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Ask Slashdot: Is KDE Dying?

Posted by EditorDavid on from the demise-of-desktop-development? dept.

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?

5 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. We're All Dying by cosm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:We're All Dying by somenickname · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think it's more that hobby contributors have been replaced by corporate paid, "my way or the highway" contributors. That has had both positive and negative effects but, to me, the most noticeable effect is that projects have formed agendas that in *no way* reflect the actual users of those projects. You see it happening in almost all the big projects now. Users hate Gnome 3? Too fucking bad. Users hate KDE4? Too fucking bad. Users hate the loss of functionality in Wayland? Too fucking bad. Systemd has consumed the userland? Tough shit.

      Maybe it's just the changing of the old guard to the new guard but, frankly, I have no desire to live in the world that the new guard is creating. They aren't improving things, they are taking a page out of the Microsoft playbook and trying to co-opt them for personal or corporate gain.

    2. Re:We're All Dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I went Windows 98->RH w/GNOME 1 (for about 3 days)->RH w/Afterstep->RH or Gentoo w/WindowMaker (for about 10 years)->Gentoo w/KDE (~6 months?)->Windows 7->OS X (ongoing).

      One day I just got annoyed with poor integration in WindowMaker and decided to try KDE, purely for decent drag & drop between apps. Found a few other apps which were better integrated, like Amarok. Strangely, it was frustration with Amarok which eventually made me try Win7.

      Over the WindowMaker period I tried many variations of GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Enlightenment and many others I've simply forgotten. Never for serious work (WindowMaker filled that niche the best), just to see how they were doing. Never been impressed with GNOME - it feels like an unrelated grab bag of apps with some common skin elements, configuration and integration is extremely inconsistent, the DE itself is the same. Xfce feels like an beta-release of a pimped TWM, featuring annoying UI/font scaling errors and occasional code bugs, with the bare features of WindowMaker but none of the polish. E was nice to look at but lacked functionality, especially during the 12-year release hole. KDE was the only contender and it was basically Windows XP with double-bevelled buttons and slightly buggy IPC.

      In the end I realised I was spending more time getting KDE to work properly than using it (Amarok at the time, but there were a collection of annoyances) that it was just easier to buy and use Windows. I still had Linux servers and Xmingw worked on Windows, so why not?

      What I'd like to know is why all those big open-source projects which everyone in the early 2000s thought would be Windows-killers "real soon now", turned out to be utter UI and usability train wrecks - GNOME, KDE and Firefox would be the best examples. In each project there seems to be a turning point where the devs went from heavily-engaged in the community to preaching their own virtues from ivory towers, releasing unusable crap or just pissing people off. Around the same time, myself and (it seems) many others decided that it was all too much pain and went elsewhere.

      What happened there? Why?

  2. Re: What does Netcraft say? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those aren't desktop users. They're not relevant to a discussion about desktop environments. You wouldn't run KDE on a switch. That would be stupid.

  3. Re:What does Netcraft say? by Daemonik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The 'people' didn't choose Gnome, much in the same way the 'people' haven't chosen systemd. The distribution packagers chose to make Gnome their default and the 'people' once presented with a choice tend to stick to that choice.

    Until the last 5-10 years there were only a couple of distro's that really took the effort to showcase KDE, mostly Mandrake and SuSE.

    The sad thing was Gnome was never up to KDE's maturity and cohesion. It was launched and chosen as the default because of baseless fears over the licensing of Qt back in the 90's, not technical ability.