Martin Flöser Steps Down As Maintainer Of KDE's KWin

[aufkrawall]

Quality of Kwin on Xorg wasn't really satisfying, bugs didn't get fixed...

[ngraham]

Responding to a troll, obviously, but it's not the specific words, but the mindset of the individuals involved. Once SJW's infect a project, it's all downhill from there.

Heavily involved in the project; cannot confirm. KDE is a place to produce amazing software, not a vehicle for contemporary politics. It just doesn't come up.

[schmidtbag]

My best guesses would be https://phabricator.kde.org/D12732 and https://phabricator.kde.org/D12795 given security was mentioned, and potentially, given the timing, https://phabricator.kde.org/T8707 with https://phabricator.kde.org/D13276, but that's guesses, there might be more and others.

Thanks for the links. I think they answer my question pretty well.

I for one find it irritating when Dolphin doesn't/didn't have root access, and I think a warning is plenty sufficient (even if it's an annoying one that you can't get rid of). I understand his concerns, but I don't think he's weighing the situation correctly - pretty much the only people using Dolphin under root are people who own the PC in the first place, and know what they're doing. A hacker is going to use command-line tools, and someone who doesn't own the PC won't (or shouldn't) know the root password. His rambling about catering to every user's wish sounds more like a scapegoat to deliberate negligence; you have to go out of your way to prevent a program from running in root, so he's not just denying what users request, he's going against it (and from what I can tell, partially out of spite). I don't disagree with the security issues, but he's taking it a little too seriously.

As for the window border thing, I don't get what the advantage is of Martin's proposal, and I think he's blowing the situation way out of proportion. From what I can tell, it seems he's mostly just upset over VDG stepping on his turf, and he's being deliberately difficult as a result. Kind of irritating, since it seems that resulted in requesting to remove borders, which I'm not fond of.


Perhaps VDG isn't doing their job correctly, but I also think his bureaucracy is counter-productive.

[bobwya]

Quality of Kwin on Xorg wasn't really satisfying, bugs didn't get fixed...

Hmmm...
Martins rather exuberant hatred of Nvidia and dislike of "obsolete technologies", like X, were not ideal...
A more neutral developer (or set of developers) would be a pleasant change.
But sadly we're loosing Martin's expertise... Hopefuly KWin won't be hit by a bus now...

[Tomin]

But sadly we're loosing Martin's expertise... Hopefuly KWin won't be hit by a bus now...

You and many others are missing that he is not leaving KWin. They can still talk with him and he will still write code. I understood from the message that he hadn't been doing all the things he probably should have been like reviewing patches due to lack of motivation so it's probably better that KWin has people that want to do these things.

[Awesomeness]

This is completely false information, and I am flabbergasted how this editorial mistake could arise.

Yeah, how could it… your mail https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasm...ne/086122.html just has "Stepping down as maintainer" as headline…

[Fuchs]

Yeah, how could it… your mail https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasm...ne/086122.html just has "Stepping down as maintainer" as headline…

Please tell me this was sarcasm.

That's how mailing lists work, rest assured that at least some clients will break if you alter the subject.
With that logic everybody replying to that thread would be stepping down as a maintainer.

And from a "news outlet", even a one man show like phoronix, I expect a bit more research than just reading mail subjects before handing out false news that are quite the opposite of what actually happened. At least it was corrected quickly.

kr

Fuchs

[Vistaus]

Then again sometimes even security changes should have more discussion before becoming final, like with the recent furore around Nautilus's ability to execute files.

Believe it or not, but the GNOME Team actually listened to the users for once and restored said functionality: https://news.softpedia.com/news/look...s-521222.shtml

[darclide]

Wait, what? What features did we remove?

That's easy but a lot of manual work to list, so I leave the exercise to the reader to just go through the current kcm redesigns and look for feature parity. That's actually a great diff view so you can see which settings got lost.

Half of the goal of the Usability & Productivity initiative is to make KDE Plasma a good desktop for power users.

Awesome! Then don't remove options and functionality just because someone thinks that nobody uses that anyway, or that it just isn't modern, or that it makes the GUI look cluttered.

What can we do better?

Stop putting form in front of function, don't remove separators and the likes just because it makes the UI look less crowded, don't drive off developers and instead try to find compromises with them, don't make half of KDE look like mobile apps that someone dragged to the desktop (a lot of concepts just don't work with mouse and keyboard, or not as efficient) and so on, the list is very long.

[smitty3268]

I think this was the right decision. Reading through his explanation, it's clear that he was becoming frustrated by having to justify saying no as maintainer, but that's the most important part of it. Not just saying no - explaining why it's such a bad idea that it can't be accepted, and helping provide a way forward that works for everyone. Providing no explanation just spreads the frustration around to everyone else.

Having not worked with the VDG, I don't think anyone here can really properly evaluate if his criticisms are accurate or not. Certainly some of what he says sounds unfortunate, but it's difficult for an outsider to judge if he's overstating his case or not. I do think there is a valid argument to focus on making the majority of your userbase happy while ignoring the 1% who moan the loudest, but I also think that a focus on bug-fixing and polishing over core new features is absolutely needed as well.

Hopefully kwin as a project keeps humming along without too much disruption due to this.