KDE SC 4.5 Just Got Hit With A One-Week Delay

[ChrisXY]

KDE makes a nice desktop. Good for them. I wish more distros shipped it by default rather than Gnome. Not that I have anything against gnome, it's just the lopsided "market share" given how good KDE really is.

So when you say KDE is good, do you mean Plasma finally stops segfaulting all the time with 4.5?

[pingufunkybeat]

Plasma hasn't segfaulted for years here. Then again, I don't do fancy stuff, just a couple of widgets and hiding panels.

"All the time" sounds extreme. Have you reported a bug?

[KAMiKAZOW]

From my understanding, KDE used to have the lionshare of the Linux desktop market in the US. That changed with KDE 4.0.0, because people started to adopt it before it was ready for mainstream use.

You understand wrong.
Red Hat has always been the leading Linux distributor in the US and ever since GNOME exists, Red Hat defaults to it (still applies to Fedora).
In turn GNOME probably always had more users in the US.

The situation was different in Europe with both Mandrake/Mandriva and SUSE defaulting to KDE's desktop.

This changed in 2004: Novell bought SUSE after it already bought the GNOME founder's company Ximian. With Ximian bought first its executives were put in charge of Linux operations at Novell. Needless to say one of their first orders was to kill KDE from SUSE Linux and replace it completely with GNOME. After uprising by its customers the plans were changed and KDE was kept intact, but degraded to an alternative option.
Considering that independent SUSE never had a strong standing in the US, those events didn't change the DE market share in the US much.
It did, however, make GNOME the de facto enterprise DE.

Also in 2004 the first version of Ubuntu was released which shook up the market shares a bit. Ubuntu didn't increase the overall user base of Linux (though Canonical claims that), but it shifted the share within the overall Linux market.

Later openSUSE was formed which defaults do KDE's desktop.
Thanks to Novell's involvement I wouldn't be surprised if that gained the recognition of KDE within the non-enterprise user base.
Also Fedora has a well respected KDE ?spin? which is promoted quite well. This should've increased KDE's US reputation as well.

And then there's Debian. God who knows what its users are actually using. Repo statistics suggest that GNOME may have the lead, but considering that even simple things like nm-applet carry a bunch of GNOME dependencies and KNetworkManager4 wasn't usable for quite some time, those statistics are influenced by such cases.
I use KDE Plasma, but I also use nm-applet, in the past I used Brasero (when K3b was still alpha), I use Firefox, and so on.

KDE 4.0.0 was never ever laid the hands of actual users. Never. KDE only releases source code packages which are then distributed to users by ? you guessed it ? distributors.

All major distributions except Fedora-KDE stayed with KDE 3.5. Only Fedora switched to some 4.0.x release, but Fedora isn't targeted at users anyway, but developers and alike.

And there is also one player that gets overlooked quite often: Xfce.
It's more or less a lightweight GNOME clone, eating away GNOME's market share.

I didn't see any newer statistics recently, but if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that thanks to openSUSE's growth in the US, Fedora's better marketing for the KDE spin, and Xfce probably KDE's desktop has a slight lead over GNOME, but when combining the whole GTK camp (GNOME, Xfce, MeeGo Netbook, even LXDE), that one leads over the Qt camp which currently consists of KDE alone.

[KAMiKAZOW]

So when you say KDE is good, do you mean Plasma finally stops segfaulting all the time with 4.5?

Stop using Kubuntu or Arch and get a working distribution, like openSUSE.

[KDesk]

the only thing I can find about Qt 4.7 release is that RC1 will be tagged on August 5th and that probably another RC will follow. More here

Thank you for the info Tsiolkovsky!

[V!NCENT]

Lol ever since I stopped using Kubuntu there hasn't been a single Plasma crash. I suggest Fedora with RPMFusion and it's rock solid all the way. Way more solid than Gnome on Fedora, which frequently crashes. More over KDE4 crashes were due to a dbus bug, which is fixed now.

[Apopas]

Ubuntu didn't increase the overall user base of Linux (though Canonical claims that), but it shifted the share within the overall Linux market.

I don't think so. For example in the greek forums of Ubuntu where I am moderator, we have about 6000 members. Never ever was such a big Linux community in Greece, but the most important thing is that the vast majority and I mean VAST, are new Linux users. Totally noobs who don't even know how to run ls in the terminal. Ofcourse most of them are dual booters but even like that, with Ubuntu we have a tremendous boost in the Linux community which keeps improving.
Also, by polls we do, it seems that a lot of users who become more or less familiar with Ubuntu, turn to change to Kubuntu. KDE is very popular even in this Gnome-centric distro.

[pingufunkybeat]

Here in Germany, when people say "Ubuntu", they typically mean "Kubuntu". When it gets deployed by companies, governments and universities, it typically gets KDE as the default desktop.

On the other hand, Germany has always been a KDE stronghold. Here, running GNOME is something exotic.

[RealNC]

Well, in Germany KDE was even in the news (I mean TV) more than once because of a high profile award its initial developer won.

[yotambien]

You understand wrong.
Red Hat has always been the leading Linux distributor in the US and ever since GNOME exists, Red Hat defaults to it (still applies to Fedora).
In turn GNOME probably always had more users in the US.

Are you really saying that Red Hat is the Linux distribution more widely used in the US? I find that odd.

Also in 2004 the first version of Ubuntu was released which shook up the market shares a bit. Ubuntu didn't increase the overall user base of Linux (though Canonical claims that), but it shifted the share within the overall Linux market.

Do you have some data to backup this? The perception that Ubuntu brought a lot of new users is everywhere. Web hits statistics prove that in the desktop it's used as much or more than the rest of the distributions taken together. Are you claiming that all that growth was basically achieved at the expense of other distributions?