Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

> KDE3 didn't have problems that a regular user would care about which could not have been fixed by a good going-over to clean up and organize menus and control panels

I beg to differ. The transition to Qt4 combined with opening the path to platform independent libraries was alone enough to warrant or even necessitate a rewrite across the board. Deep ranging changes like plasma and (yes) the semantic desktop was also infrastructure that would be rather challenging to do by refactoring KDE3. I believe users do enjoy the improvements.

> At a time when Windows users were looking for alternatives out of a fear of Vista all they found from KDE was a buggy early 4.x instead of the stability that would have lead to more switching. A great opportunity to convert many users to a Free OS was lost because KDE was in a period of infrastructure churn that was not *necessary*, however nice the results.

I am afraid our perceptions are wildly differing on this issue. From my end of the universe Ubuntu was the only hope of getting users over from Vista. Ubuntu hedged all their bets on Gnome way before KDE4 became an issue. Moreover, our shot was through the netbooks. From my sources Canonical priced Ubuntu licensing way to high, pusing the likes of ASUS to ship Linpus and Xandros on netbooks. Users got a horrible experience. End of story. An all in effort on KDE3 would do shit about Vista, and only serve to keep KDE on a dead end Qt3 for several years. Whethet pushing Ubuntu on netbooks would have made any difference is also an open question. Personally I believe GNU/Linux is in a much better position today than back then, and I am afraid we need another couple of years before we really have a viable desktop alternative. With a focussed Canonical we could get there faster, but that is I am afraid not going to happen.

> So where is the key binding manager?

In system settings of course, you have always found all settings there. Gnome is finally copying it.