals of the typical user. Of course some stuff was for the common user, but that tended to be something that Gnome and whatnot already had or were getting as well.
Also the typical KDE look was that of a Solaris machine from 1998.
The best I way I have described KDE to someone was, think of Mac OS X with all its swirls, shadows, blurs, and other flourishes and now think of the complete opposite. Very soviet, very "functional".
Yes, I know you could add these things but they weren't part of its heart and soul.
For instance, there are people at BMW who's job it is to work on the door-open-key-in chime. They work tirelessly to make it very BMW, very soothing, yet attention grabbing. This is what was completely missing from KDE. The art of a great UX. What they were trying to build was a great UI.
Yepp. The reason: akonadi, baloo.
I've been using Linux since '94 and I've used nearly every major desktop environment at some point along the way. In my experience, the biggest problem KDE has isn't features. KDE is everything I actually want in a desktop (other than using minimal resources like traditional window manager fluxbox). The problem is that the environment is buggy and/or unstable. Every once in a while, I will try to use KDE as my desktop and I will only last a few months before going back to Mate/gnome2, XFCE or something like icewm. The list of odd behaviors would be too long to post here but I've had endless problems with Kopete, Kmail, Korg, Konq (browser) and many others. In comparison, I can leave up a gtk based desktop for weeks to months at a time without thinking about it with a similar compliment of apps (Pidgin, Tbird, FF, etc.) and rarely run into any weirdness.
They have the features, they just need to really nail down the stability, clean up the cartoon fonts, and set the default settings to something more usable. Admittedly, I'm overdue for a test run of plasma 5.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
In Germany, you will find KDE on all desktop from government offices to universities. Especially, OpenSUSE, so, it has at least one huge community.
How does anyone get any work done if they are constantly playing with desktops.
The worst case was someone who was meant to be helping me in the late 90s who was obsessed with enlightenment, He didn't produce anything useful.
Personally I'm OK with windows 7 at home, but expecting to go Mint, nothing scary to someone who knew UNIX before DOS (I did start early).
I've been using KDE / Plasma for many years and think that the current iteration is the best yet. It's actively developed, fast, and beautiful. The applications the original poster references are part of the KDE suite of applications, not the desktop itself. So that they aren't great doesn't mean the desktop is dying. Additionally, those programs probably have poor quality and are not developed much because they aren't used very much -- most people (like me) use Firefox and Chrome, rather than Konqueror. Konqueror was never a great browser, so it is definitely not a sign of KDE's "health." The KDE PIM suite (Kontact,et al) also isn't used as much as it used to be. A lot of people use web-based e-mail interfaces now. I've honestly never met an e-mail program I actually liked anyway, for what it's worth. M
You forgot "... and Local Search doesn't work for 30% of Windows 10 installations" which includes my computer at work. I'd be completely dead in the water if it wasn't for Launchy and Everything. Fucking Microsoft.
KDE is not dead at all, not even by a long shot. I'm using the latest Plasma 5 desktop in Slackware (current) and I find it lean, fast, and quite stable.
I think the problem lies in the fact that the codebase is quite big and the developer base is shrinking. There are not many hobbyists working on it right now, and there are simply no distros sponsorinng any paid developers to work on KDE. The result is that there are a lot of emblematic KDE apps/frameworks which still need to be ported to Plasma 5, such as Kile or Krusader, KHTML, or Reqonk (some may say that some of those apps/frameworks are already ported but there are no releases of them). One by one, the applications and frameworks get abandoned.
Among the latest to suffer this behavior was KDE-Telepathy, which is right now losing its maintainer.
So, there was a time where several distros sponsored some developers, and there were also other high-profile developers working on KDE as a hobby. These got new jobs, so their involvement in KDE had to be cut, and there was no replacement in sight.
I think KDE is trying to correct the problem. They are a good community, but to be honest, it is a difficult process.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
1. It's been forever since I tried to use Linux as a Desktop OS
Among it's failings:
Gnome/KDE aren't the same thing, often requiring both to be installed to use applications
2. Few, if anything can be downloaded pre-compiled and work out of the box.
Want to run that 6 month old version of Konquerer? Well screw you, you need exactly version X.Y.Z of Library1, and version Q.P.R-PL3 of Library2
Linux has the worst bitrot of all the available operating systems, and that includes FreeBSD. At least FreeBSD has a "complete OS" that is maintained. The closest Linux gets to this is RedHat, and that is fine for a Server OS that you must maximize the uptime on, but as a desktop, there is no flavor or Linux that "all linux applications" work on without some tinkering.
And that is the primary failing. I remember back in early pre-google era days that RedHat Linux was pretty much the only version available and you had to spend three solid days downloading it on a 56K modem. The kernel had to be recompiled and you had to spend half a day on it. Linux hasn't moved very far from this, only now instead of spending 3 days, you spend 3 hours downloading it, and then another 2 hours recompiling the software you actually use, and letting the binary updates handle everything else you don't care about.
When there is a day, that someone can be handed a USB stick with a flavor of Linux that they can run from it,have all their hardware supported, without having to install, compile, or download anything, we will have finally a Linux OS that is at least comparable to Windows 95. To get past that point, Linux needs to stop breaking the ABI, and the libraries that make up the "OS" need to stop breaking ABI. Windows at least makes the effort of preventing ABI breakage by keeping the core OS libraries available and when an ABI break will happen they have a version for each ABI change. This isn't perfect mind you, Windows breaks driver ABI's with major versions, and often a driver that worked fine on Windows XP won't work on any future version of Windows.
So KDE? Gnome? You ultimately need both since Linux GUI software is written against only one or the other, so why is it a question at all. Like the thing that pisses me off on servers is that you end up having to install most of X, gnome and KDE to access postscript graphics libraries if you use binaries, but don't if you download from source. Which is less of a pain in the ass?
I've used pretty much every major DE for extended periods of time. I've been on Gnome 3.x for a decent while now. However, when I first got into Linux KDE was what I was using. I really liked the features and ability to customize it. KDE 4 had promise, but was a bit of a mess because the distros rolled it out too soon and it had some issues that were problematic for large groups of users (graphics on Intel and Nvidia hardware for example). Plasma 5 has fixed some of these issues, but I still find the problems I've had in the past with KDE are things that are still there. For all the power KDE can give a user, I've never thought that KDE did a good job of streamlining the experience so that average users weren't assaulted by all of the advanced features. I consider myself a fairly advanced user in terms of experience and understand of DE concepts and every time I've used KDE I end up suffering from feature fatigue. There a so many dials to turn in KDE and each dial has multiple switches that it seems endless. And things that should start out being simple like the file manager are, to me, way over the top. Most other DE's are setup with the basic folders along the left column (documents, pictures, music etc.), but in most KDE distros I've tried I have an assortment of smart folders and smart searches. Those are great features and can be very useful to power users, but aren't something an average user would likely work with. The whole concept seems very foreign compared to Gnome, Unity, Mate etc defaults. That's not say KDE should just copy what everyone else is doing, but some things I think are needlessly complex. I really do wish KDE the best. They have great tech, passion about OSS and an excellent community. And I don't want my criticisms to be taken as bashing. I am well aware that Gnome isn't perfect and has issues of its own. I just see the potential that KDE has and want them to find greater success. I guess my bottom line is that I find it easier to dial up other DE's instead of dialing KDE down.
Um, duh. Plasma 5 is by far the best looking desktop out there. And if you don't like the default, well, it comes with four other Plasma themes, two icon themes, three window decoration themes, and five app widget themes (two by KDE and three by Qt itself).
Apparently there is enough choice already.
Thumbs up for using Midnight Commander. A long time user (10+ years). It leaves my Windows using colleagues in the dust. SSH + Samba means I will run rings around you while I eat your lunch, you lame windows using troglodyte. I say this with something resembling competitive enthusiasm. "You can peak into zip files??", why, yes I can. "You can inspect remote shares??", why, yes I can. "You can do directory/file comparisons??", why, yes I can.
We dumb terminal users will ALWAYS smoke our GUI using cohorts. You windows using twats. (Ye gods... did I say that out loud??)
Though I've tried other desktops, KDE 5 is what I keep coming back to. Sometimes Unity and Gnome feel more streamlined, but KDE's configurability is just too awesome. I can define keyboard shortcuts that apply across its applications. I can define not online virtual desktop screens but activities which affect the power usage profile. I can tailor window behavior, laptop lid, and network profiles with comfort. It's my working and browsing environment on a day-to-day basis and has been for years. I use it on top of Fedora and love it - other OS's are only for specialty uses like gaming and music/audio.
Somehow, the idea that it's not fashionable enough for a clickbait article seems just silly.
I'd argue that very few people's productivity is measured in how efficient their file operations are. It's sort of like believing you're going to be vastly more efficient as a programmer if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or type 60wpm instead of 30. Unlike the movies [hackertyper.com], programming isn't about how fast you type.
I think it's more about learning how to work efficiently, and keeping an "efficient" mindset in whatever you do. Example: I use pine for my email, I have since around 2000. I use fetchmail to pull in a few accounts locally. If I want to check my email, it's faster for me to ssh to my home machine and check it rather than scan across several emails on my phone (I do use K9 to pull them into one app though). Now, if I want to view and attach pictures to emails, or look at attachments, then a GUI is better. But most of the time I am just reading the text and ssh/pine is much more efficient.
Another example: at work someone on my team was trying to generate a 2 million row csv file for testing. She was trying to do it in Excel, and it was very cumbersome and slow. Using an example row, i created a script that was able to generate a million rows in about 5 minutes. Then I used a couple of other tools (sed/cat/vi) to copy the million row file, modify it, and cat them back together. She had her 2 million row csv file in about 15 minutes. She was amazed. Since then I have worked on several other large files like this because people think they have to use Excel to view csv files. And vi kicks notepads ass in editing.
These are just two examples of doing something efficiently. Yes, it was comfortable for me to use these things, but there was no other good solution for this particular problem because people were locked into what they knew. Back on topic, I can certainly use other desktops, but I moved to XFCE many years ago when KDE kept eating my CPU for some unknown reason... and I have simply grown to prefer it. MintXFCE is my sweet spot now, and I don't have any plans to switch.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
IMO, the big difference between now and, say, 10 years ago, is that the gap between "real DEs" like KDE and Gnome, and "back to the basics" minimalist DEs and WMs (Openbox etc) has been filled. It used to be that you had to pick between "it just works" - but with all the bells and whistles, too - and hand-editing config files.
Now, though, there's Xfce, LXDE, and even, to some extent, MATE, to fill the it's-not-fancy-but-it-works niche. Xfce in particular is really nice - I would say that feature-wise, it's about where Gnome 2 was (which is a sweet spot for many), except with fewer bundled stock apps, and more configurability with more sensible defaults. So if you just want to get work done, and want a traditional desktop environment, it gives you that with minimal overhead, compared to Gnome and KDE.
The importance of KDE is not found in how many or what distros include KDE as their primary desktop. I have been using Debian since (I can't even remember the Toy Story character; it has been that long!) time immemorial and it was not because of KDE or any other desktop. The stability of Debian (yes, I know there are other distros, I value the focus on stability and security more than gadgets and widgets) has always been the thing that first attracts the WinTel users frustrated by the well known vagaries and vices of Windows. However, what KEEPS users is the comfortable familiarity that KDE provides. It is that familiarity that allows the comfortable day to day user experience that results in increased productivity (as opposed to learning an entirely different environment such as OpenStep or Gnome that are as different from Windows as it is probably possible to be.
A great deal of effort and discussion has been expended in answering some form of the question "how to make Linux a mainstream environment for the common everyday user" and a variety of answers have led to efforts to improve the eye candy of all the desktop environments, not just KDE. Unfortunately, the misguided efforts, misguided because they miss the most important points: first, longtime users are essentially unaware of --or, at least, unconcerned with-- the desktop. They use what they need and are comfortable enough with the command line that loosing the desktop would be more inconvenience than anything else and second, because the new user is looking for familiarity and comfort as they learn the workings of the new operating system. The divergent needs of these groups has led to acrimonious differences of opinion and caused individuals and groups to leave the project for others that are more amenable to their particular viewpoint. KDE must play to its strengths to survive and that strength comes from both its pedigree and its familiarity to Windows users. For those that desire the wildly different, there are options; however, those options would not make Linux any more appealing to the general public than using the interface created by NeXT would Macs. KDE is the best option Linux has to open the minds of the WinTel masses to what is possible; KDE can even take the place of Explorer!* That is the true strength of KDE.
* Making that installation easier for the average Windows user would have far greater returns than all the eye candy in the world; the case of Windows 8 is informative. One can scarcely imagine the effect that even a minor mention in the mass media would have had at a time when the Windows interface could hardly have taken a greater turn for the worse.
Subject says it all.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I dont think, its a bit stalled, but its as stable, usable and viable (and resources consuming) as always has been. It is solid, the fact it doesnt spurt a new version every x time, doesnt mean its at fault or its going to dissapear. Its true this doesnt have the activity of a couple of years ago, but doesnt forget the model of open source, and when no one needs it, this will be gone.
I wish it wasn't so, but KDE is not what it used to be. There is just too many problems or difficult issues with it compared to the other desktops that have been actively maintained. If I had the skills I would try to help but I'm only a user. (sigh) I have migrated to Gnome and I am comfortable there so good-bye KDE.
I use Plasma because I refuse to allow system.d on my computers. I use "Linux" to be in control not to be controlled. Gnome lost me at system.d. If things keep going the way they're going, I may switch to a BSD.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
What's up with you, are you a FUD posting yerk?
I am using KDE as my mayor desktop for year, but i do not have the impression, that there is something wrong with it.
The only nasty release was the early KDE4, cause a lot trouble, but in comparison with that the KDE5 (Plasma) is an
excellent Desktop. I am using it on Fedora (started with F17 and use Plasma since F23.)
The only cumbersome issue was the Network-Manager, that was quite old on KDE and did not support OpenVPN,
but since F23 these problems were gone.
KDE is wonderful, and the updates are frequent. I have no idea, what went wrong on your side. Last not least, the
rising stability of the ole KDE Office shows that you must be completly wrong. Calligra (ex KDE Office) is now
usable and was improved in the past.
Sorry my friend, KDE is alive and quite vital. Your posting "KDE dead" seems like FUD to me.
Groovie
Bear with me...
If we all rally behind the free desktop ideas, we can achieve the goals and be able to present an alternative to modern OS X, Windows and mobile desktops/laptops.
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
I began using KDE when SuSE shipped the 1.0 beta with its September 1998 release. It was so much better than Win95 that it became my DE of choice every since. I have been running Kubuntu since their 9.04 release and am now running 16.04 with the Neon repository added, making my distro Neon. The jump between KDE4 and kDE5 has been traumatic for some, like the jump from 1 to 2 or the jump from 3 to 4, but in that jump most of the negative complaints were from MS fans trolling in an attempt to get Linux distros to adopt Mono. De Icaza has left the Linux scene and Mono has been delegated to a minor dev tool for some developers.
I was astounded by the significant increase in speed of Plasma5 over Plasma4. With Kubuntu 14.04 on this Acer 7739-6830 the Steam program "Universe Sandbox^2" was so slow I had to disable most of the particles so that the planets would revolve smoothly in their orbits around the Sun without stuttering or lagging. Running on Kubuntu 16.04 (even with Neon) US2 is so fast I can run all of the simulations without any lag or stuttering. Stellarium gave me frame rates of 25-40 fps on Plasma4 but on Plasma5 I get vsync at 60 fps for the mediocre GPU in this laptop.
I've never used Konqueror and don't consider it a watermark for any event. I've been a fan of KMail in the past. When Google, Twitter and Facebook announced that they were going to censor posts I decided to close my Google account. KMail accepted all 5,000+ emails I imported my 200MB mbox files without a hiccup. The only problem I've found with KMail is that when I delete a mail a ghost of its header stays in the msg list until I clock on another folder, then it disappears.
To nibble and quibble one might as well say that Gnome is dying, or Unity as well. The reality is that smart phones are killing the PC market. I have an Apple iPhone 6+. I can do things with it that I only dreamed about doing on my laptop, with either Linux or Windows, and its easy to use. But they are not killing the PC game market, or the corporate desktop/laptop market and never will because the smart phone form factor is too small and klutzy. My current laptop is six years old. Will I replace it once it dies? That's the question.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I, on the other hand, love systemd on my Kubuntu 16.04 with Neon running on top. In System Settings, at the bottom, is the Systemd Icon. Open it and you have the GUI to start and stop all services with a mouse click, if you don't want to us the CLI.
Linux and KDE. They keep on giving you choices because one size does not fit all.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It's hard to keep such a large project going and with direction when no-one is getting paid and no-one is in charge. If instead they copied osx, there'd be instant and clear direction, like the kernel, there'd be instant commercial software, there'd be little arguments in the mailing lists, and people wanting to contribute would have a clear blueprint of what to do.
This is exactly right. I used to think that I would write faster using a keyboard rather than using a pencil and paper, or using my phone, because I can type faster on a keyboard. But the vast majority of the time spent writing is in thinking about what to write, not actually writing it down. The time savings from typing is negligible. The older I get, the more I love clipboards. Writing on a phone keyboard really does suck because you have to spend most of your cognitive effort fixing the autocorrect.