KDE Developers Are Currently Seeing 150~200 Bug Reports Per Day

[sophisticles]

But over 2 million bugs is acceptable for you? Can you point me to windows bugtracker? How many bugs are there? Ten millions? I know people don't even care reporting windows bugs, because of handicapped windows support:

m$: did you try reinstalling the software?
me: yes.
m$: oh..

When comes to KDE it's a big project with big applications. Krita alone will get many bug reports.

Let me break this down for you in a way that even you can understand.

KDE is estimate to have 23,743,965 lines of code, for easy math let's round that up to 24 million. There are currently 24 thousand open bug reports, and rising.

This means that they have one bug report for every 1000 lines of code.

As I have mentioned when i went to school the first time one of my majors was Comp Sci. I have taken college level classes in C, C++. Visual Basic, Java, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal and Python and I have had to write college final projects that had over 10.000 lines of code.

You could not pass the class if you submitted code with 10 bugs in it. I had professors that used to tell you make sure the code is bullet proof because he was going to do everything he could to break it.

I find it hard to believe that the KDE contributors have Comp Sci degrees from any school.

And for the last time, Windows is an OS, KDE is not, it's a DE, they are not the same type of software,

[mrg666]

Yeah, I have a very big mental issue, it's called knowing what I am doing and expecting other people to also show that they paid attention in school.

Seriously, much of the open source code looks like it was produced by people that are below the level of self-taught.

Since you don't have any mental issues, can you explain to me how you feel comfortable installing software on your computer that has 24,000, and counting, known open bug reports and how you feel comfortable trusting it with your personal information?

https://youtu.be/gBd2DyfpvGI?feature=shared

[sophisticles]

Ok, I see the problem now: you bought a plum when you wanted an orange, and now you feel the need to rail against plums for being terrible oranges, instead of just buying an orange.

Now, I think there is room for both plum and oranges, but just because the plum is free doesn't mean I should be happy when I get one with a worm inside.

Just because you are giving something away for free doesn't mean you can give them an inferior product and they should thank you for it.

Show some pride in your work, KDE has been around for about 30 years, by now software development should be second nature, there should be a policy that says no new features until there are zero bugs in the current product.

It's especially glaring when you consider that KDE tries to sell computers and the project does have that beautiful laptop with that gorgeous case but how is someone supposed to buy a product that they know will come with 24,000 active bugs?

If KDE made a concerted effort to eliminate all the bugs you guys would sell out of all those laptops in no time.

[sophisticles]

https://youtu.be/gBd2DyfpvGI?feature=shared

Translation, you have no answer.

[ngraham]

The ironic thing here is that I'd actually love to do basically what sophisticles is asking for, but without taking KDE private and commercial. A long-term goal of mine is to professionalize KDE so that a wing of it can run more like a company, with KDE e.V. (the nonprofit behind KDE) paying employees do focused, goal-driven, QA/stability/strategic work. There would be a strategic plan, developers who execute the plan, managers to keep them pointed in the right direction, a QA team that can block releases until they're ready, a customer service department that can handle Karens so that the bug tracker remains technical and actionable, and so on.

The thing is, you need money to do this. A lot of money. None of it is any fun, so you're not going to get volunteers to do it, and instead you have to pay people. Paying people for boring work means you get normal passionless employees who clock out at 5 PM and demand a market-clearing wage and benefits. Instead of one FOSS superstar doing the equivalent of 5 people's jobs for free (which is basically how projects like KDE and GNOME and every other FOSS project work), you need to pay 5 people, probably 6 or 7 to account for some of them taking vacations, being sick, quitting and not having been replaced yet, etc, and you have to pay out 1.3x their salaries or more after taking into account benefits and employment taxes. Then you need at least one HR and one accounting person to manage those aspects of having paid employees. You're looking at at least a million dollars a year for the personnel costs alone.

Raising this kind of money yearly is hard for a very small nonprofit. We don't want to become a commercial company (actually legally we can't; "we" meaning KDE e.V.) which means we need a lot of donations and patronships and memberships so we can afford this level of professional organization. Up until just a few years ago, KDE e.V. took in less than 100k€ a year. The gulf between even the current budget and the dream I've just sketched out is vast. If you really do want to see something like this happen, honestly the best way to do it is to donate to KDE e.V., and encourage others you know to do the same.

[sophisticles]

@ngraham

If you really want to raise money then change the way you think and operate.

KDE is open source and mostly GPL, you want it that way, fine. There is nothing that says you have to release it in binary format.

Issue a public statement that says starting with Plasma 7 there will be one official KDE distro that you release, based on LFS.

No other distro vendor is permitted to offer spins featuring the KDE DE.

if they want to do so, they need to pay you a fee per download.

There are projects making millions of dollars from your work, Rocky Linux scammed investors out of 26 million dollars in start up capital to offer a RH based distro and then they screwed them over by re-basing a lot of it on Fedora.

The offer a Rocky spin that features KDE and it sucks, it makes your project look bad, I tried it for 10 minutes and wiped it right off the drive.

Alma is another one, on their website they brag that they have one sponsor that gives them a million dollars a year and they have about a dozen sponsors.

These 2 projects alone generate millions of dollars for themselves every year and they do it in part by using your DE.

Don't be afraid to crack the whip, reach out to them and ask if they will sponsor KDE or give you contact into for their sponsors.

Suse makes millions a year from distros that feature the KDE environment, reach out to them and tell them that if they don't sponsor you they are no longer allowed to use it.

Don't be afraid to treat KDE like a business.

[andyprough]

Those of us who wait months and even years to adopt new technology, we are snickering right now. I'll stick with DWM and Xorg for awhile longer, maybe someday all your Wayland desktop promises will finally come true. When Wayland is guaranteed by credible people to not break my production applications like it did during my trial this winter I'll try it again.

[cend]

I don't think extreme elitism and zero chance for newbies to practice is the future of computer engineering. In fact, completely barring any newbies from any well-known computer engineering activities is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as while there is no way to know will a newbie become a good and respectable engineer, no newbies means absolutely no more engineers at all, which is far worse than newbies not getting things right.

[sophisticles]

I don't think extreme elitism and zero chance for newbies to practice is the future of computer engineering. In fact, completely barring any newbies from any well-known computer engineering activities is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as while there is no way to know will a newbie become a good and respectable engineer, no newbies means absolutely no more engineers at all, which is far worse than newbies not getting things right.

Are you taking the position that baring anyone that does not have a minimum education level from contributing code to projects like KDE is not a good thing?

He wants to turn KDE into a professional organization with properly run infrastructure that generates enough revenue to offer competitive salaries to role players that can elevate KDE to what it could be.

You don't do this by releasing software that has 24+ thousand open bug reports, increasing by at least 150 a day and then ignoring those reports by working on new features.

How do you feel confident installing and using a DE for work, taxes, banking, etc, when you know for a fact that there are that many issues with the software?

i have always said that the claims surrounding open source are hogwash, the many eyes looking at software argument is demonstrably false.

The reality is that the people with the knowledge and experience to fix this code base are too busy earning good livings and lack the time or patience to fix this DE.

I would treat KDE like an old house that you gut to the studs, and start fresh.

Get the basic shell running completely bug free and then add one feature at a time, verify that there are no bugs and continue.

On the bright side, I still think that KDE is probably in way better shape than Gnome, at least KDE didn't have a memory leak for 10 years that they refused to acknowledge and they don't have that stupid code contribution mandate that you are only allowed to use 2 or 8 indentations because anything else is "disrespectful" to the Gnome developers.

Seriously, WTF?

[mdedetrich]

I think you are correct, it probably isn't how it works.

So you should probably stop making suggestions, Dunning–Kruger effect and such

That's why you have so much buggy software and so much malware out there.

No its not, its because software is insanely complex and there are limited resources in the world. Ontop of that software can have bugs for reasons outside of the project, ngraham gave an example earlier

Maybe if people started taking some pride in the work, and if people stopped enabling incompetent coding by apologizing for crap software, the world would be a better place.

Sorry to break it to you, but this isn't the reason which is why your suggestions is as non-constructive and clueless as you can get.