Sure, but Windows 10 is selling too, and look what a turkey that is, complete with keystroke logging sending all your passwords and everything else straight to MS.
And to be fair, there are reasons they're popular. I've already mentioned some of them, dealing with how corporations like to do acquisitions (they prefer to lease stuff instead of buying it outright). In addition, such services probably do have some seeming benefits as far as getting things working quickly, getting set up without a big initial fee, etc. It's all designed to lock you in and extract monthly payments from you.
Samba and what else? Samba being GPLv3 is not pushing people to use SaaS; that doesn't even make sense. "Oh no! We can't modify Samba in a way that can be Tivoized, so let's move our accounting to this new online could service!"
According to Memory Alpha, there's actually a DS9 novel that serves as a sequel of sorts, revealing the parasites to be genetically modified Trill symbionts.
That's a great video, and shows that a non-technical Windows XP user who isn't a complete dimwit and has an open mind has no trouble adapting to a new system.
The two primary reasons for home users to stick with Windows are: 1) "I need to run Adobe|some weird application|some game". Yeah, unless you can get it to work in WINE, you're pretty much stuck there. The same problem applies to Macs though, to an extent (Adobe stuff runs on Macs, but the latest games don't), so on that platform you're stuck running Parallels.
2) "It doesn't look and work exactly like Windows". Neither does Windows itself (try going from 7 to 8/10 and making sense of the wacky Metro UI), but somehow this doesn't apply.
3) "It doesn't work with my shitty $20 inkjet printer" because this printer is a "Winprinter" and does all the processing in the driver. Somehow just buying some decent hardware isn't an option; any printer that uses PDF, Postscript, or really any command language usually works fine.
Part of the reason why Cloud/SaaS/Remote Hosted/Time Shared software has gotten popularity, was due to working around restrictions in Open Source systems, such as the Anti-TiVo addition.
Huh? How so? The only way this claim would be valid is if large amounts of FOSS software had actually adopted GPLv3. To date, not that much has, and certainly nothing really important. Linux is GPLv2 and always will be (it's impossible to get all the contributors to agree to a license change), PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed, Apache has the BSD-like Apache license, etc.
The reason cloud/SaaS crap has gotten popular is simple: 1) software makers like it because it gives them a continuous revenue stream, so they just have to lock in the users and then they'll get monthly fees forever, and 2) these software makers target things that FOSS simply doesn't address very much or at all, such as specialized business software. Even Windows (OS) is trying to move to a SaaS model, and Adobe's been doing it for a while; it's all about being beneficial for the software companies. Users only do it because either they have little choice if they want to use that software, or they like the "low" monthly payments (and are too stupid to do basic math and realize they're paying more in the long run)., or they're running a business and thanks to wacky business accounting, it's easier to get the company to buy into a monthly service ad infinitum rather than shell out a higher one-time purchase fee (which is the same logic that makes businesses opt to lease expensive equipment rather than buy it, even though it costs them a lot more over time, but they don't care because it makes the short-term balance sheets look better and works better with taxes because they can deduct the expense instead of having to take depreciation).
Anyway, point is, FOSS licensing has absolutely nothing to do with the popularity of SaaS and cloud services; that's completely ridiculous.
What's your point? The frontier worlds in Firefly weren't shown to be technological leaders at all, they were shown to be backwaters with low tech, but a lot more freedom than the Alliance worlds (though this came at a price--a lot of crime and anarchy). But they still had technology, but of course it was likely all manufactured on the inner Alliance worlds, and a lot of it was old (like the Firefly ship itself).
This isn't much different from how things were in the American frontier; they had technology, but it had to be shipped from the eastern states where it was manufactured, and of course they couldn't generally afford the latest and greatest and went without a lot of the time.
Of course I know who Weird Al is; I remember when "Even Worse" was brand new, but I never wasted time watching infomercials. If I stayed up late, I was either watching Johnny Carson or doing something on my computer.
Yes, Jobs was a salesdrone, but he helmed the company when it made the iPod and the iPhone, two phenomenally successful products. That's what he's going to be remembered for. Those products will be in museums (if they aren't already). Ronco products will not. Unfortunately, the nature of our society is that the corporate leaders are the ones who are remembered, and they're almost never engineers (and in fact, when engineers have headed companies, the results have usually been not that great). So the engineers who make the products are never remembered by name (except for Wozniak, a big exception, though even here most people-on-the-street probably won't recognize his name the way they would Jobs'), while the salesCEOs who peddled their products are.
No, that's not what happened at all, with either of them.
KDE4 was because the KDE codebase was spaghetti code, and they had a lot of ideas they wanted to pursue and they wanted a better architecture to do it with, because they were spending too much time dealing with spaghetti-code bugs, so instead of refactoring piece by piece they decided that since they were switching to the Qt4 libraries anyway, they might as well just start all over. The end result has actually been really good for the most part, it just took a while to get here, and it didn't help that the distros jumped the gun and adopted KDE4.0 too early and didn't keep KDE3 even as a fallback, leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
Gnome3 was somewhat similar, but different: the devs decided they had some grand ideas they wanted to pursue for the be-all-end-all desktop, which involved removing all user choice whatsoever, because they decided they were UI experts and knew better how a user's computer should work than the user himself. They also wanted to move past the crufty Gtk2 libs (and they're not the only ones, all the other Gtk-based DEs have done the same), so they too did a full rewrite. However they were too arrogant to learn the lesson the KDE team learned the hard way, and they did the exact same thing: pushed out an unready release full of bugs and missing critical features, and then instead of apologizing arrogantly proclaimed that users should get used to it because the Gnome devs know what's best for everyone. This of course caused a huge backlash resulting in both MATE and Cinnamon being created/forked.
Huh? I'm pretty sure banners were flown in the middle ages. And the US had flags before the beginning of the 19th century. No, it didn't have the exact same flag as now, but that's not the point the OP was making, it was that flags have been flown for a very long time in western society.
You've got to be kidding me. You're comparing the Chop-O-Matic to the iPhone, and calling the former "technology"???
People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials, plus they don't see how his products have improved anyone's lives substantially. Whereas, rightly or wrongly, they attribute smartphones to Steve Jobs and those really have changed peoples' lives in an undeniable way.
Heck, I had to look up Popeil on Wikipedia to see who you were talking about since I didn't recognize the name, and I certainly couldn't think of any of his inventions offhand. Everyone knows what an iPhone is.
When you let techies build things you get Linux which is great.
I used to believe this too, but then look what happened when someone let a bunch of techies made a desktop environment, and they came up with Gnome 3.
Some techies working without some asshole non-technical manager come up with great stuff like the Linux kernel, DD-WRT, PostgreSQL, etc. But sometimes they come up with shit.
But I'm not installing it for my 70 year old mother.
Try installing Linux Mint for her and see if she has any problems with it. I never need to clean any toolbars out of Firefox on my wife's Mint computer, and she's definitely no techie.
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
How will the defaults being what you want stop people playing with them?
The defaults aren't what I want; they're whatever the distro decides on (which are likely not very different from what the KDE publishes).
There's nothing stopping people from playing with them. How is that a bad thing? Holy shit, is everyone on Slashdot a Mac fan now? That probably isn't even fair to say, since even Macs have some configurability.
First, KDE is not really competing against low-resource desktops like LXDE and XFCE.
Second, configurability is not a detriment. If you don't want to change the configuration, then DON'T. Leave it at the defaults. No one is forcing you to go through every configuration option.
My car has a bunch of configuration options in the infotainment system. I can change all kinds of things: audio settings, HUD settings, navigation settings, etc. This doesn't make it hard to drive, because most people just leave things as-is. This is an absolutely idiotic argument, and it's really quite pathetic that someone here would argue for this kind of Apple-esque "don't allow users to change anything!" mentality.
If you're trying out alpha software, then I don't think it's at all fair to complain about issues like this. You can't expect a good out-of-the-box experience with something that isn't ready for prime-time.
All the KDE distros I know of are still using KDE4. Remember, they had this problem before: a bunch of distros switched to KDE4.0 way too soon (there's disagreement over whether the KDE team claimed it was ready for use or still in beta), and it was a disaster. Surely any decent distro, as well as the KDE team, are both keen to avoid a repeat of this.
Ironically, our "real world" planetary searches are showing there are probably more habitual worlds than the writers of Star Trek ever envisioned.
Huh? No they aren't. We've found over a thousand exoplanets so far (last I heard), but they're mostly gas giants, or way too cold or hot. We've only found a handful that look like they might possibly be Earth-like, and even these are large (like 2g gravity), and there's no telling what the environments are like. All we know is they're rocky, somewhere on the order of Earth's size, and they appear to be within the "habitable zone" of the star. That really doesn't say too much about the surface conditions of a planet; it could be as cold as Hoth or as hot as Venus (Venus is within the habitable zone, it just has a runaway greenhouse effect), it might not have any water, it might not have an atmosphere at all.
Most likely, there's at least some of them in our galaxy, considering there's a billion stars here and exoplanets of some kind seem to be common, but we just don't have any idea how common a "Class M" planet is.
"KDE should be the default DE for everyone because I like it more"
No, it should be the default because it's highly configurable. Any distro can easily make a preferred configuration instead of making an all-new DE. Obviously, a lot of people hated Gnome3, which is exactly why both MATE and Cinnamon were created. I think it would have been easier if they had put that effort into re-skinning KDE.
"Software should have never been created, because having more choice in FOSS software is somehow bad for the Linux ecosystem."
Choice is fine, but there is a shortage of development resources, so it makes more sense to cooperate when possible.
Well it is the community that just took the easy path and created a dependency on them.
Not really. Linux distros have long been divided into to major factions, the Red Hat faction and the Debian faction, plus some other sizeable mostly-unaligned groups (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo). These three factions still can't agree on even a package manager for some strange reason, even though it'd make things a lot easier to have this standardized. Debian is in no way dependent on RH. Ubuntu is dependent on Debian however. And many distros do use a lot of stuff produced by RH (these days, systemd is the big one, but Gnome is the other, there's also PulseAudio, and probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten).
But just like no one was forced to adopt RPM, no one was forced to adopt Gnome. But they did anyway (until Ubuntu decided to make Unity). Why, I don't know. Strangely, Red Hat's biggest ally, SUSE (which is the other major distro that uses RPM) was historically more of a KDE distro, and still is I believe (I think they briefly dabbled in switching to Gnome, then changed their mind); it's probably the most prominent KDE distro of all. But everyone else jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, and except for Unity never really left it. And when Gnome3 came out and pissed everyone off, they could have just switched to KDE, perhaps with a custom theme and settings package to make it look and act just like Gnome2 and called it done, but no, they went and created not one, but two forks, MATE (a fork of Gnome2) and Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome3 with a Gnome2-like desktop on top of the Gtk3 libraries). The total amount of developer time going into all the Linux DEs has got to be staggering: KDE, Gnome3, MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Xfce, Lxde, Razor-Qt (I think this merged with the previous one), and probably some smaller ones (IceWM?). If they could pool their efforts into just two (or even 3), imagine how much they'd get done.
And it is mostly armchair commentators. If the amount of time use for vocal opposition was used to actually maintain an existing non-systemd upstream distro this would barely be a problem and according to them everybody would use it because systemd is apparently such a dire and critical problem.
Agreed.
The FOSS community cant innovate, that is the problem. Linux is copy of UNIX, GIMP is an attempt to copy Photoshop, LibreOffice is an attempt to copy MS Office 2003 and built of the proprietary StarOffice codebase.
To be honest, innovation was never really the strong suite or focus of FOSS, it was more about freedom of choice and features; a lot of FOSS software came about because someone didn't like some proprietary company's crippled offerings and decided they could do it better. Take a look at alternative router firmware like DD-WRT and OpenWRT. Is there any real innovation there? I don't think so. But they're great because they're open-source, and give you access to very advanced features normally only present on high-end networking gear from Cisco. Plus they don't have the bugs that stock firmware has, nor are they abandoned after the warranty is over, never to get another security update. For router firmware, I don't need innovation, I want features, security updates, bug-free software, and a lack of crapware (some router firmware has manufacturer crapware trying to upsell you on cloud services I believe).
This is basically what I want in a DE too, and why I like KDE. It obviously borrows a lot from other proprietary DEs like Windows, but it's extremely configurable (which proprietary is not) so I can customize it to how I like it, is reasonably fast, has lots of features (including lots not present in commercial software; many of them probably wouldn't appeal to non-technical users, but that's fine because FOSS is usually made by technical people for technical people), and on top of this, except for that whole KDE4.0 fiasco, I don't have to worry much about them pulling the rug out from under me and changing everything like MS did with
I'm not sure it's "the community" that's to blame as much as certain large entities in the community (*cough* Red Hat *cough*).
First, about systemd. Exactly what "problems" has it caused the users? On a normal distro, it runs in the background and should be transparent. sysvinit was ancient, and not even Solaris (the last true UNIX) uses it, it switched to SMF ages ago. All the anti-systemd hysteria I've seen has only been about vague possibilities, or whining about "the one true UNIX philosophy" (which again, apparently real UNIX doesn't even follow), etc. Whereas the systemd supporters can actually point to real, tangible benefits. Now admittedly, at home I'm a longtime user of Linux Mint which still runs on upstart for the moment, but I've been using CentOS 7 machines at work and I haven't run into any problems there (except for fucking Gnome3, more on that later). systemd seems to me to work just fine.
However, with Gnome3 and Unity, you're exactly right. The two most powerful and influential distros (Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu) both changed to awful DEs, which certainly can't be attractive to new users who aren't looking for something that's a complete sea-change from the UIs they're used to. By all rights, KDE should be the default DE: it's reasonably fast, it's pretty bug-free at this point (compared to Gnome3, which is full of bugs in my personal experience with CentOS7), it's full-featured, it's highly configurable to do whatever you want, whether you want it to be more like Windows or like MacOS, and it's a familiar paradigm. Yes, the "semantic desktop" stuff is useless, but it's actually turned off by default on many distros now I believe, and if not, it's easy to disable and simply ignore--I do. So why Linux distros are pushing minimalistic DEs, I dunno. But I'm certainly not the only one who doesn't like them: there's a reason Mint has become so popular, and so many people have switched to Cinnamon and MATE.
Honestly, the big misstep that started most of this crap was the founding of GNOME back in the late 90s, due to the licensing issue with Qt. They should have abandoned Gnome when Qt finally was released under the GPL, then we wouldn't have these issues now.
That's interesting, but it's really orthogonal because you're getting into existential questions which are mostly beyond the ability of science to answer. Yes, some religions do ponder the questions of freewill vs. predetermination, but the conclusions they usually wind up with are entirely based selective reading of the Bible or other holy text. That's the whole problem with religions: they don't consider real evidence, they only consider their own holy texts as reliable evidence. It's like an echo chamber: this book is true and correct, because it says that it's true and correct, which is a tautology. There's no actual reasoning there, just a fallacious appeal to authority.
What I'm addressing is philosophies of *how we should live* and *how we should structure our societies and laws*, not questions of how we got here or whether we're living in the Matrix. Religionists want to base laws and societal codes entirely on ancient books written by primitive people, whereas secularists want to base them on rational principles backed by evidence when possible (i.e., make sure laws actually work as intended, and set up a feedback system so that they can be corrected so that they do).
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Sure, but Windows 10 is selling too, and look what a turkey that is, complete with keystroke logging sending all your passwords and everything else straight to MS.
And to be fair, there are reasons they're popular. I've already mentioned some of them, dealing with how corporations like to do acquisitions (they prefer to lease stuff instead of buying it outright). In addition, such services probably do have some seeming benefits as far as getting things working quickly, getting set up without a big initial fee, etc. It's all designed to lock you in and extract monthly payments from you.
Samba and what else? Samba being GPLv3 is not pushing people to use SaaS; that doesn't even make sense. "Oh no! We can't modify Samba in a way that can be Tivoized, so let's move our accounting to this new online could service!"
Sorry, you haven't proven your point at all.
According to Memory Alpha, there's actually a DS9 novel that serves as a sequel of sorts, revealing the parasites to be genetically modified Trill symbionts.
That's a great video, and shows that a non-technical Windows XP user who isn't a complete dimwit and has an open mind has no trouble adapting to a new system.
The two primary reasons for home users to stick with Windows are:
1) "I need to run Adobe|some weird application|some game". Yeah, unless you can get it to work in WINE, you're pretty much stuck there. The same problem applies to Macs though, to an extent (Adobe stuff runs on Macs, but the latest games don't), so on that platform you're stuck running Parallels.
2) "It doesn't look and work exactly like Windows". Neither does Windows itself (try going from 7 to 8/10 and making sense of the wacky Metro UI), but somehow this doesn't apply.
3) "It doesn't work with my shitty $20 inkjet printer" because this printer is a "Winprinter" and does all the processing in the driver. Somehow just buying some decent hardware isn't an option; any printer that uses PDF, Postscript, or really any command language usually works fine.
Part of the reason why Cloud/SaaS/Remote Hosted/Time Shared software has gotten popularity, was due to working around restrictions in Open Source systems, such as the Anti-TiVo addition.
Huh? How so? The only way this claim would be valid is if large amounts of FOSS software had actually adopted GPLv3. To date, not that much has, and certainly nothing really important. Linux is GPLv2 and always will be (it's impossible to get all the contributors to agree to a license change), PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed, Apache has the BSD-like Apache license, etc.
The reason cloud/SaaS crap has gotten popular is simple: 1) software makers like it because it gives them a continuous revenue stream, so they just have to lock in the users and then they'll get monthly fees forever, and 2) these software makers target things that FOSS simply doesn't address very much or at all, such as specialized business software. Even Windows (OS) is trying to move to a SaaS model, and Adobe's been doing it for a while; it's all about being beneficial for the software companies. Users only do it because either they have little choice if they want to use that software, or they like the "low" monthly payments (and are too stupid to do basic math and realize they're paying more in the long run)., or they're running a business and thanks to wacky business accounting, it's easier to get the company to buy into a monthly service ad infinitum rather than shell out a higher one-time purchase fee (which is the same logic that makes businesses opt to lease expensive equipment rather than buy it, even though it costs them a lot more over time, but they don't care because it makes the short-term balance sheets look better and works better with taxes because they can deduct the expense instead of having to take depreciation).
Anyway, point is, FOSS licensing has absolutely nothing to do with the popularity of SaaS and cloud services; that's completely ridiculous.
What's your point? The frontier worlds in Firefly weren't shown to be technological leaders at all, they were shown to be backwaters with low tech, but a lot more freedom than the Alliance worlds (though this came at a price--a lot of crime and anarchy). But they still had technology, but of course it was likely all manufactured on the inner Alliance worlds, and a lot of it was old (like the Firefly ship itself).
This isn't much different from how things were in the American frontier; they had technology, but it had to be shipped from the eastern states where it was manufactured, and of course they couldn't generally afford the latest and greatest and went without a lot of the time.
Of course I know who Weird Al is; I remember when "Even Worse" was brand new, but I never wasted time watching infomercials. If I stayed up late, I was either watching Johnny Carson or doing something on my computer.
Yes, Jobs was a salesdrone, but he helmed the company when it made the iPod and the iPhone, two phenomenally successful products. That's what he's going to be remembered for. Those products will be in museums (if they aren't already). Ronco products will not. Unfortunately, the nature of our society is that the corporate leaders are the ones who are remembered, and they're almost never engineers (and in fact, when engineers have headed companies, the results have usually been not that great). So the engineers who make the products are never remembered by name (except for Wozniak, a big exception, though even here most people-on-the-street probably won't recognize his name the way they would Jobs'), while the salesCEOs who peddled their products are.
No, that's not what happened at all, with either of them.
KDE4 was because the KDE codebase was spaghetti code, and they had a lot of ideas they wanted to pursue and they wanted a better architecture to do it with, because they were spending too much time dealing with spaghetti-code bugs, so instead of refactoring piece by piece they decided that since they were switching to the Qt4 libraries anyway, they might as well just start all over. The end result has actually been really good for the most part, it just took a while to get here, and it didn't help that the distros jumped the gun and adopted KDE4.0 too early and didn't keep KDE3 even as a fallback, leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
Gnome3 was somewhat similar, but different: the devs decided they had some grand ideas they wanted to pursue for the be-all-end-all desktop, which involved removing all user choice whatsoever, because they decided they were UI experts and knew better how a user's computer should work than the user himself. They also wanted to move past the crufty Gtk2 libs (and they're not the only ones, all the other Gtk-based DEs have done the same), so they too did a full rewrite. However they were too arrogant to learn the lesson the KDE team learned the hard way, and they did the exact same thing: pushed out an unready release full of bugs and missing critical features, and then instead of apologizing arrogantly proclaimed that users should get used to it because the Gnome devs know what's best for everyone. This of course caused a huge backlash resulting in both MATE and Cinnamon being created/forked.
Huh? I'm pretty sure banners were flown in the middle ages. And the US had flags before the beginning of the 19th century. No, it didn't have the exact same flag as now, but that's not the point the OP was making, it was that flags have been flown for a very long time in western society.
Oh, and don't claim "New Testament!!!" because
That whole "OT doesn't apply any more" crowd is so hypocritical.
If you say they shouldn't eat shellfish because it says so in Leviticus, they'll say that doesn't apply any more because it's in the OT.
If you say that you don't need to tithe, they'll pull out Leviticus and quote the verse.
If you say there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, they'll talk about Sodom and Gomorrah (in the OT).
KDE doesn't depend on systemd. KDE runs on FreeBSD, which doesn't have systemd. KDE also runs on Windows.
You've got to be kidding me. You're comparing the Chop-O-Matic to the iPhone, and calling the former "technology"???
People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials, plus they don't see how his products have improved anyone's lives substantially. Whereas, rightly or wrongly, they attribute smartphones to Steve Jobs and those really have changed peoples' lives in an undeniable way.
Heck, I had to look up Popeil on Wikipedia to see who you were talking about since I didn't recognize the name, and I certainly couldn't think of any of his inventions offhand. Everyone knows what an iPhone is.
When you let techies build things you get Linux which is great.
I used to believe this too, but then look what happened when someone let a bunch of techies made a desktop environment, and they came up with Gnome 3.
Some techies working without some asshole non-technical manager come up with great stuff like the Linux kernel, DD-WRT, PostgreSQL, etc. But sometimes they come up with shit.
But I'm not installing it for my 70 year old mother.
Try installing Linux Mint for her and see if she has any problems with it. I never need to clean any toolbars out of Firefox on my wife's Mint computer, and she's definitely no techie.
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
How will the defaults being what you want stop people playing with them?
The defaults aren't what I want; they're whatever the distro decides on (which are likely not very different from what the KDE publishes).
There's nothing stopping people from playing with them. How is that a bad thing? Holy shit, is everyone on Slashdot a Mac fan now? That probably isn't even fair to say, since even Macs have some configurability.
This is stupid.
First, KDE is not really competing against low-resource desktops like LXDE and XFCE.
Second, configurability is not a detriment. If you don't want to change the configuration, then DON'T. Leave it at the defaults. No one is forcing you to go through every configuration option.
My car has a bunch of configuration options in the infotainment system. I can change all kinds of things: audio settings, HUD settings, navigation settings, etc. This doesn't make it hard to drive, because most people just leave things as-is. This is an absolutely idiotic argument, and it's really quite pathetic that someone here would argue for this kind of Apple-esque "don't allow users to change anything!" mentality.
What distro features KDE5? I'm not aware of any.
If you're trying out alpha software, then I don't think it's at all fair to complain about issues like this. You can't expect a good out-of-the-box experience with something that isn't ready for prime-time.
All the KDE distros I know of are still using KDE4. Remember, they had this problem before: a bunch of distros switched to KDE4.0 way too soon (there's disagreement over whether the KDE team claimed it was ready for use or still in beta), and it was a disaster. Surely any decent distro, as well as the KDE team, are both keen to avoid a repeat of this.
That's why you're an idiot: the defaults are fine, and there's nothing forcing you to configure it differently.
Ironically, our "real world" planetary searches are showing there are probably more habitual worlds than the writers of Star Trek ever envisioned.
Huh? No they aren't. We've found over a thousand exoplanets so far (last I heard), but they're mostly gas giants, or way too cold or hot. We've only found a handful that look like they might possibly be Earth-like, and even these are large (like 2g gravity), and there's no telling what the environments are like. All we know is they're rocky, somewhere on the order of Earth's size, and they appear to be within the "habitable zone" of the star. That really doesn't say too much about the surface conditions of a planet; it could be as cold as Hoth or as hot as Venus (Venus is within the habitable zone, it just has a runaway greenhouse effect), it might not have any water, it might not have an atmosphere at all.
Most likely, there's at least some of them in our galaxy, considering there's a billion stars here and exoplanets of some kind seem to be common, but we just don't have any idea how common a "Class M" planet is.
"KDE should be the default DE for everyone because I like it more"
No, it should be the default because it's highly configurable. Any distro can easily make a preferred configuration instead of making an all-new DE. Obviously, a lot of people hated Gnome3, which is exactly why both MATE and Cinnamon were created. I think it would have been easier if they had put that effort into re-skinning KDE.
"Software should have never been created, because having more choice in FOSS software is somehow bad for the Linux ecosystem."
Choice is fine, but there is a shortage of development resources, so it makes more sense to cooperate when possible.
Well it is the community that just took the easy path and created a dependency on them.
Not really. Linux distros have long been divided into to major factions, the Red Hat faction and the Debian faction, plus some other sizeable mostly-unaligned groups (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo). These three factions still can't agree on even a package manager for some strange reason, even though it'd make things a lot easier to have this standardized. Debian is in no way dependent on RH. Ubuntu is dependent on Debian however. And many distros do use a lot of stuff produced by RH (these days, systemd is the big one, but Gnome is the other, there's also PulseAudio, and probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten).
But just like no one was forced to adopt RPM, no one was forced to adopt Gnome. But they did anyway (until Ubuntu decided to make Unity). Why, I don't know. Strangely, Red Hat's biggest ally, SUSE (which is the other major distro that uses RPM) was historically more of a KDE distro, and still is I believe (I think they briefly dabbled in switching to Gnome, then changed their mind); it's probably the most prominent KDE distro of all. But everyone else jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, and except for Unity never really left it. And when Gnome3 came out and pissed everyone off, they could have just switched to KDE, perhaps with a custom theme and settings package to make it look and act just like Gnome2 and called it done, but no, they went and created not one, but two forks, MATE (a fork of Gnome2) and Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome3 with a Gnome2-like desktop on top of the Gtk3 libraries). The total amount of developer time going into all the Linux DEs has got to be staggering: KDE, Gnome3, MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Xfce, Lxde, Razor-Qt (I think this merged with the previous one), and probably some smaller ones (IceWM?). If they could pool their efforts into just two (or even 3), imagine how much they'd get done.
And it is mostly armchair commentators. If the amount of time use for vocal opposition was used to actually maintain an existing non-systemd upstream distro this would barely be a problem and according to them everybody would use it because systemd is apparently such a dire and critical problem.
Agreed.
The FOSS community cant innovate, that is the problem. Linux is copy of UNIX, GIMP is an attempt to copy Photoshop, LibreOffice is an attempt to copy MS Office 2003 and built of the proprietary StarOffice codebase.
To be honest, innovation was never really the strong suite or focus of FOSS, it was more about freedom of choice and features; a lot of FOSS software came about because someone didn't like some proprietary company's crippled offerings and decided they could do it better. Take a look at alternative router firmware like DD-WRT and OpenWRT. Is there any real innovation there? I don't think so. But they're great because they're open-source, and give you access to very advanced features normally only present on high-end networking gear from Cisco. Plus they don't have the bugs that stock firmware has, nor are they abandoned after the warranty is over, never to get another security update. For router firmware, I don't need innovation, I want features, security updates, bug-free software, and a lack of crapware (some router firmware has manufacturer crapware trying to upsell you on cloud services I believe).
This is basically what I want in a DE too, and why I like KDE. It obviously borrows a lot from other proprietary DEs like Windows, but it's extremely configurable (which proprietary is not) so I can customize it to how I like it, is reasonably fast, has lots of features (including lots not present in commercial software; many of them probably wouldn't appeal to non-technical users, but that's fine because FOSS is usually made by technical people for technical people), and on top of this, except for that whole KDE4.0 fiasco, I don't have to worry much about them pulling the rug out from under me and changing everything like MS did with
"Conspiracy" was indeed a fantastic episode, but it was an anomaly in the 1st season.
I'm not sure it's "the community" that's to blame as much as certain large entities in the community (*cough* Red Hat *cough*).
First, about systemd. Exactly what "problems" has it caused the users? On a normal distro, it runs in the background and should be transparent. sysvinit was ancient, and not even Solaris (the last true UNIX) uses it, it switched to SMF ages ago. All the anti-systemd hysteria I've seen has only been about vague possibilities, or whining about "the one true UNIX philosophy" (which again, apparently real UNIX doesn't even follow), etc. Whereas the systemd supporters can actually point to real, tangible benefits. Now admittedly, at home I'm a longtime user of Linux Mint which still runs on upstart for the moment, but I've been using CentOS 7 machines at work and I haven't run into any problems there (except for fucking Gnome3, more on that later). systemd seems to me to work just fine.
However, with Gnome3 and Unity, you're exactly right. The two most powerful and influential distros (Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu) both changed to awful DEs, which certainly can't be attractive to new users who aren't looking for something that's a complete sea-change from the UIs they're used to. By all rights, KDE should be the default DE: it's reasonably fast, it's pretty bug-free at this point (compared to Gnome3, which is full of bugs in my personal experience with CentOS7), it's full-featured, it's highly configurable to do whatever you want, whether you want it to be more like Windows or like MacOS, and it's a familiar paradigm. Yes, the "semantic desktop" stuff is useless, but it's actually turned off by default on many distros now I believe, and if not, it's easy to disable and simply ignore--I do. So why Linux distros are pushing minimalistic DEs, I dunno. But I'm certainly not the only one who doesn't like them: there's a reason Mint has become so popular, and so many people have switched to Cinnamon and MATE.
Honestly, the big misstep that started most of this crap was the founding of GNOME back in the late 90s, due to the licensing issue with Qt. They should have abandoned Gnome when Qt finally was released under the GPL, then we wouldn't have these issues now.
That's interesting, but it's really orthogonal because you're getting into existential questions which are mostly beyond the ability of science to answer. Yes, some religions do ponder the questions of freewill vs. predetermination, but the conclusions they usually wind up with are entirely based selective reading of the Bible or other holy text. That's the whole problem with religions: they don't consider real evidence, they only consider their own holy texts as reliable evidence. It's like an echo chamber: this book is true and correct, because it says that it's true and correct, which is a tautology. There's no actual reasoning there, just a fallacious appeal to authority.
What I'm addressing is philosophies of *how we should live* and *how we should structure our societies and laws*, not questions of how we got here or whether we're living in the Matrix. Religionists want to base laws and societal codes entirely on ancient books written by primitive people, whereas secularists want to base them on rational principles backed by evidence when possible (i.e., make sure laws actually work as intended, and set up a feedback system so that they can be corrected so that they do).
Oh yeah, I forgot to add (why the fuck doesn't Slashdot have an edit function after all these years like Reddit?):
All those Germans who herded homosexuals, intellectuals, Gypies, and Jews into trains and took them to death camps were Christian.