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?

Comments

What does Netcraft say?

[0100010001010011]

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.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[donaldm]

Linux was never alive to begin with. It's market share has always been in the toilet. Nobody takes it seriously as an operating system.

You are quite right Linux's market share is so abysmal that billions of people actually use it daily without being aware of it.

If you are going to Troll, do it properly.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Billions of people actually use it?

As a desktop? Heh - no. Wrong.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Bing Tsher E]

Billions of people use processors that run only Machine Language programs that load from the reset vector. Mice, graphics card, the controller chips inside hard drives, etc. There's even a 'multiplier effect' because every Linux computer in operation has a handful of these processors inside it. So the Machine Language 'Operating System' is 20-500 times more popular than any PC operating system, and thousands to hundreds of thousands of times more popular than Linux.

This popularity measure is based on the same notion as the one that asumes that every device out there that runs a Linux kernel is 'linux.' I.e. every Android device, every Tivo, etc.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[ITRambo]

About 2% of desktop users use Linux. That's about 30 million, not billions.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android. Web servers. Routers. Switches. Billions.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Given the considerable lengths to which MS has gone over the last 20 years in its attempts to strangle any other, nascent desktop OS in the crib, I think it's pretty fucking remarkable that we even have any alternatives at all.

Fuck the numbers. What matters is this: Do we still have choices? Yes? Then I really don't give a shit about how many people make choices that I don't make. Let them. I don't follow the Kardashians, either.

And FWIW--long-time KDE user here. The Plasma/workspaces stuff is boneheaded but can safely be ignored. Otherwise, I'm still liking it pretty well. If that ever changes? "We'll always have Window Maker."

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[Daemonik]

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.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[Your.Master]

The context is KDE. The D in KDE stands for Desktop.

Talking about things that are mostly not desktop is the strawman.

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[drinkypoo]

It was launched and chosen as the default because of baseless fears over the licensing of Qt back in the 90's,

Back in the 90s the license was an issue. It's not the same now.

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[jellomizer]

That isn't using Linux as a desktop and you know that.
That is imbedded systems. When People say Linux as a desktop they talk about GNU/Linux distribution. Where The Linux OS is directly used for a wide range of tasks. Not just running some directed piece of software.

Now the desktop market share is dying. However if we can get the Linux community to stop shooting themselves in the foot we may be able to transmission Linux/KDE development from Granda Approved Desktop to a useful Workstation environment where we can do real work more effectively. Because all the other major OS players are dropping the Desktop market towards low end devices with touch displays. We have a gap need for a real work OS

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[paulpach]

I used to be a big fan of KDE, It was my first desktop environment back in the 90's and I used to follow their blogs, and even made a few contributions. I marveled at their frameworks and clean code. As the years went by, KDE developers improved the code more and more. Every iteration of the desktop had better and better frameworks, and that is all it had. Usability seemed to be an after thought for most KDE developers. They added features that while impressive, were ultimately not particularly useful such as activities and rotating plasmoids.

In contrast, the gnome project had some frameworks that seemed rather poor in comparison, but the devs were laser focused on usability. They mercilessly cut out features if they were not useful. At the end of the day if I am using a tool every day, usability is king.

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[arth1]

KDE is the de-facto DE for Linux workstation/desktop users

In what world?

The top five distributions, according to distrowatch, and their default DEs (others may be available as extras or in special editions/spins) are:

Mint: Cinnamon, Mate
Ubuntu: Unity
Debian: Gnome
Mageia: KDE
Fedora: Gnome

For businesses that use Linux on the desktop, most use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its varieties like CentOS and Scientific Linux. These all default to Gnome (2 or 3).

Re: What does Netcraft say?

[thegarbz]

Who said anything about desktops?.

The article.
The first post.
The reply to the first post.

This is what is called a "conversation". A reply needs to be considered in context of what's above it. And in the context of this conversation, you're an idiot.

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[e432776]

KDE might be dead. On the other side, Gnome seems to have suffered a stroke or lobotomy. Sad times.

Re:What does Netcraft say?

[Daemonik]

Just because a desktop is in the distro doesn't mean they went to any effort to actually make it a part of the distro or if they just compiled the packages and threw them into the image so they can claim a bullet point.

It better not be.

[Zombie Ryushu]

KDE is the Gold standard in Linux Desktops. It has the most utilitarian behavior of all of the existing Linux desktops.

Re:It better not be.

[donaldm]

nope.

MATE and CINNAMON have that. KDE is a relic of bygone era, smarter people have moved on

I have used Mint and personally I still like KDE which I have as part of my Fedora 24 spin. KDE to me still has the more configurable graphical interface out of all the window and session managers and I have used pretty much all of the competing offerings.

Of course, if you like a particular GUI over another then that is fine. At least with Linux and all the distributions out there you have compleat freedom to choose what you like and configure it to your tastes, which is how it should be unlike a certain "phone-home" OS which will remain nameless.

Now that's said can we please comment on how emacs is better then vi or vice versa. -- Ducks for cover :-)

Re:It better not be.

[HiThere]

KDE3 was the gold standard for my use. KDE4 never seemed as "solid". I preferred Gnome2. When I saw KDE5 on Ubuntu I immediately reinstalled Debian.

XFCE is pretty good, so is LXDE. The last time I tried Mate I wasn't really impressed, but that's 6 months ago. Cinnamon seemed to have caught some sort of disease from Gnome3 when dealing with panels. Trinity doesn't seems to work well with the current series of applications.

But currently what I use is KDE4. I like it, it's just never felt as solid as KDE3 did....but I preferred Gnome2 to KDE4, so I'm not sure why Mate hasn't felt like a reasonable choice.

Re:It better not be.

[Gavagai80]

I loved gnome 1 for the customization options, but switched to KDE when gnome 2 came out removing all the options. KDE went through the same thing removing options with KDE 4 and again with Plasma 5, though... and of course gnome repeated it with gnome 3. Perhaps KDE dying will be a good thing, it'll prevent removing any more features from it.

Re:It better not be.

[fahrbot-bot]

Now that's said can we please comment on how emacs is better then vi or vice versa.

As a desktop environment? Probably Emacs.

Re:It better not be.

[fnj]

When I saw KDE5 on Ubuntu I immediately reinstalled Debian.

Uproariously silly non sequitur. You can run basically ANY of the DEs and WMs on ANY distro. There are these convenient things you may have heard of called packages and meta-packages.

Re:It better not be.

[fnj]

I find Mate to be very high in usability, and high in what I THINK you mean by "quality". Certainly it's complete, and without any useless frills. Specifically, whatever I use has to have a decent weather applet, a good clock/calendar applet, a decent sensors applet, a customizable drawer applet to start all the stuff I actually use, a notification area where stuff like a clipboard utility, volume control, and messaging app live, and a GOOD task bar. The task bar has to hold at least 30 or so tasks without mashing them into unusably tiny form, so it needs to support at least 2 rows, and the tasks must be manually arrangeable so I can FIND them, because I am constantly accessing them. I pretty much require two panels to support all this usably, and Mate lets me properly set up a bottom one for the task bar and almost nothing else, and a top one for all the other stuff. It also has fully configurable hide panel buttons, and optional autohide, though I don't often use these. The virtual desktop switcher is well worth having, but I very seldom use it; it's just a habit I never picked up.

No other DE comes close to this level of perfection. KDE's task bar is hopelessly fucked up, as you can't prevent it from constantly rearranging the tasks. There is no drawer, or if there is, it is utter junk. The weather applet is laughably poor. I think all this stuff used to work in the past; I remember KDE3 as being wonderful, but It's been a LONG time since I've used it. Xfce is half assed in many respects. LXDE is definitely a poor man's DE which lacks many features.

I couldn't care less about any frills such as 3D compositing, Plasma Workspaces, and the other dreck churned out by fat DEs like KDE. In fact I hate all that crap with a passion, and get turned off if it's even there, because I have to waste time figuring out how to turn it all off.

As far as the actual apps that come bundled with DE's, I couldn't care less about any of them. Konsole happens to be by far the best terminal app anywhere, and kate is one of the best GUI based editors out there. I use both of them all day every day under Mate, without the slightest difficulty. Other than that, I just mix and match apps from all over; some GTK, some Qt, and some other.

Now, with all that said, since I am not a slave to the apps that form the "E" part of "DE", I have to ask, why do we even have DE's at all? Clearly, I like a lot more features than you get in a plain WM such as Fvwm, but just as clearly, 90% of the effort expended in creating a DE is an utter waste. Something between a WM and a DE is all that is required; something to provide the basic necessary features I enumerate above. Lumina Desktop is such a beast, but unfortunately many features are missing.

Re:It better not be.

[drinkypoo]

KDE3 was the gold standard for my use. KDE4 never seemed as "solid". I preferred Gnome2. When I saw KDE5 on Ubuntu I immediately reinstalled Debian.

XFCE is pretty good, so is LXDE.

xubuntu. lubuntu.

But currently what I use is KDE4.

kubuntu.

Not that I really give a crap, but there was no need to install debian. You could have just installed a different -desktop package.

Re:It better not be.

[Teun]

KDE is more than a desktop, it is a whole bunch of applications that are well integrated.
I left Gnome when I noticed it was so disjointed that it was impossible to copy&paste between applications, something that took many years to fix.
By it's design KDE never had such issues.

Regretfully we've had to go through several major changes with KDE3, to KDE4 and now KDE5, each one leaving a couple of applications and plug-ins in the dust.

There was a time, say 4-8 years ago, developers would jump onto it to convert such applications but it seems to take longer and longer before we users see results.

I'm afraid it's a sort of chicken and egg problem, because there are problems people avoid the DE, because they don't use it any more they stop development.

But with all it's little problems, KDE is still well ahead of the Gnomes and Mates, just look at Dolphin and it's plug-ins, nothing comes close.

Re:It better not be.

[geoskd]

As a desktop environment? Probably Emacs.

I predict 2017 will the year of emacs on the desktop.

Re:It better not be.

[arth1]

xfce is OK, except for their 1 pixel wide resizing border around windows.

That is a travesty, just like in Windows 10. It kills traditional X mouse behavior, with focus-follows-mouse, no auto-raise and left-click-border-to-raise and right-click-border-to-lower.
And that behavior is what makes overlapping windows with copy/paste between windows work, and is a big productivity booster as it allows for meaningful multitasking.

Getting rid of window borders is for people who run their apps full screen or in front, i.e. single-taskers.

Re:It better not be.

[SLi]

Have you tried KDE on Ubuntu? It's in such a sorry state that I consider it a wonder if it starts at all. Even trivially fixable bugs that make a package unusable for everybody go unheeded for the best part of a decade, which is presumably because Ubuntu is not run by that many people. That has been the Ubuntu way as long as I remember, but their KDE support has only gone from bad to nonexistent.

I installed (K)Ubuntu at work, and regret it. At home I run Debian unstable, which mostly just works, but breaks in all kinds of interesting ways once every two years or so. I cannot afford that at work, so I thought I'd give the hyped Ubuntu with its rolling releases a try. (Before you tell me I should try Debian stable, consider that Debian doesn't generally fix /any/ bugs for a stable release, no matter how broken they make the package, unless it's a security issue. And that's a feature. Debian testing is a lot like unstable, but with the added downside that fixes are delayed by a random time after they get to unstable.)

For Ubuntu, presumably they will eventually get any KDE fixes from Debian, but for issues which for some reason happen to be present in Ubuntu but not in Debian, you are out of luck. Moreover, the KDE packages in Ubuntu seem to be essentially an entirely randomly timed snapshot of Debian unstable KDE packages. If KDE was entirely broken in Debian unstable at that point, then it will be in Ubuntu. Nobody cares.

How Active Does Development Need to Be?

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:How Active Does Development Need to Be?

[JoeMerchant]

I don't know that maintaining a web browser in the face of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the rest makes any sense?

Also, a standalone mail client? I haven't used one of those in nearly 5 years now. So, do I care that it hasn't updated? Do its users want it to become more like Outlook? I think probably not.

My gripe with KDE the last time I tried to use it was lack of font scaling support for 4K screens... I assume that KDE5 is addressing that, but how well? Next time I set up a desktop I might try it, but for now I'm happy enough with what comes "out of the box" with Ubuntu, and was unhappy enough with the last Kubuntu I tried that I've left KDE to go grow up some.

I hope it does continue to improve, I used to really prefer KDE to Gnome.

Re:How Active Does Development Need to Be?

[damn_registrars]

I don't know that maintaining a web browser in the face of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and the rest makes any sense?

I can tell you from experience that Konqueror is a browser with a vastly smaller footprint than Chrome or Firefox. There are times when this can make a really big difference, particularly if you are in a situation where you need to X-forward a browser session over the internet; Chrome and Firefox might be particularly painful while Konqueror could be usable.

Opera I haven't used in a long time, and the last time I tried to use it I found it quite broken in *nix. Maybe it's better now? As for Edge, I'm not aware of a system upon which you could have both KDE and Edge. If you know of such a beast, feel free to enlighten me.

Also, a standalone mail client? I haven't used one of those in nearly 5 years now. So, do I care that it hasn't updated? Do its users want it to become more like Outlook? I think probably not.

There is still demand for a standalone mail client, though I can't say I've used KMail much. I use Thunderbird religiously. I most certainly do not want it to look any more like Outlook, in fact I value how much it looks like the old Netscape Communicator.

My gripe with KDE the last time I tried to use it was lack of font scaling support for 4K screens.

Holy first world problems, batman. If I ever find myself with that much disposable income ...

Re:How Active Does Development Need to Be?

[fnj]

A standalone mail client is absolutely essential. I looked at Kmail, but it was laughably incomplete. Thunderbird and Claws Mail fill my needs OK.

A mail client has to be configurable with an arbitrary number of separate email accounts - not separate users; separate accounts. A unified inbox is a very nice feature, but not absolutely essential. It needs to have very rapid searching on metadata such as "to", "from", "subject", etc. It must not bog down with many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of retained IMAP messages.

Re:How Active Does Development Need to Be?

[Teun]

I wouldn't know what to do without a decent mail client like Thunderbird that keeps a local copy and thus allows offline reading and answering.
Access to mail via the web invariably misses options.
As a long time KDE user I'd love to use Kmail, it is solid and like most thing KDE it has a pleasant interface.
But there's just this one issue that doesn't get fixed, I want to specify per sender who's allowed to display html and or pictures, Kmail can only handle it as a global switch, all or none.

The fact Thunderbird is also a nice simple newsreader does help, Knode is an example of dead KDE projects and am using Pan for binaries.

It's not really dead

[93 Escort Wagon]

As long as you remember it.

Did KDE survive KDE3-KDE4?

[Skewray]

I never got over the KDE3 to KDE4 transition, and switched to something else. I think KDE4 was too complex to survive long-term.

Re:Did KDE survive KDE3-KDE4?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it didn't survive.

KDE4 sucked. It sucked so hard and the developers wouldn't admit to it. They first blamed the distributions for shipping 4.0, which was supposed to be "Beta quality," except that there were a whole 2 years of 3.9-BETAs and 4.0 had a big release party from KDE themselves when it went gold. It was a bullshit excuse. Then they kept saying "4.2 will have feature parity with KDE3", followed by "4.3" then "4.4" etc...

Finally, when KDE4 was still a pile of shit 2 years after release, they started blaming the users for not having standard configuration hardware (never-mind that only KDE struggled with graphics, and no other environment). When they continued to bleed users, the developers renamed the project about half a dozen times so that the remaining users wouldn't even know where to complain about the krashes. Oh that crash that keeps happening and can be easily replicated? Yeah, that's not the KDE SC's fault, that's nepomuk / akanodi / strigi / phonon / your graphics. Except only KDE depended on those shitty back-ends in the first place.

Then there was another rebrand with KDE 5, where it became Plasma Desktop, and SC applications? Are you still following through the name changes? Because most people gave up by this point. The stability never returned from the 3.x days. KDE is a user-hostile community; the devs deserve to be shot for ruining a good thing, and of course they will blame somebody else, anything else for their inadequacies.

The only people still using KDE are newbies who want eye candy to show off in Youtube videos. Those of use who want to get work done have long since moved on. I hear that besides a few bugs and quirks, KDE 5 is almost usable. Great. We're now nine years out since KDE 3.5.

The fact that this story exists on Slashdot is enough proof that KDE is dead.

Re:Did KDE survive KDE3-KDE4?

[WheezyJoe]

The KDE transition sure seemed to coincide with developers losing interest. Sure there's Krita, and Konqueror makes for a pretty good file explorer, but in the list of apps made for KDE, there's nothing that's, you know, killer. Instead, most K apps that don't look derelict look more like demos, half-baked to show off a feature of the toolkit-under-development rather than something you'd actually have confidence to rely on for the foreseeable future.

This is disappointing. I've used it for years in the 2.0-3.0 days and always felt that KDE had the edge over GNOME. But for one reason or another, the apps aren't there, so a K desktop is basically a K window manager + file explorer, on which you run GTK apps and LibreOffice (i.e., another GTK app), even though the K team posts one announcement after another how KDE's underpinnings are cutting-edge.

Re:Did KDE survive KDE3-KDE4?

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

We're All Dying

[cosm]

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.

Re:We're All Dying

[iggymanz]

not true, their are good desktops that have taken over from the archaic relics of the past decades (GNOME, KDE).

MATE and CINNAMON is where it's at. XFCE4 is quite good too

Re:We're All Dying

[Nemyst]

The "hacker" crowd is most definitely not dying, it's simply facing demographic changes. We used to be everything there was when it came to computers, both users and contributors. Now, there are billions of end users who don't give a toss about how it works so long as it does. We're no longer the majority, or even a dominant force.

However, that does not mean that the crowd is shrinking. Proportionally, it might be, but in absolute terms it's far more likely to be growing and to keep growing as more and more people have access to a computer from a young age, therefore exposing them to technology and allowing them to choose this path if they feel an affinity with it. Things are definitely changing, but don't go tombstone shopping just yet.

Re:We're All Dying

[somenickname]

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.

Re:We're All Dying

[donaldm]

not true, their are good desktops that have taken over from the archaic relics of the past decades (GNOME, KDE).

MATE and CINNAMON is where it's at. XFCE4 is quite good too

You do know that Xfce and KDE were first started in 1996 and Gnome released in 1999. So saying that KDE and Gnome are relics compared to Xfce is totally wrong. Basically as far as computing goes all Desktops and/or Session Mangers either stagnate or evolve and most including KDE have evolved. Of course, personal preferences are at play here.

In case you are wondering MATE and CINNAMON are both spinoffs of Gnome.

As for which desktop is better, personally I like KDE plasma and I have used pretty much all major desktops over the last 35 years, however at least with Linux desktops you do have the choice and you can configure most of them to your own personal preference. Of course, we could always start the 1980's flame war over emacs verses vi. On second thoughts let's not. :-)

Re:We're All Dying

[physicsphairy]

I represent someone in that demographic from a small engineering school. Among my admittedly non-mainstream group of friends I'd guess at least half know what KDE is. I'm not sure how many actually use it vs. GNOME, but it's common for them to have a Linux or Mac laptop. Laptops have become work devices -- they're what you take to project and study groups. *nix works great for that, and easy to get everyone using the same software (within a college student's budget, no less). I'm sure other places are different, but one anecdote deserves another.

Re:We're All Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:We're All Dying

[dbIII]

it is old school Unix guys that don't think responsiveness is worth losing network transparency

It was never that choice.
If you want to see responsiveness try gnome2 applications either locally or remotely and compare them to the current ones locally even with a video card accelerating things for you.
Recent toolkits told reponsiveness to fuck off.
Blaming network transparency is just a distraction from losers who wouldn't know how to get their stuff running well on any platform. It never had anything to do with responsiveness because local applications get to use local sockets.

Re:We're All Dying

[friedmud]

Your path is pretty close to mine. Here's me:

I went Windows 95->Windows 98->Slackware w/Elightenment (2 years)->Gentoo w/KDE (8 years)->OS X (ongoing)

(Note: many of the years with Slackware/Gentoo I also dual-booted some version of windows for games)

KDE3 was seriously great. I was a Qt programmer at the time... and it felt *powerful*. I could string together new apps in no time... or customize something to be just the way I wanted it.

These days I make my money doing massively parallel scientific computing. All code is written in OS X and runs on huge Linux clusters. OS X just works as a desktop... with full UNIX capability.

Re:We're All Dying

[DogDude]

Because humans work in groups in certain ways, and the open source organizational structure generally doesn't work. It's the same reason people tend to paid up in couples, and organizations of people that work well tend to have strict hierarchies. It's basic sociology, and the open source high priestesses believe that they're somehow more special than most people and the human organizational paradigms don't apply to them. They were (and still are) wrong.

It's been dying since KDE3

[hawkeyeMI]

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.

Subject

[MBGMorden]

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.

Re:konqueror best filemanager

[donaldm]

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.

Konqueror is a web browser and it does work very well if you wish to make it a file manager, however, it is nowhere near as good as Dolphin which is so configurable that IMHO puts all other file managers to shame. I follow the Unix paradigm. "The right tool for the right job" and using a Web Browser as a file manager is not really using the right tool.

If you have Fedora 24, KDE spin it ships standard with QupZilla which is sort of like Chrome (pretty much all browsers are sort of like Chrome) except it gives you allot more privacy and it actually does quite well on many browser benchmarks. Yes, I know you can easily lock down Chrome although good luck with a certain operating system which I won't name.

A view from a user

[Frank Burly]

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.)

How to advocate for desktop dev in a phone world?

[ErichTheRed]

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...

Re:konqueror best filemanager

[hey!]

Konqueror would seem to be the best file manager for power users and programmers.

As far as I can see, file management really isn't a big deal for programmers. IDE, source control system, build automation tools, web browser, and of course a shell with the usual POSIX utility suite -- each of those things is a big deal. But Finder vs. Windows File Explorer vs. Thunar vs. Nautilus? I'd be curious if anyone can show that the choice has any measurable impact on productivity. It seems to me purely a matter of taste.

I stopped using KDE and Gnome years ago, except to try them out periodically to see where they're headed. And pretty much it's places I don't particularly care about. I won't be arrogant and say that makes them bad or stupid, it's just means they're not for me. To me the desktop wars are like college basketball; if other people are into it that's fine by me, as long as it isn't compulsory.

If there are enough people who DO want to go where these projects are heading, then KDE and Gnome will do fine. If they aren't, well, I'd feel sorry for all the people who put so much work into them. There was a time when these projects were critical to the future of software, but not anymore. Pretty much any one desktop system could disappear over night -- even (or perhaps especially) Windows. -- and it wouldn't be the end of the world. There's a healthy field of choices now, which is good for users if rough on the legacy of pioneering developers.

Using Cinnamon

[HalAtWork]

Fits all my and family's needs. Most of my GUI apps are GTK but QT ones fit in fine.

umm all modern desktop environments suck

[chris2net23]

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.

Post Bait.

[ElectricPrism]

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.

Re:How to advocate for desktop dev in a phone worl

[Dutch Gun]

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.

What doesn't it do ?

[Archfeld]

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 ?

Happy KDE user since 6 months

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My Limited Experiences With KDE

[BrendaEM]

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.

Looks sooo dated

[Billly Gates]

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

Re:konqueror best filemanager

[Zontar The Mindless]

That was true 3-4 years ago, but no longer. You should really try out Dolphin--I think you'll find that it now has all the useful features from Konq. It also supports the fish: handler for protocol-agnostic remote usage (FTP, SSH, etc.).

Law of headlines

[Xtifr]

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.

Re:it's all dying...

[thinkwaitfast]

there are too few developers volunteering their time and expertise to open source projects.

Doesn't that imply most itches have been scratched?

Re:How to advocate for desktop dev in a phone worl

[Dutch Gun]

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.

The "gleeful adoption" of Windows 10?

[jez9999]

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.

Re:The "gleeful adoption" of Windows 10?

[iampiti]

In the original submission the author says Windows 10 is finally a good UI. If he thinks that I don't really KDE to ever become a good UI :).
Anyway, KDE 5 has gone to some extent in the direction of Win 10 so I'm not sure why he doesn't like it.
Maybe I'm too old but I just can't understand why people think flat, with few colors, touch-oriented UIs are good for a desktop

Re:is lack of development a problem?

[Teun]

Lack of development is a problem when the underlying DE is changed (for good reasons) but development of the applications is not keeping up and they are no longer available on the new platform.
Examples, the KIPI plugins, a couple of nice Plasma Widgets like Quick Access, weather, localize calender etc.

KDE died in my desktop long ago

[OneHundredAndTen]

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.

Re:konqueror best filemanager

[bmo]

But Finder vs. Windows File Explorer vs. Thunar vs. Nautilus? I'd be curious if anyone can show that the choice has any measurable impact on productivity. It seems to me purely a matter of taste.

Here's what you can do in Dolphin and Konqueror versus all the rest:

There's a guy up there in the thread that is very happy with mc. Mc is visually identifiable at a glance because it has 2 panes and a command line. There is a profile that re-creates mc in Dolphin and Konq, which you cannot do in other file managers because they can't do panes.

Why do this in Dolphin or Konq instead of just running mc in a terminal? Because you can drag-and-drop from/to Dolphin and Konq to other programs.

--
BMO

opinions

[AntEater]

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.