KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits

[birdie]

kraftman,

Sometimes I make myself open and read your posts but all I see is "Linux has no problems", "You're a moron", "the list is moronic", and "all the people agreeing with it are stupid idiots".

Way to go, sir!

However most amusingly and contrary to your one-dimensional knee jerk reaction, people do agree and support this imbecile list. Maybe it's because you don't actually use Linux? ;-)

[jvillain]

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.

Don't blame KDE here. The audio component of Gnome is Pulse. The audio component of KDE is Phonon. The fact that a number of the distros through their arrogance have tried and tried and tried to force Pulse down our throats even though it is drastically flawed is not KDE's fault. I had nothing but problems until I yanked Pulse out except for the libs which I can't remove because of some stupid dependency shoved in by the Fedora package maintainers. It meant having to add in a config file to get the ALSA mixer working but since then (several years ago) my audio has run flawlessly. Yo, distro maintainers if I want to run Gnome I will run Gnome. Until then stop trying to force Gnome down my throat with stupid stunts like forcing us to take Pulse. Seriously who ever though that was a good idea? I mean other than Pottering?

[Larian]

May I ask which distributions?

Looks like I mis-spoke there, but didn't Canonical kill off their Kubuntu branch? I was honestly under the impression that it was becoming a rare bird and losing funding left and right. Am I mistaken?

[FutureSuture]

I am way too technically inept to understand what all the fuss is about but I use Linux Mint KDE via a USB and am more than happy with it. The MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce variants of Linux Mint have given me problems, always causing me to return to the KDE variant. It gives me the most customization options and also happens to closely resemble Windows 7 (although I've been told that Windows 7 actually closely resembles KDE). I do hope KDE continues to stick around.

[Teho]

Don't blame KDE here. The audio component of Gnome is Pulse. The audio component of KDE is Phonon. The fact that a number of the distros through their arrogance have tried and tried and tried to force Pulse down our throats even though it is drastically flawed is not KDE's fault.

PulseAudio is not Gnome technology nor is Phonon replacement for it. Phonon-GStreamer doesn't even support non-PulseAudio setups offically. I have no idea what makes you think that PA is somehow flawed as to me it seems like the best thing that has ever happened to audio on Linux. It supports many features that I couldn't live without like:
-Multiple simultaneous outputs
-Easy output and channel swapping
-Proper bluetooth support
-Application specific and systemwide volume control and equalizers
-Jack detection
...among others.

Seriously who ever though that was a good idea? I mean other than Pottering?

Considering the fact that it's used by all popular desktop distributions and all non-Android Linux mobile operating systems I would say that quite a few. Pottering hasn't even worked on PulseAudio for years now and it's still the most actively developed open source audio server out there.

Looks like I mis-spoke there, but didn't Canonical kill off their Kubuntu branch? I was honestly under the impression that it was becoming a rare bird and losing funding left and right. Am I mistaken?

Not quite. Canonical moved their only paid Kubuntu developer to work on other stuff but then he was then hired by Blue Systems to continue his work on Kubuntu. Canonical still provides the developement infrastucture and hostring for Kubuntu. So essentially nothing has changed.

[boast]

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.

I just did System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon, and for audio playback set HDMI as the top preference, and it works fine.

I'm using kde 4.9 beta 2 and it still has the problem that the windowbar plasmoid often has problems shifting the window entries to the left and even displays two entries at the same place. That's not a new problem with the beta. That has been there for a long time and just looks bad.

Wow, can't believe they haven't fixed that yet.

[e8hffff]

I think, as peter points out, nowadays applications had become really bloated behind the scenes with no major usability improvements.

I think he's actually saying that it's very difficult to program with little reward. Today, what appears to be simple is really complex. Steve Jobs and Apple have moved computing into a user-friendly simplified direction, and that is good... but it means one needs to come up with innovative methods, yet have complex, feature rich abilities.

After 6 years of work Peter can't see much changed, even though there has been a horde of work. I programme myself and I can understand this.

Example some people are also good at graphics and others with structure. Someone can spend a day doing an icon, where another a few hours. A whole day for an icon, means you sacrifice your life. KDE is a project with few workers, so getting supporters means a lot of work is done by those that are active and it can be inefficient and detrimental to one's life.

Peter is saying he's near burnt out.

[Larian]

Don't blame KDE here. The audio component of Gnome is Pulse. The audio component of KDE is Phonon. The fact that a number of the distros through their arrogance have tried and tried and tried to force Pulse down our throats even though it is drastically flawed is not KDE's fault. I had nothing but problems until I yanked Pulse out except for the libs which I can't remove because of some stupid dependency shoved in by the Fedora package maintainers. It meant having to add in a config file to get the ALSA mixer working but since then (several years ago) my audio has run flawlessly. Yo, distro maintainers if I want to run Gnome I will run Gnome. Until then stop trying to force Gnome down my throat with stupid stunts like forcing us to take Pulse. Seriously who ever though that was a good idea? I mean other than Pottering?

I feel like I've kicked the hornet's nest here, but I've got to stand by my observations: KDE was de-facto broken on Mint 13 because of hidden settings and audio incompatibility with industry standard hardware. I'm sure there is some configuration of hardware and software that works really well, but we didn't have that. For a new user just trying Linux, the KDE disk wouldn't play nice while the Gnome disk would. Yes, I'm not a fan of Pulse. Yes, it's a bloated layer that doesn't bring anything practical to the game for the majority of users. Yes we got it early, broken, and barely supported. But when it works, it works well.

Funny how the PulseAudio argument is of exactly the same structure as the KDE arguments I've received so far, but KDE isn't broken, it's the distro packager's fault... Phonon, blah blah blah. Look, I don't care. The KDE stuff didn't work. It just didn't. And the guy didn't care why, either. He isn't the least bit interested in politics and idealism. He wanted a method of getting his hardware to respond and interoperate like an OS is supposed to do, and he didn't want to go the Windows route. The KDE package didn't deliver. No matter what else is said or what apologetics are offered, you will not be able to wash away the simple fact that it didn't work, and it made KDE look even worse than it previously did in my sight. To us - that day - KDE was anything but a competitive option. It fell on its face right out of the gate.

My personal bitch with KDE is that it seemed locked down when I first tried it in version 4. Settings were in odd places when they could be found at all, I was completely unable to customize my desktop to my satisfaction (they wanted a "unified experience" on the desktop, and fuck what I wanted to do), and there were all these *surprise!* features that got in the way more than they added to my experience, while others were so unintuitive that I'm not sure I could figure out what they were for even today. But as I said, I'm comfortable in a Gnome 2 environment, and KDE is the dark side of the moon in comparison.

[Larian]

I just did System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon, and for audio playback set HDMI as the top preference, and it works fine. .

We did mess around with Phonon as well but to no effect. To my mind, on a fresh install, things like this should be detected automatically and made the default. I don't know why the audio wasn't piped correctly either, and no set of sliders, work in ALSA-mixer, or burning little effigies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs solved the problem.

Bug?

[Awesomeness]

Who is the KDE initiator uses GNOME now?

There is only one KDE initiator: Matthias Ettrich.
Unless something changed, he currently works for Nokia on Qt. I cannot find it now but a few years back he held a presentation (either at Akademy, some Qt event, or Desktop Summit) and he used Ubuntu with GŃOME 2.x and he was asked why he used GNOME and he said that it matched his vision for KDE more than what KDE actually became.
I do now know what he uses today. As a Ubuntu user maybe Unity but that's just speculation.

Anyway: KDE survived his departure and the community actually even grew a lot since then. If KDE survived the departure of its founder to the competing side, KDE can even more so survive Peter's departure.

I fully agree with him that KDE lacks in a few places. As I mentioned the web browser side is one aspect. Kontact is not too well maintained either (although I find it better than Thunderbird or any web mailer). I have no religious attachment to KDE. It's not all or nothing to me (Peter's comments read to me like ?aspect X and Y suck, therefore everything sucks?). If something does not work well, I use something else. I wonder why he does not do the same. It's not like the state of, say, Kontact has anything to do with Dolphin. I've seen people use Thunderbird instead of Kontact under Plasma Desktop, I've seen people use Pidgin instead of Kopete, I've seen people using LibreOffice instead of KOffice/Calligra.
What I don't agree with is the reason he gives for leaving. Why can't he just switch components as I and many other people did?

The core Plasma Desktop experience is IMO great and Plasma Desktop is very well maintained and in the process of being modernized (see libplasma2 and the QML ports of applets).