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Fifteen years of KDEFifteen years ago, the graphical interface on GNU/Linux consisted mostly of window managers and basic environments like Motif and CDE that came from the proprietary Unix world. As one of the first GNU/Linux-targeted GUI efforts, the development of the K Desktop Environment became a catalyst for rethinking that situation. It's a role that KDE continue to play as the project celebrates its fifteenth birthday, continuing its tradition of innovation and — from time to time — controversy. Like the Linux kernel, KDE started with an email. "Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing," Matthias Ettrich posted on the Usenet group de.comp.os.linux.misc on October 14, 1996. "There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available, so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI." Ettrich went on to explain that existing solutions were inadequate because of the lack of a common framework and aesthetic. He suggested using Trolltech's Qt framework — then less than year old — and offered a to-do list of needed tasks, concluding:
I admit the whole thing sounds a bit like fantasy. But it is very serious
from my side. Everybody I'm talking to in the net would LOVE a somewhat
cleaner desktop. So let us join our rare spare time and just do it!
At first, Ettrich called the project the Kool Desktop Environment, echoing CDE. However, the name quickly settled down to the K Desktop Environment (KDE), with the "K" not standing for anything. The name stood until 2009, when the project rebranded itself as simply KDE, on the grounds that it was no longer just a desktop, but a community of related software projects. ![[KDE 1.1]](/images/2011/kde1.1-sm.png)
Originally, Ettrich envisioned the first version being released by Christmas 1996. However, the already ambitious project grew in scope, and with the amount of work needed, the first version was not released until 12 July 1998. The news release was concerned mostly with justifying KDE, and included KOffice as part of the announcement. Gun-metal gray with no anti-aliasing of fonts, like most interfaces of the time, KDE 1.0 was clumsy-looking by modern standards, and not nearly as unified as Ettrich perhaps envisioned — if only because it had to accommodate many non-KDE applications. However, by the standards of the time, it was far ahead of anything else available for Unix-like systems. The Qt controversy![[KDE 2]](/images/2011/kde2-sm.png)
With its first release out of the way, KDE settled down to a series of minor releases, moving gradually towards the 2.0 release on 23 October 2000, a re-engineering that brought KDE closer to its ideal of a modular, consistent desktop, and introduced Konqueror as its web browser and file manager — a combination that was popular at the time. However, even before the 1.0 release, KDE was facing criticism because of its choice of the Qt framework. For KDE, using Qt was largely a matter of practicality: project members considered it the best GUI toolkit available, it was free of charge, and it might encourage commercial software developers to work with KDE. From the start, Qt was available under different terms for commercial and community purposes. Unfortunately, Qt's first community license, the FreeQT License, was considered non-free by the Free Software Foundation and contrary to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which was then the second major arbiter of software license's freedom. Moreover Trolltech took several efforts to produce a new license that was generally recognized as free. At any rate, the second license for non-commercial use, the Q Public License, made little difference. It required that all changes to Qt be made available as a patch so that the code base would remain the same for both free and commercial Qt versions. Since this requirement would mix free and proprietary software, the Q Public License was no more acceptable to the larger community than the FreeQT License was. In response to this dispute, Trolltech and KDE announced the FreeQt Foundation, whose members signed an agreement that a free version of Qt would always be available. Trolltech and its successors were also obliged to produce a new release at least once a year. If it failed to do so, the latest free version would be released under a BSD-style license. The intricacy of the solution failed to satisfy critics, and the GNU project created the Harmony Project (not to be confused with several projects that have used that name, including the recent copyright assignment project founded by Canonical), whose goal was to create a free Qt clone. Meanwhile, the dispute was continually escalating into a flame war, fanned by the dedicated beliefs of free software advocates and Trolltech's apparent reluctance to move towards a truly free license. In the Debian project, KDE was a main reason for a general resolution to eliminate all non-free software (it failed). The Free Software Foundation responded just as strongly with the creation of the GNOME project to create a desktop that was unequivocally free. The dispute was abruptly resolved when Trolltech announced in September 2000 that, after consultation with critics, it now considered the GNU General Public License (GPL) a widespread standard, and would use it for Qt's next release. When the third version of the GPL was eventually released, Qt subsequently moved to it without any real controversy. Since the Nokia acquisition of Trolltech, Qt has switched to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). But old feuds die hard, and the animosity between GNOME and KDE still occasionally flares to this day, even though the main reason for it no longer applies. The only difference is that, in recent years, arguments usually center on GUI toolkits and design choices instead of licenses. The "Golden Age" and beyond![[KDE 3]](/images/2011/kde3-sm.png)
No longer concerned with licensing issues, KDE released a series of uneventful minor versions, before making a major break with the past with KDE 3.0 on 3 April 2002. The release featured improved display capabilities and increased customization and internationalization. Even more importantly, it created subsystems of specialized libraries, including ones for printing, personal information, and document and network protocol access that any KDE-compliant application could easily access. More than any previous release, KDE 3.0 fulfilled the original intention of a fully modular environment. Some developers criticized the massive rewriting of KDE, and some users described the default icons as childish and unbusinesslike. However, for many, KDE 3.0 was the release showed that GNU/Linux was finally near to equaling proprietary desktops. It became a classic desktop, surviving six years with only incremental releases — three times as long as the previous major releases. ![[KDE 4.3]](/images/2011/kde4.3-sm.png)
However, gradually the KDE 3 series began showing its age, and rewriting became easier than patching. After two years of planning and development, KDE released KDE 4.0 on 11 January 2008. KDE 4.0 went even further than the KDE 3 series in producing modular subsystems for everything from multimedia (Phonon) to personal information (Akonadi) and interfaces (Plasma). It also added a MySQL database for Akonadi's storage of information. Even more importantly, KDE 4.0 expanded the concept of the desktop by emphasizing virtual workspaces, easily swappable icons and desktop layouts, desktop widgets, hot spots on the screen edges, and an array of other innovations. For the first time, a free desktop could plausibly be argued to have not only caught up with its proprietary rivals, but leaped ahead of them as well. "Personally, I naively thought that we had really proven ourselves with KDE 3," Aaron Seigo told me five months after the release. "We had taken the promise of KDE 2 and matured it to KDE 3.5.9. And then we were going to attempt to replicate the results of that previous effort and take it to a whole new level." But that wasn't how the release turned out. Despite all the promise, the release was something of a failure, provoking hundreds of hostile responses. KDE had failed to emphasize sufficiently that KDE 4.0 was a developer's release, and distributions — eager to offer the latest software — ignored the fact. Users were faced with a desktop that lacked many of the customization features of the KDE 3 series and introduced a sometimes bewildering set of innovations. Jokes, such as Seigo's remark that he had just removed desktop icon support in 4.1 (because icons were now part of the Plasma, and no longer confined to a single desktop) only increased the hostility and the confusion. Three years later, some users still insist that the third release series was the height of KDE development, and that the fourth series continues to lack features found in the third. Still others consider KDE 4.0 as an example of how developers are divorced from the needs of end-users. However, as minor releases have gradually improved the user experience, most users seem to recognize the KDE 4 series as the accomplishment that it is. Into the futureAs KDE celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, KDE 5.0 seems some distance away. Although the KDE 4 series will be four years old in January 2012, it remains flexible enough that its possibilities are not yet exhausted. For example, the abstraction of the interface from the core code into the Plasma subsystem has allowed Plasma Netbook to be offered as an alternative interface on any KDE installation. The just-released Plasma Active One also shows this flexibility as an interface for touchscreen tablets. In fact, you might say that with the KDE 4.0 series, KDE is at last fulfilling the vision of fifteen years earlier of a modular, easy to use desktop. Adjusting to circumstances and controversies, KDE has weathered four major releases, and looks ready for another fifteen years of equal accomplishment. [Note: KDE has no shortage of histories online. For example, the KDE History Page lists conferences and a timeline of events and releases, while The Qt Issue and The History of KDE on the UserBase Wiki gives KDE's side of the controversy over the development framework. A screen shot history is available on Saeid Zebardast's blog and from the screen shot page on the main KDE site (which is where the screen shots for this article were obtained). Those interested in KDE 4.0 might look for my "What Went Wrong with the KDE 4 Release?" when the Linux.com archives are restored.] (Log in to post comments)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 0:14 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]
I ran KDE for quite a while, but between the increasing reliance on Nepomuk and Akonadi and the like, and the apparent focus on the social desktop, I've wound up walking away.
I'm sure the idea of the email/rss/facebook/twitter/google+1/flickr/whatever desktop with rich media tagging and semantic search is really interesting to some people, but for me, well, mostly I just want to get work done. I don't want social stuff mewling and clawing at my peripheral vision constantly, nor do I want to spend the effort tagging all my stuff so that I can use search to find it. That's why my filesystem is hierarchical.
Some aspects of KDE really do interest me these days; I'd still like to see what a modern vision of Stardock's Object Desktop would look like, and I think KDE is probably the closest to that of anyone.
I suspect in the end I'll wind up running something like xfce, but using KDE libraries (and Gnome libraries, for that matter) in the background.
Now if only dbus were something sane rather than XML...
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 1:07 UTC (Wed) by sml (subscriber, #75391) [Link]
Don't forget that all those extra features are totally configurable and can be disabled if you like.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 1:17 UTC (Wed) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link] Don't forget that all those extra features are totally configurable and can be disabled if you like.That's what they say but no matter how many thing I tried to disable I still could run into situations like this. This thread inspired me to install xfce and I already notice a substantial performance boost.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 15:34 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
You can no longer use kmail without akonadi, so that isn't very useful.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 12:51 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]
You can, but it looked to me like Akonadi and Nepomuk were gradually becoming core libraries, which (unless things have changed) also means running MySQL. You can (sort of) disable them, though in my experience that means the notification tray fills up with complaints and some programs refuse to start.
If the useful parts of KDE all become reliant on Akonadi and Nepomuk, it becomes a lot harder to call the result "modular" with a straight face.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 13:10 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Common dependencies do not imply non-modularity, unless it's impossible to swap in a replacement because the dependent items rely on internal implementation details of the common dependencies. (Otherwise, pretty much nothing is modular - how many programs have no direct dependency on libc?) Admittedly, there probably doesn't exist an alternative implementation of the interfaces presented by Nepomuk and Akonadi.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 13:18 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I'm mystified as to why there is no »no-op« version of Akonadi. It is a caching framework, so it should be straightforward to come up with an implementation that always returns a cache miss and/or falls back on the real data sources with no actual caching taking place. This would get rid of the »why do I need to run MySQL?« issue, among other things. I have kmail from KDE 4.6 running with Akonadi disabled, and it is plenty fast enough for me to not bother trying to get Akonadi to run properly. Akonadi with no caching shouldn't be a lot worse than what I have now. Besides, if I were to develop Akonadi, a »no-op« cache would be the first thing I'd come up with, simply to be able to debug the rest of the framework.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 22, 2011 17:34 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"It is a caching framework..."
It can do caching. It doesn't have to use the database for that (it doesn't above a configurable data size).
"...so it should be straightforward to come up with an implementation that always returns a cache miss and/or falls back on the real data sources with no actual caching taking place."
Would kind of also ruin the offline support.
"This would get rid of the »why do I need to run MySQL?« issue, among other things."
You would still need one of the database options for the relational data.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 0:05 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
some people don't want the caching and offline support (and all the resource use that comes with that)
right now there appears no way to turn this off.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 8:45 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
True, minimum cache timeout is one minute, so one will have bear that obviously huge overhead of at least 60 seconds.
I guess if someone wants to have their mail client download headers for all mails every time they click on an IMAP folder they will find an alternative mail client that never ever accesses local storage.
But such a person would have not used KMail at any prior version anyway, because it also did cache headers.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 16:25 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
or they will use a smarter IMAP client that doesn't have to download all headers every time you open a folder. from your comment this means not using kmail (I haven't used it so I can't say
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 17:11 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
When the user tells an IMAP client to open a folder, it basically has three options:
(1) show no content
Now you have made it abundently clear that you don't want option (3), you seem to be somewhat opposed to option (2) so that leaves option (1).
A valid choice, though I am not sure how many others would use a term like "smarter" to describe such behavior.
KMail (with or without Akonadi) uses option (3), based on the assumption that its target users prefer folders to be populated automatically upon open and prefer not to download headers every single time.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 19:47 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
it doesn't need to download all header information, it only needs to download the information needed to display the screen
so not all information and not all headers.
it normally needs to download sender, date received, message size and subject for somewhere between 30 and 60 messages.
this is a far cry from downloading all header information for a folder with 10's of thousands of messages in it.
this does assume that you are using a decent IMAP mail server that can support things like server-side sorts, etc.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 16:35 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Would kind of also ruin the offline support. I couldn't care less about KMail's offline support. I run offlineimap, which works a lot better for me, anyway. [ ] but then why remove the caching and offline capability if all you want is to use a different DB engine? I'd prefer not to have to run a DB engine for the exclusive benefit of my mail program at all, thank you very much. I've been using KMail for years and years without the added complication of a »DB engine«, and I can frankly see no benefit whatever in the added complication. Show me one compelling reason why I would even want to run a complete MySQL or PostgreSQL server just to power my mail reader and I might reconsider. I can tell you right off the bat that caching and offline support are not compelling reasons.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 18:10 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"I couldn't care less about KMail's offline support. I run offlineimap, which works a lot better for me, anyway."
Fair enough, but I hope you understand that it's not a viable option for everbody. A caching service that can be configured through GUI or does not require any configuration at all is targetted at a different type of user.
Mail clients such as KMail or Thunderbird (and most likely also Evolution) acknowledge that this other type of users exists and thus are capabable of providing caching themselves.
I am confident that there are mail clients which target users such as yourself who can take care of such features externally.
"I've been using KMail for years and years without the added complication of a »DB engine«, and I can frankly see no benefit whatever in the added complication."
Choosing to use software components developed by experts in their respective area is considered a common and recommendable practise, i.e. using established libraries and services instead of implementing everything again (often referred to as as "reinventing the wheel").
A couple of years back a lot of programs used to have their own handcrafted code to deal with relational data, usually using some program specific binary format for data and index files.
Nowadays most of these programs have switched to using existing relational data handling code, usually written by people with a lot more experience in dealing with such data than the end user application developer using the library.
KMail used to be one of the applications that still had its own way of dealing with such data, using its own proprietary index format, etc.
It might look like a weird choice from a user's perspective but a lot of software developers seem to agree that this is a good thing.
"Show me one compelling reason why I would even want to run a complete MySQL or PostgreSQL server just to power my mail reader and I might reconsider."
There is quite a range of possible implementations for relational data handling, the two you are referring to here use a service based approach where engine runs in its own process and clients commmunicate with it.
Depending on factors such as size of data set, access concurrency, support for transactions, etc. some implementations will have different advantages and disadvantages.
Therefore different weighting of these factors will result in different ranking of solutions. If your needs are better matched by an in-process implementation then you should be using one. I don't see any value in trying to persuade you otherwise, after all you know your requirements a lot better than anyone else.
Whether some software you are using is capable of using different implementations is of course dependent on whether its developers anticipated a need to have this kind of customizablity.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 22:25 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Fair enough, but I hope you understand that it's not a viable option for everbody. I'm a big believer in Heuer's Law: »Any feature that cannot be turned off is a bug.« A couple of years back a lot of programs used to have their own handcrafted code to deal with relational data, usually using some program specific binary format for data and index files. Nowadays most of these programs have switched to using existing relational data handling code, usually written by people with a lot more experience in dealing with such data than the end user application developer using the library. True, but KMail doesn't actually appear to use »relational data«. The Akonadi docs say that in the case of e-mail, everything is stored where it used to be stored (maildirs, IMAP server, ) and cached by Akonadi, except for e-mail flags, which hardly require a relational database infrastructure to store. Hence, in the case of KMail, using something like MySQL appears to be an unnecessary complication. It should be reasonably straightforward to offer the alternative of not caching anything and continuing to use the already-existing code (or something else simple) for e-mail flags in KMail. If I was an Akonadi developer I'd do this just to make debugging easier. It might look like a weird choice from a user's perspective but a lot of software developers seem to agree that this is a good thing. This is the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum, a.k.a. »if everybody does it, it must be right«. »A lot of software developers seem to agree« that using Java or Windows is a good thing, but even so KDE isn't written in Java for Windows. Go figure. Whether some software you are using is capable of using different implementations is of course dependent on whether its developers anticipated a need to have this kind of customizablity. In the case of KMail, or more specific Akonadi, this is possible. According to KDE TechBase, you get to pick your database for Akonadi as long as that database is MySQL. If the Akonadi developers have finally got their act together enough to support a less wasteful storage option then that news does not appear to have made it into the documentation, but then again documentation has never been KDE's strong suit.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 16:45 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, it's not the disk space that is taken up that's the big issue for me, it's the memory that these caching processes eat up even when I don't use kmail or any other software that they support. On my laptop with 'only' 2G of ram, these processes eat up a very noticeable amount of it (close to 1/4 of the available ram)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 18:36 UTC (Sun) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
If "these caching(sic) processes" is referring to Akonadi services, then you are most likely unknowingly running "or any other software that they support."
Akonadi is neither autostarted nor restored by a session manager (unless one manually adds autostart support files, which is highly unlikely in your case), but started on-demand by first client.
I think there is a list of less known clients on userbase.kde.org which are known to cause Akonadi startup for users who are strictly against PIM data integration features.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 23, 2011 19:53 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
Ok, the only windows I have open are firefox chromium, and xterms. nepomuk is disabled through system settings (kubuntu 11.10)
what did I do to demand that 26 processes with a fairly significant memory footprint start up?
output of smem
Command Swap USS PSS RSS
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 22, 2011 17:25 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"...which (unless things have changed) also means running MySQL."
or PostgreSQL or SQLite. MySQL is the default though
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 7:58 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
"nor do I want to spend the effort tagging all my stuff so that I can use search to find it. That's why my filesystem is hierarchical."
Technically you are already tagging your files by using filesystem hierarchy.
Nepomuk could do tagging easy and automatic (for tags that can be automatically generated, existing directories as tags, ...), but unfortunately it really doesn't. It is getting kind of silly that finding content on web is easier than on your own desktop machine.
I type a string in google and I usually get what I want - in kde with nepomuk and strigi enabled, "alt-f2" search almost works, but only if the search result is unique. With dozens of results, no preview or context is shown, only the name of file - Useless.
Chromium history shows me what I surfed yesterday with a single click. But with all the nepomuk indexing, I can't get a history of what local files I read and edited yesterday.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 20:21 UTC (Wed) by PhrkOnLsh (subscriber, #58879) [Link]
the timeline:/ KIO has been available for a long time and allows you to do this. Type timeline:/calendar in to your dolphin or konqueror window.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 9:07 UTC (Thu) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
Now this was awesome news. Why is this feature so hidden?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 29, 2011 11:20 UTC (Sat) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link]
same here, I totally agree with your Nepomuk and Akonadi view. also I do remember to must enter my password all the time to unlock the key chain or something like that. you had the option to disable the "feature" altogether or were forced to enter the password again and again. there was no sync of the user password with the keychain password the last time I tried KDE. that really sucked. Is this problem fixed in recent version?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 0:55 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
The whole 'semantic desktop' stuff is silly. Why the hell would I want to share my taskbar with somebody else?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 3:13 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
You probably wouldn't. The social network generation might though.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 4:28 UTC (Wed) by VelvetElvis (guest, #69142) [Link]
It's not like all the other desktops aren't moving in that direction. Look at the Empathy integration in Gnome Shell (which I happen to like a lot).
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 5:15 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Well, I don't like Gnome Shell (I've switched to KDE because of it) and Empathy (I'm used to Pidgin) but I can certainly understand how integration with IM client can be useful.
But I still don't understand why would I need to share my taskbar.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 7:09 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
The integration to the shell is nice but the implementation kind of sucks.
It seriously needs to be tweakable. With a GUI, not scripting.
For example, message pop is far too short. I can't notice the pop and refocus to read it before it vanishes. The text is also much too small. And, being Gnome, there isn't a single option anywhere that would fix it. It also only pops on one monitor, which I might not even have in my field of view.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 6:16 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
No, you probably don't want to share your taskbar. You might want to share some other desktop widget, who knows? And that means the configration widget is around for every plasma widget. I don't use it either, but on the other hand, I don't worry about it. I use KDE to get my work done, and my KDE4 desktop allows me to do that in exactly the same way I used my KDE 1, 2 and 3 desktops.
Of course, this has _nothing_ to do with nepomuk and the semantic desktop.
Nepomuk is what you use when you tag brush presets in Krita so you can filter the presets you need in a particular stage of a project or a particular project. Artists like that. So you probably don't need that either, but in this instance, Nepomuk actually _helps_ professional users to get their work done.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 13:24 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I use KDE to get my work done, and my KDE4 desktop allows me to do that in exactly the same way I used my KDE 1, 2 and 3 desktops. Good for you. The only way I manage to do large parts of my work on KDE 4 is by using non-KDE applications. This used to be different in KDE 3.5, which in its time at least came with a reasonable web browser.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 14:19 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Konqueror is exactly as capable as it was in the KDE 3.x days. And that's the problem -- it's the web that has changed.
So instead of using konqueror with khtml, try using rekonq, which is also a KDE application and works fine with today's websites.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 15:17 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] That's not the issue at all. My problem is that our company web site requires X.509 client certificates. Up until KDE 3.5, Konqueror had very good support for X.509 client certificates. In KDE 4, for no apparent reason, this support is no longer available, which is a definite step backwards as far as I am concerned. (And incidentally, Rekonq doesn't even seem to touch this with a 10' pole.)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 30, 2011 18:02 UTC (Sun) by walex (subscriber, #69836) [Link]
The reason why KDE SC 4 has little X509 support is simple: nobody has volunteered to write it. The KDE project runs on "scratch your itch" (and sometimes "scratch your employer's itch") lines like other freedom sw projects.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 2, 2011 0:51 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The X.509 support was there and working well in KDE 3.5. If it was possible to port the rest of Konqueror over to KDE 4 it ought to have been possible to port that part, too. As far as »scratch your own itch« is concerned, no. This is »platform vs. playground« again. If you want to be taken seriously as a reliable platform for others to use, removing perfectly-working features just because nobody within the project can be bothered to maintain them is a big no-no. That this happens all the time in KDE is a sign that KDE is basically a project whose purpose is keeping hobbyist programmers within the project amused, rather than creating a basis for serious work by people outside the project. Which is fine in itself, of course, but then trying to pass KDE off as something that others can rely on is not. Most other free-software projects manage to avoid feature regressions of this type, so why not KDE?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:36 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> If you want to be taken seriously as a reliable platform for others to use, removing perfectly-working features just because nobody within the project can be bothered to maintain them is a big no-no.
Leaving unmaintained features in, especially ones with security implications, is also "a big no-no". If someone outside the project needs a certain feature, one which is apparently specific enough to their needs that no one else has bothered to work on it, why don't they just sponsor someone to port it to the new platform rather than expecting others to implement it for free?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 2, 2011 18:24 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] This is a typical playground answer. »We would much rather implement cool plasmoid eye-candy than work on porting forward something boring and crucial such as X.509 certificate support, so if you want the boring stuff done you will have to do it yourself.« As I said, the KDE people are perfectly free to do whatever they like. If they don't mind gratuitous feature regressions that is absolutely OK. However they don't get to do this and at the same time get to claim believably that their project is providing a reliable platform (rather than entertainment for hobbyist programmers). In this particular instance, it isn't that big a deal since people who actually need workable X.509 support will just use a different browser, such as Firefox. However, Konqueror used to be a pretty good browser in its day, and it is sad to see the KDE project basically give up the idea of providing a state-of-the-art browser that (unlike Firefox) integrates well with the rest of KDE.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 0:10 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
You can call it a "typical playground answer" if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the *correct* answer. The project has a limited budget to work with, and paying someone to port and maintain X.509 certificate support simply didn't make the list. If a feature isn't being used by the vast majority of users, why divert effort from other areas?
Minor features get dropped all the time, especially when a project undergoes a large-scale rewrite. It's not "gratuitous", just matter of setting rational priorities. Conserving maintenance efforts by pruning disused features is a good software development practice, and, rose-tinted memories aside, it's not like Konqueror was ever a killer app for KDE in the first place. With most KDE users running Firefox or Chrom(ium) anyway, they would be foolish to waste scarce paid-developer resources on Konqueror. You can probably count the number of affected users on one hand--and like you, none of them are offering to do the necessary work.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 0:54 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
"none of them are offering to do the necessary work"? How can a user do the work of not breaking something! Only the developers can do that.
Your answer drips with disdain. If the development effort breaks a feature, then of course you will find few users of that feature when you look around for them later. If you allow konqueror to rot, then of course by the time chrome comes around people will switch out of necessity.
Me, I thought that konqueror was indeed one of the killer features of KDE back in the day. I switched to chrome, recently, only because the web itself has changed and konqueror didn't keep pace with it.
You suggest that users should sponsor developer time to keep a feature from being broken in the next release ... how would one even know this was necessary? Before it breaks, how are the users to know it will break? And even after something breaks, unless you publicize that developer resources are the limiting factor in that particular breakage, how would we know to offer, or lobby for, support? For instance, will we ever see Kprinter again? It was promised real soon now through the early versions of 4.x; now it seems to have dropped off the TODO list altogether. Would offers of developer support bring it back? Where can I sign up? If sufficient user-generated underwriting is promised, is there a promise of a working and supported KDE print interface in return?
Bitter? Me? Not really - I still prefer KDE to the alternatives. In fact version 4.recent is very nice, barring the lack of a print tool. But I sure wish the the developers in both the gnome and KDE camps would get a clue about the importance of not breaking things. There is a substantial group of users who would restate your prioritization to read: if the project has a limited budget to work with, paying someone to develop eye candy rather than to keep the core components working is a waste of scarce resources.
So here's to KDE - a toast to 15 years. May it continue to thrive. Like many teen-agers, it's family suffered a bit during a period of adolescent trauma, but we hope that's now behind us.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 1:36 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> How can a user do the work of not breaking something! Only the developers can do that.
You do realize that KDE4 is a completely new platform, right? New ideas, new architecture, new APIs. It's not just some random modifications to KDE3.5. Everything in KDE4 was written for KDE4, either from scratch or as a port from KDE3.5. None of that happens by itself. They didn't "break" the X.509 certificate support; they wrote a new browser which happens to resemble the KDE3.5 browser superficially, and haven't gotten around to implementing that feature (since very few people need it).
> Me, I thought that konqueror was indeed one of the killer features of KDE back in the day.
Perhaps it was, once, but it's been declining ever since Firefox became popular as a free, cross-platform alternative, long before it was reimplemented for KDE4. It was never much more than a thin front-end for KHTML, compatible with the rare minority of pages which are actually standards-compliant, written in the days when it was considered cool to merge web browsers and file managers into the same package. Nowadays KHTML is called WebKit, and the primary open-source front-end is Chromium. Why bother maintaining a second one?
You're welcome to continue using KDE3.5. There's even a fork already started to continue development on the KDE3.5 desktop: Trinity Desktop <http://trinitydesktop.org/about.php>.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 2:24 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if you are going to take the tack of "KDE 4.0 is not an upgrade to KDE 3.x, it's a completely different product" then you should not call it KDE 4.0, you should call it something completely different.
For the same reason, Perl 6 should be called something else as it is not an upgrade of Perl 5
if you give it the same name, but with a higher version number, people are going to expect that the capabilities they had before would still be there, along with the new stuff. If you don't intend to provide a feature, you need to list is as a feature that's specifically being removed (and if you have a very long list of such things, expect to loose a lot of people, each one of these 'removed' or 'unimplemented in the new version' features is a regression)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 3:41 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
And the rewritten successor to Windows 3.11 shouldn't have been Windows 95 (and then Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, etc.). And the successor to Mac OS 9 shouldn't have been called Mac OS X. And so on.
Face it--this sort of thing happens all the time. The name is just a brand, not a reference to a specific codebase. KDE4 is not even the first all-up rewrite of KDE. KDE 2.0 was "almost completely re-engineered"[1] from KDE 1. This happens to most projects eventually; some things can be fixed as you go, but others are more integral and require a change in the fundamental design. Either you fix the design (and port/rewrite) or the project stagnates and is eventually replaced.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 4:41 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
And what functionality did microsoft drop between windows 3.11 and windows 95?
The issue isn't if they are modified or if the new version is written from scratch, the issue is what things that worked on the old version break on the new version.
If few things break (Windows 3.11 to Windows 95) you get nearly everyone to upgrade (unless the hardware can't run the new version at all, mearly running it poorly didn't stop a LOT of people from upgrading)
where it breaks things, including the user interface (Windows XP to Windows Vista for example) the uptake of the new version is much lower
the fact that KDE4 is a re-write vs KDE3 is a good thing, right up until you state that a feature is lost because the developers didn't care enough to make it part of the re-write, and that it's up to the users to fix this (if it was merely missed because nobody cared enough to notice during the re-write, then reports from users that they cared about the feature should get it on the list of things to fix, it may take a bit of time, but KDE 4.x has had time now)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 9:42 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] And what functionality did microsoft drop between windows 3.11 and windows 95?Funny you should ask. One of the features they dropped (I'm sure there are more) was Windows Recorder, which allowed you to record and play back macros. A lot of people complained.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 6, 2011 1:52 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] It's not the same, but not even MSFT written software worked on Win95/98/Millenium and WinNT 4 (a game, in my case, "certified" to work in that environment, didn't even make it past the splash screen before hanging the machine). Ditto MSIE on the first x86_64 versions of Windows, they crashed the machine with utter reliability.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 1:27 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The project has a limited budget to work with, and paying someone to port and maintain X.509 certificate support simply didn't make the list. I don't think this is actually how these decisions were made. It is not as if prior to the implementation of KDE 4 there had been a formal committee going through a long list of KDE 3.5 features in order to decide which ones to carry forward and which ones to drop, based on estimates of the cost of porting each feature, and assigning developers to them. AFAIK very few people actually get paid for working on KDE, so »budget« doesn't really enter into it the way it would drive decisions in a commercial software project. It's more likely that at some point during the Konqueror port the (hobbyist) person thought »to hell with this, I'm not using this stuff, I'd rather develop more new cool eye candy«. This is of course their privilege (being hobbyists), but it doesn't make for a reliable platform. Minor features get dropped all the time, especially when a project undergoes a large-scale rewrite. The desktop environments like KDE or GNOME seem to like to do this. Many if not most other infrastructure-type free software projects appear to take a more conservative stance towards backward compatibility, which is generally a good thing. For example, the Linux kernel gets all sorts of rewrites all the time, but there, user-visible features seldom if ever disappear at short notice they get carried along for a very long time even if the developers would much rather remove them for good. If you really want to get rid of a feature what you do is that you deprecate it over a certain period of time before it is actually removed, to give users the chance to come up with alternatives if you don't provide alternatives yourself. At least this is how serious projects usually handle this; the fact that KDE can't be bothered is an indication that the KDE project doesn't really care that much about its users. (Keeping the hobbyist programmers amused with cool new stuff seems to have a higher priority.) it's not like Konqueror was ever a killer app for KDE in the first place. That's not what I remember. There used to be a time when the KDE project basically touted Konqueror as the best thing ever, the greatest innovation since sliced bread. It brought together file manager and web browser functionality with good integration with the rest of KDE (ioslaves etc.), and if that didn't actually make it a »killer app«, then at least it brought it dangerously close to »killer app« territory. (Remember that Konqueror was enough of a state-of-the-art browser in its day that Apple saw fit to adopt large parts of it for their own web stuff.) In the light of this, retroactively claiming that Konqueror was never actually all that important to KDE is clearly inappropriate.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 4:24 UTC (Wed) by johnny (subscriber, #10110) [Link]
Oh yes, KDE3! It did everything I wanted and felt finished, still it was exciting to develop for. Too bad it all crazy after that. ;-)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 9:56 UTC (Wed) by acooks (subscriber, #49539) [Link]
"In fact, you might say that with the KDE 4.0 series, KDE is at last fulfilling the vision of fifteen years earlier of a modular, easy to use desktop."
This would be true, if only I could find a way to get rid of Plasma. I switched to Gnome when KDE 4.0 was released, because KDE was preventing me from getting work done. Then in April 2011 I decided to give KDE another try, since gnome is such a disaster these days. I installed KDE 4.4 and gave it two months of use, but I still hate plasma. I'm back on gnome 2 and not feeling very happy with the direction things seem to be going.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 11:20 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
KDE 4.4? We are at 4.7.2 now. 4.4 is almost two years old. Why would you try a completely outdated version?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 11:42 UTC (Wed) by acooks (subscriber, #49539) [Link]
Correction, it was KDE 4.6, but I don't think that changes anything.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 13:07 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Well, you say that only if you could get rid of plasma, KDE would be modular and user-friendly. That sounds like nonsense to me...
In what way is KDE not modular according to you? Because you can use KWin without plasma-desktop? Because a KDE application like Krita runs fine on any other desktop than plasma-desktop? Because plasma is modular enough that you can create an old-fashioned Windows 95-like desktop with a start-menu, a panel and icons on the desktop as well as a finger-friendly information-on-the-desktop tablet gui?
And in what way would KDE be more user-friendly for you without plasma-desktop, always accepting that any judgment on user-friendliness given here on LWN is bound to be highly subjective and completely skewed because of the reader base?
And while KDE 4.4 was perfectly usable for someone who used to use KDE 3.x (KDE 4.2 was already in that stage), yes it matters which version you were talking about, because KDE 4.6 is much better again.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 16:06 UTC (Wed) by acooks (subscriber, #49539) [Link]
This is exactly the problem. The people who want to catch the next big wave in computing (eg. the semantic/social/3d desktop or tablet computing) have the desire to argue about these things, while the people who don't want their work environment disturbed, simply want to carry on with their work. This is why there are so many people complaining about KDE4 and Gnome 3 and yet there isn't enough drive to keep the old codebases alive as healthy forks. It's also a lot easier and less time consuming to shout "KDE sucks" than to get involved in a detailed discussion of the problems.
To be clear, afaict plasma consists of:
I don't particularly care if plasma is actually something else entirely. Those are the two items I have not been able to get rid of. If you could post a link to some instructions for running a kde session without those two things, but with an alternative panel, I'll gladly give KDE 4 another try. Ideally, I think what I would like is to have kicker from KDE 3.5 back, but without having both kde3 and kde4 libs taking up memory.
1. I don't want any wallpaper or icons on the desktop, or at least I want the option not to have it on my work PC. I also don't want to see the cashew or any of its plasmoids or transparency effects.
KDE might have improved in numerous ways between 4.2 and 4.6, but the things that caused me grief haven't improved afaics.
I find it ironic how new desktop environments like XFCE and LXDE have evolved to service the needs of the boring old farts who just want a lightweight desktop without the gimmicks, while the old projects are trying to attract new users and change the way their existing users work.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 16:54 UTC (Wed) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959) [Link]
If you don't want Plasma-Desktop ending is as simple as "kquitapp plasma-desktop". There are many standalone panels such as Cairodock, AWN available which you can run in a KDE session.
There is also Kor http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kor+Testudo+Shell?co... which is a small desktop shell.
And if it is just the cashew: there is a Plasmoid on kde-look called something like "I hate the cashew" and which removes it.
You mention a lot of "I don't want..." things and all of those are not mandatory.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 17:02 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
to answer your comments
1. wallpaper, you always have had some background, you can change it from the default picture to some simple patters, just make that image and set it as your wallpaper (the image can be all black if you want)
icons on your desktop
on my desktop there was one window with some icons in it by default, but hitting the close button on it eliminates that, so I now have no icons on my desktop, just the bar at the bottom.
2. if you go to system settings, desktop effects there is a checkbox that will turn off all of the fancy animations and similar effects. seeing the contents of the window as you move it and anti-aliased fonts aren't affected by this checkbox.
3. I think you are out of luck here. but at the same time, I don't see how you would manage a launcher bar without having a modal interface, what clicks or gestures would you make to do the editing/rearranging functions that would never have a meaning outside of editing? left, right, and middle click are used, as is drag-n-drop
4. the difficulty in adding an arbitrary program to the launch is annoying, but since it's not something I do frequently, I don't worry about it a lot. what I do is to pick an app from the KDE menu and right click on it to select 'add to panel', I then right click on the result and select 'edit'. I can then change the command line, icon, name to be anything I want it to be.
5. nepomuk is trivial to turn off, go to system settings, desktop search and unclick the 'enable' button
6. I use multi-monitor support and while I have had problems with it not remembering my settings from login to login with prior versions, the version shipped with kubuntu 11.10 seems to be working for me so far.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 13:22 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
> And while KDE 4.4 was perfectly usable for someone who used to use KDE 3.x (KDE 4.2 was already in that stage)
I think that depends on your POV and whether you are happy to abandon using your preferred terminal dimensions. Even when I finally get to run 4.8 it'll take a long time to forgive http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176902 - a small thing, maybe, but it left a bad taste in my mouth long after the showstopper bugs in 4.0 were fixed.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 13:36 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
P.S. the reason it upset me so much is that konsole is the one KDE app I use *constantly* and for essential tasks, and until my distro gave me KDE 4.0 it had been by far the best terminal emulator I used. Adding lots of flaky eye candy was annoying, but it got less flaky and could be disabled. Adding flaky eye candy *and* breaking the single app I rely on? ... grrrr!
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 13:39 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
What I don't understand about this bug: why didn't it affect me? I use konsole every day and ususally to edit files in vim. And the konsole windows usually have far more than 24 lines.
Did the window have to be exactly 80x40 to cause the bug?
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 21, 2011 13:18 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
Yes, it only happens for 80x40, so the workaround is "just" to stop using that size.
It's alright to stay on the old version - stability and legacy are good things! Posted Oct 19, 2011 13:30 UTC (Wed) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
I don't know why you left KDE 3.5 when 4.0 came out -- the software wasn't broken and your workflow didn't need fixing. You probably want to be honest about your intentions, and not blame a developer release getting in the way of your work when what got in the way of your work was you wanting to play with a new toy. Whichever version you tried, 4.0 didn't get in the way of my work and has steadily improved over the last 3+ years.
K3n.
It's alright to stay on the old version - stability and legacy are good things! Posted Oct 19, 2011 16:50 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
probably the reason he switched to KDE 4.0 is that the distro he was using made the mistake of switching, and he was forced to choose between not upgrading the distro or switching to 4.0
I don't know of any distro (other than probably gentoo) that offered the option to use either 3.5 or 4.0
It's alright to stay on the old version - stability and legacy are good things! Posted Oct 19, 2011 17:26 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
openSUSE offered both until 4.3 was released and found to be good enough to not warrant the doubled maintenance effort anymore.
Seems like openSUSE is an often overlooked but all in all very nice distribution.
It's alright to stay on the old version - stability and legacy are good things! Posted Oct 19, 2011 20:09 UTC (Wed) by Anssi (subscriber, #52242) [Link]
Mandriva did the same, 3.5 alternative was only dropped when 4.3 came.
Why 4.4 Posted Oct 20, 2011 15:29 UTC (Thu) by tsr2 (subscriber, #4293) [Link]
4.4 is the version shipped with Debian Squeeze. It is my only experience of KDE4 and it was still flaky at the .4 release.
Out of the box I found the user experience painful and even after using it for a couple of months I never managed to configure it to be anywhere near as usable as KDE3.5, so I got rid of it.
I now have one desktop running Linux Mint and my other desktop is running Trinity desktop Environment. If Mint goes to GNOME 3 I will try GNOME 3, but I expect I will eventually run Trinity on both boxes.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 17:29 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
I'm the KDE buildsystem maintainer, and I started to use KDE 4 with version 4.5.
At least for me, the difference between everything up to 4.4 and 4.5 was huge.
On my plain Slackware install 4.4 (was it in Slackware 13.1 ?) I was able to mess up/crash several things in plasma within one hour of playing around, so I stayed at 3.x.
Then, with Slackware 13.37 there came KDE 4.5, and it is *beautiful*, and I can't remember any crashes.
So, if you haven't tried after 4.4, give 4.5 ... 4.7 a try. IMO it is very different.
Alex
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 22, 2011 17:38 UTC (Sat) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"This would be true, if only I could find a way to get rid of Plasma."
One option would be to remove plasma-desktop.desktop from the global autostart directory.
Another option would be to copy the file to the user local autostart directory and add
Another option would be to do the same but with another global autostart directory and adding its base to KDEDIRS.
See output of
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 10:49 UTC (Wed) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
KDE had a nice desktop, which I could never really love because my eyes disagreed too much with it, and no matter how much I tried, getting a consistent color/style/icon was difficult. After KDE 4.0, I simply gave up on it as a desktop environment.
> Still others consider KDE 4.0 as an example of how developers are divorced from the needs of end-users. However, as minor releases have gradually improved the user experience, most users seem to recognize the KDE 4 series as the accomplishment that it is.
I think most users that didn't leave KDE after KDE 4.[0-2] are probably happy with the improvements. Other users went somewhere else, and aren't looking back. Most people (read: me!) just want to get work done, and that normally happens within applications. For as long as the desktop gets out of the way and doesn't crash doing fancy graphic calls, it suffices.
[...]
Some KDE applications are IMO the best of the breed, such as Konsole and Yakuake. Digikam surely is capable (I've been using/trying photo managers a lot lately) but again it has an interface that I, personally, can't stand.
All in all, I think KDE's main contribution are its applications, and also the large number of special purpose small applications that, for one reason or another, always seem to appear first at KDE such as printing management, alarm, whatever-was-the-name-of-kde's gnome-do thing, and desktop wide password management. (apologies if I am wrong, but AFAIK all of those were KDE's 'firsts' and were later added to Gnome).
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 14:22 UTC (Wed) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]
KDE 3 was the golden age indeed.
I remember, It took a lot of effort to get from KDE 2.2 to 3.0, and I still hated 3.0, but from 3.1 till 3.5, I really think KDE was the best desktop environment available on any platform, period.
I don't have any research to back this up with, but my own anecdotal feelingis that KDE went from being the preferred choice of over 70% of Linux desktop users in 2004, to less than 30% now.
I still lament the fact that no community sprung around KDE 3.5 to fork it. It's starting to show its age today, but if it had been kept up to date, I reckon it would have a lot of followers, especially with so much dissatisfaction with Gnome Shell and Unity.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 14:33 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"KDE 3 was the golden age indeed."
The grass was always greener in the past, when we were young and still had waists... Oh, for the golden days of yesteryear, when beer still came 33cl bottles instead of 30cl and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were still properly small and furry.
"I don't have any research to back this up with, but my own anecdotal feelingis that KDE went from being the preferred choice of over 70% of Linux desktop users in 2004, to less than 30% now."
That might be true, or not, nobody has any realistic numbers, but it could be true. If so, I doubt it's KDE4 that caused the decline -- but rather the growth of Ubuntu which shipped Gnome. On the other hand, the KDE developer communities has grown and grown and grown since the KDE 4 effort began, and usually, a developer community grows with the user community and contracts with the user community.
"I still lament the fact that no community sprung around KDE 3.5 to fork it."
There is: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ -- and they even are porting KDE 3 to Qt4 _again_. And you know what? The KDE community doesn't bear them _any_ ill will. Trinity is even developed right inside KDE's subversion repository.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 15:37 UTC (Wed) by przemoc (subscriber, #67594) [Link]
Trinity being ported to Qt4 is a news to me (I wasn't following their development). But maybe they should wait for Qt5.
http://trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Developers/Trinit...
There must be QML-backed KDE5 using Qt5 in future, right? ;-)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 16:07 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I see the commits pass by. Basically, they have a kind of layer that makes it possible to compile both against Qt3 and Qt4. I haven't compiled it myself, though -- I'm really happy with KDE 4 myself.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 21, 2011 13:31 UTC (Fri) by robbe (subscriber, #16131) [Link]
Debian's popularity contest (popcon.debian.org) reports 25 % of participants having installed the "gnome" package, 5 % installed "xfce4", 3 % have "kde-full", and 2 % selected "lxde-core".
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 21, 2011 15:54 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959) [Link]
kde-full is a meta-package for complete KDE Software Compilation. It is rather useless to measure "kde". I as a Plasma Core developer running debian testing do not have it installed.
Measuring is for KDE of course rather difficult as KDE produces so many different products, just think of Krita compared to Plasma.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 25, 2011 6:55 UTC (Tue) by robbe (subscriber, #16131) [Link]
> kde-full is a meta-package for complete KDE Software Compilation.
I am aware of that. So are the other packages mentioned. (Though xfce4 and lxde-core, by their nature, pull in rather less stuff.)
I linked to the source, so you can select other packages and draw your own conclusions. Comparing "gnome-desktop-environment" (30 %) to "kde-plasma-desktop" (8 %) paints a less extreme picture.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 27, 2011 10:24 UTC (Thu) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
Last time I checked at linuxquestions KDE was on pair with Gnome. Gnome was so popular, because of Ubuntu and KDE 4.0. Today we have gnome3 mess, Unity and rock stable and polished KDE 4.7.2. Because of these I bet Gnome is less than 20% now.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 19, 2011 20:25 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
I remember that KDE 1 was such a memory hog back in the day. The big improvement in KDE 2 was that it used less memory - but was slow as hell, I went back to KDE 1, then left KDE for good. Of course, "improvements" in GNOME meant that the gnome-panel started to leak memory by the hundreds of MBs, so now I'm back to KDE 3.5 on the work machine. I very much hope it won't be upgraded.
The features I'm using from KDE? There's a panel with taskbar, a workspace selector, konsole - and that's all, the same I used in KDE 1.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 18:58 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Yeah, KDE 1 was fat, but I had 128 MB so I didn't mind! I liked that release!
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Oct 20, 2011 2:54 UTC (Thu) by jmclnx (subscriber, #72456) [Link]
I have tied KDE multiple times over the years (since ver 1) and it always caused me great eye strain (including v3.5), I would then quickly revert back to my favorite window manager.
*But*, I have to say, 4.6+ works great for me, and I find it very configurable. Ver 4.6.5 I am now on is configured the point were where it acts like the WM I have used for many years. And it was easy to disable effects I did not care for.
So, congratulations to the KDE team on a great accomplishment!
Jack
KDE Applications and multiplatform Posted Oct 21, 2011 9:29 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] Thanks for the nice article about the KDE initiative. I believe it is notable that the move to the KDE 4 Platform enabled applications to go multiplatform, e.g. to Windows and Mac OS X as you can see from the Kontact Screenshots by the Kolab Initiative.During the time where KDE 3 meant the whole "software compilation" it was simple to say "I ran KDE", so I believe the rebranding of KDE as an initative was good. Many people still just comment on something they call "KDE", but often they get a mixture of KDE Plasma and some applications based on the KDE Platform. And the author of the article is right, the distributions play an important role in creating a good combination. On the other hand, some use applications based on the KDE 4 Plattform and do not know. Gpg4win2 comes with Kleopatra and is downloaded approximately 1 million times a year. Applications shape the experience of users a lot and there are many of them for the KDE 3 Platform. While they are ported over to the new platform, users can just keep using the old applications. This is the more important when you hear that Kontact, the desktop email and groupware client from the KDEPIM package was finally fully ported to the new backend and released in June 2011. Users can and should continue using the stable applications under whatever windows environment they chose. (Full disclosure: I am involved with KDE PIM, Kolab Systems AG and Gpg4win.)
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