Health of the KDE Community
carlschwan.eu
Health of the KDE Community
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#2Always happy for a bit of good news. Lovely analysis, good clean graphs. Aces.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#3Great to see the KDE development community being so active. I think it has really been showing in the end product. Over the past 2-3 years KDE has easily become my favorite environment, even over macOS or Windows as of late. For the most part things just work, all the default apps are solid. In particular Dolphin is hands down the best file manager out there. Kudos to the KDE devs.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#4I can't say I'm familiar with the repositories behind KDE, but can somebody point me to say the top 10 - 20 repositories with the most activity, that would be good for determining overall health? I'd like to analyze them and I'll share my findings.
I've studied hundreds of popular open source projects and I've found that "days active" and having lots of developers with mid to high level impact to be extremely good indicators of project health.
vscode and GitLab are probably my favorite repos that best highlights this. If you look at the vscode project
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...
and switch to the impact view and sort by "days active" you can get a sense of what I mean. The more developers above 25%, the better. "First commit" which is also discussed in the post, is also another good indicator. For vscode, you'll find a lot of developers with 5 years of experience.
And something that may seem counter intuitive is, you don't want contributors to have "very high" impact, as this indicates high bus factor risk. For impact, you actually want people to lie on the bottom of zone 2, as that indicates high individual impact and evenly distributed effort. Since GitLab isn't on GitHub, I can't share the insights for it, but that's what GitLab looks like.
Note: Don't install my tool as the docker image has an expired license, which I need to fix.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#5I can't say I'm familiar with the repositories behind KDE, but can somebody point me to say the top 10 - 20 repositories with the most activity, that would be good for determining overall health? I'd like to analyze them and I'll share my findings. I've studied hundreds of popular open source projects and I've found that "days active" and having lots of developers with mid to high level impact to be extremely good in…
Take a look at https://invent.kde.org/explore/projects/starred, this should give you a good overview of the most popular repository.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#6Great to see the KDE development community being so active. I think it has really been showing in the end product. Over the past 2-3 years KDE has easily become my favorite environment, even over macOS or Windows as of late. For the most part things just work, all the default apps are solid. In particular Dolphin is hands down the best file manager out there. Kudos to the KDE devs.
I always preferred thunar or pcmanfm back when I was into exploring all those Desktop Environments and Window Managers ; some of the xfce/lxde tools are particularly light on additional libraries needed, which makes them great options if running a wm only and wanting a slim system. lxterminal with i3 or dwm for example. Actually preferred that compared to rxvt-unicode. But happy to agree on the larger point: it's been showing in the end product. Particularly the KDE community has done a wonderful job slimming down its codebase.
Tried KDE a few months back for a short time, was surprised that KDE's footprint (in mb of space on disk, not ram) was not that much heavier than LXQT. The desktop experience seemed polished, though for me it has far too much gimmickery (in settings), and at this point I'm quite used to Ubuntu's Gnome. But happy for a healthy ecosystem. When I got into Linux (back in ~2008 probably?), I remember the choice with regards to full DEs was KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE vs LXDE ; there are more today, but I would hate to see one of them gone for good, and wish all of them well. Good to read that KDE seems healthy.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#7> If you are wondering who in the 1999 cohort made most of the contributions, it’s Laurent Montel and who in the 2010 disappeared in 2018 it’s “Montel Laurent”. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a nice way to merge both.
I've made a shell script to automatically rename specific authors in Git repos. It's based around git filter-repo, so you'll have to install that first. https://gist.github.com/nyanpasu64/d92f346d75131d5338466eb4b...
It may be possible to ignore email addresses when replacing names, I haven't checked.
Perhaps you could create a SQLite query or update to achieve the same effect in the aggregated statistics.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#8Great to see the KDE development community being so active. I think it has really been showing in the end product. Over the past 2-3 years KDE has easily become my favorite environment, even over macOS or Windows as of late. For the most part things just work, all the default apps are solid. In particular Dolphin is hands down the best file manager out there. Kudos to the KDE devs.
I always preferred thunar or pcmanfm back when I was into exploring all those Desktop Environments and Window Managers ; some of the xfce/lxde tools are particularly light on additional libraries needed, which makes them great options if running a wm only and wanting a slim system. lxterminal with i3 or dwm for example. Actually preferred that compared to rxvt-unicode. But happy to agree on the larger point: it's bee…
I’m just a casual user, but three features I really like in Dolphin that I haven’t seen elsewhere:
- Split window, so you can have two explorers right next to each other.
- Tabs
- If you drag a file/folder into another folder, you get prompted about “copying or moving?”
In terms of health, I also appreciate that many of the devs frequent the kde subreddit, and they all seem really chill and receptive.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#9Interesting write-up. I was a big fan of KDE 3 but never used KDE 4 or 5 in earnest because every time I gave it a serious try, it would start crashing randomly or some critical piece just wouldn't work the way it was supposed to. And that was _after_ disabling a bunch of the "fluff." But a few weeks ago, I decided to give it another try (via the packages in Ubuntu 20.10) and it's been _wonderful_. I can tweak all the knobs I want to tweak, and it has been very solid so far.
I really appreciate software projects that place a higher priority on evolution rather than rm'ing huge swaths of working functionality, designing a worse replacement, and then calling it innovation. KDE did this with 4 and then took a decade to get back to something stable. Let's hope the cycle doesn't start over again anytime soon.
Re: Health of the KDE Community
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always preferred thunar or pcmanfm back when I was into exploring all those Desktop Environments and Window Managers ; some of the xfce/lxde tools are particularly light on additional libraries needed, which makes them great options if running a wm only and wanting a slim system. lxterminal with i3 or dwm for example. Actually preferred that compared to rxvt-unicode. But happy to agree on the larger point: it's bee…
I’m just a casual user, but three features I really like in Dolphin that I haven’t seen elsewhere: - Split window, so you can have two explorers right next to each other. - Tabs - If you drag a file/folder into another folder, you get prompted about “copying or moving?” In terms of health, I also appreciate that many of the devs frequent the kde subreddit, and they all seem really chill and receptive.
I am not that aware of the various file managers and their specific features these days. I guess it's about use case. I always want primarily something "which doesn't annoy", since the file manager is mostly there "just in case" for me. I live in the terminal, even for most file operations.
Back when I tested them out (years ago, so not relevant today, still): Considering dependencies (if not running KDE), but even then Dolphin always seemed to do something quite not intuitively for me. Can't name examples anymore.
Different people, different tools.