KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[markg85]

That's my experience as well, but what about this bug that has a bunch of duplicates (with new ones appearing regularly) and it took 1 year and a half to change from Unconfirmed to New? It's a crash and apparently no one gives a damn. And before someone says "why don't you fix it then?" I would try to if I was still using KDE, but I got fed up with all the bugs/crashes/graphical artifacts/glitches and apps requiring that I waste 5 minutes configuring them before being able to use them.

Actually when I was still using KDE I thought that Dolphin was an awesome file manager. Unless it got worse recently I don't understand all the bad rep.

Don't mind the change from unconfirmed to new. I thread both status as bugs. I'm sure others don't care about that one either.
As for fixing bugs which aren't crashes and ones that are. I personally hardly ever look at crash bugs, i usually look at the "easier and smaller" bugs since that's simply more fun for me. Crashes can be quite painful to trace and fix.

[e8hffff]

If you read Peter's blog entry, he's more or less stepping down from the dolphin project manager position. He still can contribute, but at his own leisure. Also there are other competent Devs there to keep up the good works.

Apart from direct file name editing, which I hear is coming in KDE 4.9, then Dolphin is the best file manager out there.

[tuke81]

That's my experience as well, but what about [URL="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251871"]...

Actually when I was still using KDE I thought that Dolphin was an awesome file manager. Unless it got worse recently I don't understand all the bad rep.

Default kde file manager was konqueror, which is still superior to dolphin(konqueror is quite useless as web browser, but best feature rich file manager for kde). I always replace dolphin with konqueror as default file manager.

[crazycheese]

KDE was and stays the most functional desktop environment for Linux. Quite a shame he left, really. :/

[GreatEmerald]

In my experience, KDE has been getting more and more polished with every release. In fact, the last time I upgraded Amarok gained a silver icon to match the themes of the rest, and I hear the next release has unified tooltips... And that's just a few small, but very noticeable things. That said, it does always have some odd quirks, such as the quick launch buttons that disappear each time I install a new program, and that reappear whenever I open the taskbar settings and hit 'apply'... But then the system is so modular that it's to be expected. The stability has been getting better all the time, too. So I'm quite happy with it.

I never really liked GNOME that much, as to me version 2 feels like XFCE with unnecessary bloat; haven't tried version 3 yet since I don't really have any reason to. Unity has horrible control just to be different. XFCE is my second favourite for whenever I need a lightweight environment. So I never tried LXDE due to the same thing - there is no reason to. And, well, IceWM has too few configuration options. While TWM is pretty cool for whenever you feel like time travelling. So yeap, I'll stay with KDE, thank you very much.

[GreatEmerald]

Default kde file manager was konqueror, which is still superior to dolphin(konqueror is quite useless as web browser, but best feature rich file manager for kde). I always replace dolphin with konqueror as default file manager.

Yea, personally I don't see why they changed that. I never saw anything wrong with Konqueror. But then Dolphin isn't too bad either, even though I'm not a fan of the recent "button to reveal the menu" approach, which feels like taken from MS Office 2007+... And recent Firefoxes did that too...

[Larian]

It's quite easy to do with KMix but for Veromix plasmoid is absolutely fantastic for managin audio outputs. It supports most of the PulseAudio functionality and probably more than any other GUI frontend available. In nine times out of ten changing settings in KDE is easier than in Gnome because they aren't hidden. The problem with that is that the ammount of different settings might get bit overwhelming.

KMix and Veromix may be just awesome, but there was no getting it to pipe audio through the HDMI cable. We dug through sound systems for two hours trying and applying settings to no effect. We took the "engineer's solution" route and killed the problem by installing an alternate distro with the GNOME3 environment, where audio just worked out of the box (Mint 13 with KDE to Mint 13 with GNOME, if you care to know). It wasn't an overabundance of settings that caused the problem - KDE simply failed us. We were under PulseAudio in both distros, and the exact same thing which worked under GNOME didn't do squat in KDE. That's a problem, and I'm frankly amazed that the desktop environment was causing it. Two hours of trying to get something as basic as audio piped to the correct port is more than a fair shake, I'd say.

[[Knuckles]]

THIS

I've been a KDE User since 1.x as well and I'm sick and tired of waiting for a stable KDE desktop. Each release brings new bugs and most of the time many regressions as well. The QA of many KDE projects just sucks and due to the lack of a release manager who is willing to delay the release or even revert some applications back to a previous version, KDE will always be buggy.

Stability has always been more important than features but it seems KDE will never understand that.

Indeed, as you said, as a KDE user since 4.0 I keep looking forward to the next release, because this or that bug got fixed in trunk and is only scheduled for the next release. I install the next release, and new things are broken. It's a pity that you keep feeling the urge to upgrade KDE not because you are happy with you desktop and want those awesome new features, but because something very annoying is broken, and you know/hope they are fixed now.

And then you need to upgrade your distro because many distros don't maintain current KDE versions for older versions. And then the cycle restarts.

[Melcar]

All I have to say is that I won?t be able to function without KDE.

[kraftman]

It's sad, because KDE is the best DE ever made. However, Ubuntu and Unity are in the best position to gain significant market share. They're both made by the same company and in the result everything should play nice together. In the long run Fedora and Gnome also seems to become interesting, but default GS sucks and Fedora isn't so good for noobs right now. I wish A. Seigo and the rest from KDE camp to join Canonical.