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Health of the KDE Community

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Re: Health of the KDE Community

#11

Post by shorts_theory »

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.

I love the integrated terminal too! It's such a great idea which is now integral to my workflow.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#12

Post by ognarb »

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.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#13

Post by ognarb »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #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/d92f346d75131d5…

Yeah there is definitely ways to fix it with some simple SQL statements but I was probably a bit too lazy.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#14

Post by topspin »

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 agree. I had been using OpenSUSE for years, then converted to Kubuntu about 2 years ago. No regrets. KDE is currently excellent; quality is high and they are thankfully being very conservative in design and development. This has produced a pleasant, complete and stable DE.

The only real problem KDE has now are the scars of past mistakes that have kept people away and all too often mired in Gnome.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#15

Post by executesorder66 »

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.

- Split window (just use your window manager?) - Thunar has Tabs, and I'm sure lots of other file managers do too - That is a nice option, and others should copy it.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#16

Post by eredengrin »

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.

Like GP I'm a very happy pcmanfm user most of the time, but I use spacefm sometimes and I know it has split window as an option. Not trying to convince you to leave dolphin, just mentioning in case you like exploring.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#17

Post by dyingkneepad »

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 was also seen as a big failure during its release (many bugs!), the biggest issue was simply bugs: not so many people complaining about the direction of the project, although these people probably existed. The project was able to fix the biggest issues and keep moving on (although KDE is still quite famous for being buggier than some of the alternatives), and now they have a community that can probably be described as "healthier than before", and certainly much better when you compare to what's happening to Gnome.

Disclosure: I use Cinnamon.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#18

Post by ASalazarMX »

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…

KDE 4 frequently failed in weird ways for me, but KDE 5 has been stable and much more pleasant than Gnome. It's not only that I learned to avoid the weirdness, it definitely improved significantly.

If only it didn't assume my external screens are part of the same touch surface of my laptop, because that makes touch unusable... maybe KDE 6.

Re: Health of the KDE Community

#20

Post by noisem4ker »

executesorder66 wrote: post #15
ryantgtg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- Split window (just use your window manager?) - Thunar has Tabs, and I'm sure lots of other file managers do too - That is a nice option, and others should copy it.

Agreed about tabs and split windows. I think they take over the window manager's job, and do it poorly.

About the menu, it is nice, but not unique. Windows' Explorer, for example, shows it when dragging with the right mouse button. Options include copying, moving, zipping and actions from any registered shell handlers.

That said, I think KDE is still the best desktop environment across all the operating systems I've tried.

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