KDE Developer On Martin Flöser's Departure: VDG Does Not Exist

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Developer On Martin Flöser's Departure: VDG Does Not Exist

KDE developer Alessandro Longo has penned a response about the KDE "Visual Design Group" with Martin Flöser announcing earlier today he is stepping away as KWin maintainer in part due to his frustrations with the VDG...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-VDG-Not-Exist

[tildearrow]

Typo?

Alex was quick to comment that the V/Visual Design Group has

[Michael]

Typo?

it was the visual design group but now apparently just the V design group,

[cl333r]

Was Martin Floser working for free?

[zoomblab]

The non existant VDG has so far worked wonders to turn KDE 5 into a more functional and beautiful environment than KDE 4. AFAIK they have contributed a pragmatic view that has fixed some of the damage that has been introduced during KDE 4 as "innovations", thus making the environment more enterpisey which is what I personaly like. They even take into account user proposals (I know they did mine regarding the somewhat disfunctional shadow window decorations before 5.12).

[TemplarGR]

Yay, drama!

Personally, i am glad we got rid of this Martin guy. A mediocre developer who did more harm than good. KWin is EASILY the worst part of KDE and has been for over a decade. I am using KDE because it let's me arrange my workflow better than Gnome and i like its apps better, but boy every day i am wishing for another compositor. Mutter works so much better it is not even funny. Kwin still crashes and glitches regurarly, and don't get me started on the 4.x days... And despite the still buggy state of Kwin, it is not exactly full of features. It i still behind in Wayland support, for example.

This guy was more known for his blog-drama than his actually worthy contribution, so let him step down so we can have some actual new people lead the project for a change...

[GrayShade]

Yay, drama!

Personally, i am glad we got rid of this Martin guy. A mediocre developer who did more harm than good. KWin is EASILY the worst part of KDE and has been for over a decade. I am using KDE because it let's me arrange my workflow better than Gnome and i like its apps better, but boy every day i am wishing for another compositor. Mutter works so much better it is not even funny. Kwin still crashes and glitches regurarly, and don't get me started on the 4.x days... And despite the still buggy state of Kwin, it is not exactly full of features. It i still behind in Wayland support, for example.

This guy was more known for his blog-drama than his actually worthy contribution, so let him step down so we can have some actual new people lead the project for a change...

While I also disliked his way of writing, I think you should give him credit for his work. If I recall correctly, he basically implemented the KWin test suite. With Linux drivers and distro fragmentation being what they are, and KDE having maybe two or three orders of magnitude less resources, I don't think it's fair to blame him for the KWin issues.

And certainly not without looking at GNOME, where notifications make the compositor stutter terribly because of its design decisions. GNOME Shell kept crashing for months and still leaks memory because of the interactions between the C memory management (reference counting) and JavaScript's GC. And no one is working on a better design, because nobody cares enough.

So don't criticize the man, he did more for the Linux desktop than maybe more than 99% of the users here, including me and you.

[Slartifartblast]

Goodbye Martin we won't miss you and your rudeness, glad to get rid of an anti-Nvidia zealot who never tested his code on Nvidia. Kwin was and is still extremely buggy, I often had to run compiz until bugs were fixed in Kwin.

[darclide]

For something that doesn't exist they sure are pushy.

Also the blog post can be summarized as "Martin was writing nonsense, but every single point he criticized is an area we need to improve in". Great. At least maybe things improve before even more people are driven off.

What does the V in VDG stand for if not visual? Maybe it is pronounced "we", as in "we are the only ones with views that matter" ...

[lucrus]

Goodbye Martin we won't miss you and your rudeness, glad to get rid of an anti-Nvidia zealot who never tested his code on Nvidia. Kwin was and is still extremely buggy, I often had to run compiz until bugs were fixed in Kwin.

Are you seriously expecting a volunteer to test his code on some random unsupported hardware that he probably does not even own and that he does not want to own? I'm sorry you have NVidia hardware, I have it too, but it's not fair to lay the blame on him for our bad choices.

Funny you talk about HIS rudeness...