Distributions

Distribution-friendly tactics in the desktop wars

For many aspiring projects, getting accepted and shipped by popular distributions is an important step toward a long and successful life. But even large and established projects can struggle in this area. The distribution outreach program recently launched by the KDE project hosted a discussion making it clear that KDE cannot count on the support of distributions without supporting them in turn. If the participants are to be believed, KDE's second-place position in the desktop competition can at least partially be attributed to how the project works with distributors.

It all started when Eric Hameleers, a KDE packager for Slackware, posted a complaining blog entry. He ran into some trouble making KDE 5_16.03 work properly, and eventually got a message telling him to log in and run a loginctl command. What came next may not surprise too many readers: loginctl is a systemd command, and Slackware has no intention of moving over to systemd. So, Eric wrote in frustration, "WTF!!!! Slackware does not have a steenking systemd you crazy KDE developer."

Martin Graesslin responded on the outreach program mailing list, asking that distributors take their complaints, in a calmer tone of voice, to the project's mailing lists rather than to public blog posts. He pointed out that KDE does not require systemd; all it needs is something that can implement the appropriate D-Bus interface. ConsoleKit2 can fill that need as well as systemd's logind daemon. Beyond that, he said, the KDE project cannot be expected to have the resources to deal with systems that its developers are not using: "If your distro doesn't follow what 99% of all other distros do, don't expect we write code for it!" The project will happily accept patches to support such systems, but it won't write them itself.

At this point, openSUSE developer Richard Brown stepped in to point out what, he said, is perceived as an attitude problem on the part of the KDE developers. KDE is not seen as a core part of many distributions at all anymore, he said, so it is not in a position to make demands on those distributions. He advised the project to "change the mindset" and work on making it easier for distributions to integrate KDE. That includes listening to the complaints coming from distributors and providing more information to distributors about upcoming changes before those changes happen so that plans can be made.

As might be imagined, it didn't take long for GNOME to enter the discussion as an example of a different approach to distributions. Slackware developer Heinz Wiesinger was quick to claim that GNOME "has a history of making questionable choices" and is not really relevant to the discussion. But Richard disagreed, stating that GNOME's popularity gives the project the leeway to make questionable choices, while KDE lacks that. The trend for KDE, he said, is not positive:

To be able to compete at this point, he said, "KDE has to be better, smarter, leaner". It has to be easier to package, should consider getting rid of second-tier or redundant applications, and needs to market itself better. "KDE needs to make it very easy for distributions to sell the premise, promise, and benefits of using KDE to their users."

KDE developer Thomas Pfeiffer wondered about what it was that makes GNOME more appealing to distributors. He acknowledged that the GNOME project has gained some credibility after the controversial 3.0 release by "constantly providing great releases". But, he said, one of the things that makes it easy to produce those great releases is that the GNOME developers don't really have to care about anything outside of the GNOME world. He was unsure that "easier to package" would be the tag line that would bring KDE back into the top tier, but he did agree that providing better information to distributors about which applications are best to ship would be useful. In another message he admitted that "even I as a core KDE contributor do not know what is or isn't currently maintained, or who maintains what within KDE."

In the end, Richard said, it comes down to trust. Distributions need to be able to trust a software project not to spring unpleasant surprises and to be supportable over the long term.

This kind of approach, he said, makes GNOME easy for enterprise distributions (among others) to deal with. It also helps those distributions pick up new GNOME releases with confidence, since they know what is coming and can expect it to work well. The KDE 4 experience was different, he said; it had no clear goals and the quality was not good. The Plasma 5 release looks, to distributions, like a similar experience. KDE's mission still "remains pretty much an unspoken mystery" and there's no way for distributors to easily cut through that mystery. The lack of clear goals also makes it harder to bring in developers (he worries that KDE is losing developers over time), and ongoing quality issues turn away both distributors and users. In the end, he said:

These are some fairly strong words. But they came from a supportive developer at what is arguably the most KDE-friendly large distribution in existence, so they were taken seriously. Among other things, Thomas said that the project is indeed working on a statement of its vision, for both KDE as a whole and Plasma in particular.

In recent times, the KDE project has put some effort into making it easier for users to test upcoming releases. Things started with KDE Neon, which is an Ubuntu live image with a current KDE build installed; the Argon and Krypton releases will do the same thing with openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed, respectively. But Richard warned against relying on users for early testing; instead, he said, KDE should be doing the sort of automated early testing that GNOME does. KDE (and openSUSE) developer Luca Beltrame pointed out that some of this infrastructure does exist — build.kde.org, for example — but it lacks the support to become a truly useful resource.

The discussion did not lead to any dramatic changes of direction on KDE's part, at least none that are visible now. But it may have planted some seeds within the project. Projects that aim for a high level of success, as KDE does, cannot expect to get by on technical quality alone — even if they don't go through a period characterized by quality problems. Like it or not, the resulting software must be sold, and, in the current world, selling to distributors in particular remains important. Someday, maybe, the efforts to circumvent distributors will see some success; for now, though, they remain the gatekeepers, and it is difficult for a project to succeed if it creates difficulties or worries for them.

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Distribution quote of the week

-- ssmith32

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The Arch Linux developers recently released version 5.0 of the pacman package manager with some useful new features: "The release of pacman-5.0 brought support for transactional hooks. These will allow us to (e.g.) run font cache updates a single time during an update rather than after each font package installation. This will both speed up the update process, but also reduce packaging burden for the Developers and Trusted Users." Unfortunately, once they start using these hooks, older versions of pacman will no longer understand the resulting packages. That will happen on April 23, so all Arch users need to have upgraded by then.

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Distribution newsletters

• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 654 (March 28)
• Ubuntu Kernel Team newsletter (March 29)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 459 (March 27)

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