Health of the KDE Community • Hacker News Board

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#21

Post by noisem4ker » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

ognarb wrote: post #12

bityard wrote: post #9

Interesting 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 th…

The plans for plasma 6 and kde frameworks 6 are mostly around removing old deprecated features, simplify our dependency tree and porting to qt6. And there is no plans of adding any big features.

Old deprecated features such as...? Where can I read more?

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#22

Post by zxzax » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 11:32 PM UTC

dyingkneepad wrote: post #17

The author also links to a similar assessment in the Gnome community, which I find really interesting. With Gnome we can see the interest went down after Gnome 3 was released. Many people like me ran away from it scared by the usability problems and unreliability of the extension system. And Gnome kept the same complained-about interface until today, and the project never picked up the pace it had before. While KDE4…

To give another opinion, I also thought GNOME 3 was not good, until around a few years ago. It's a lot better since then, they really ironed out a lot of the issues so you see the contributions start to raise up again recently. The extension API is also getting a lot more stable, but it's not totally there yet.

One area where I think KDE does a lot better is with QML. At the moment GTK doesn't have anything as nice as that to build apps, and that hurts contributions. There's some neat new declarative UI things like vgtk [0] that are looking promising though.

[0] https://github.com/bodil/vgtk

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#23

Post by thevagrant » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

Recently got back to using KDE and it is really polished with Opensuse Tumbleweed.

I never understood why Gnome got all the attention from distros when KDE feels like a superior option.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#24

Post by ragingrobot » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

ryantgtg wrote: post #8

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

For the split views, there is Krusader which I have found a little more stable than Dolphin of late. The last annoys me at times. I'm used to years of clicking and dragging to copy, and holding down shift to move instead. All DEs and even Windows behave this way, I think they should bring it back at least as an option.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#25

Post by ragingrobot » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

thevagrant wrote: post #23

Recently got back to using KDE and it is really polished with Opensuse Tumbleweed. I never understood why Gnome got all the attention from distros when KDE feels like a superior option.

Perhaps because GNOME is under the Red Hat umbrella, so perhaps other believe it will always have a large amount of resources available to it.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#26

Post by auxym » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 12:19 AM UTC

Just wanted to chime in and say I've had a great experience submitting a small bugfix patch to KDE, even as someone new to C++. The dev docs provided a good intro, the devs were helpful in pointing out relevant sections of code (as comments to my bug report) and constructive feedback was given on my first patch submission, leading to a second attempt that was merged.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#27

Post by Decade » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

thevagrant wrote: post #23

Recently got back to using KDE and it is really polished with Opensuse Tumbleweed. I never understood why Gnome got all the attention from distros when KDE feels like a superior option.

My impression was more than a little regionalism. KDE came from Europe. GNOME came from America. Most distros that I know come from America.

In addition, Richard Stallman made lawyers nervous of KDE by claiming that using GPL libraries with Qt (which at the time was under a proprietary license with source code available via FreeQt, definitely not a FSF-approved license) meant the KDE developers had no legal right to use GPL programs at all, even after KDE and Qt were relicensed under GPL.

Stallman eventually relented and granted permission to use the FSF’s own software, but the KDE project didn’t ask for it and didn’t bother to get forgiveness from other GPL license owners. Whether they need to go through that ceremony was never tested in court. GPLv3 switched to a much more reasonable standard, just provide the source under a compatible license.

By the time the license tempest-in-a-teapot reached a conclusion, GNOME and KDE already had substantial-enough installed bases and corporate sponsors to keep going indefinitely.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#28

Post by Jedd » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

ryantgtg wrote: post #8

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

As a long-term (since last century) KDE user, it took me a long time to get used to Dolphin and wean myself off Konqueror.

I still see some weird artefacts / behaviour in Dolphin, notably around the sizing of the quick-access panels on the left, after window resizing, or display switching (effectively causing the former).

The copy/move option was present in Konqueror also, along with the same ctrl/shift modifier option to force copy / move without the pop-up.

FWIW with Microsoft Windows, for as long as I can remember, in Explorer you can right-mouse drag directory entries around, to trigger a similar copy/move pop-up. A little-known feature, but increasingly handy as Microsoft continues its war on its own users and obfuscates actual locations & paths, with the default move-if-on-the-same-drive / copy-if-not becoming harder to intuit due to these location abstractions.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#29

Post by Jedd » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #6

jogu wrote: post #3

Great 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…

> ... for me it has far too much gimmickery (in settings), ...

One person's gimmickry is another's convenience.

Does the alleged surfeit of configuration options materially affect your usage of KDE, or just offends your sensibilities that they're available?

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#30

Post by ahartmetz » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

noisem4ker wrote: post #21

ognarb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plans for plasma 6 and kde frameworks 6 are mostly around removing old deprecated features, simplify our dependency tree and porting to qt6. And there is no plans of adding any big features.

Old deprecated features such as...? Where can I read more?

Mostly really boring stuff like deprecated API functions with better replacements and such. KDE does not remove features for the heck of it, if it happens it is almost always because of rewrites. There are no rewrites of that nature planned AFAIK.