A Number Of KDE Apps Will Be Dropped If They Don't Get Ported To KF5

[starshipeleven]

This isn't particularly about Amarok but what the hell happened to all the Linux music players? None of them seem to be maintained anymore. Back when I started using Linux in '06 there were hundreds of music players because everyone and their grandmother wanted to develop a music player (along with a text editor and a file manager). WTF happened? Now there's like 3 or 4 and they're either barely maintained or not maintained at all.

VLC killed them all.

[Staffan]

This isn't particularly about Amarok but what the hell happened to all the Linux music players? None of them seem to be maintained anymore. Back when I started using Linux in '06 there were hundreds of music players because everyone and their grandmother wanted to develop a music player (along with a text editor and a file manager). WTF happened? Now there's like 3 or 4 and they're either barely maintained or not maintained at all.

Nobody needs them anymore now that everyone is streaming. Whenever I play some of my old mp3:s I just use mplayer in a konsole window. Why bother with these overly complicated gui applications for something as simple as playing a sound file?

[schmidtbag]

I have a beautiful solution to this "let's break APIs because we love doing that and we hate porting applications because we love Plasma and people should enjoy running Plasma and nothing else".

Drop KDE5 altogether. Stop wasting your time because KDE5 is slowly dying anyways.

Gee, I wasn't aware your opinion was the ultimate truth. If only we all knew KDE was useless sooner, we wouldn't have to have this discussion [/sarcasm]

I personally am fully in-favor of dropping these older applications. Qt4 and all of the KDE libraries depending on it is a lot of unnecessary bloat. KDE is already pretty heavy as-is. Qt4 is effectively useless, seeing as Qt5 is better in almost every way.

It generally isn't difficult to port applications from Qt4 to Qt5. It should only take a couple days to do, so if nobody feels like doing it then there really is no point in holding onto them.

[Awesomeness]

Someone actually ported Konqueror? WTF?!?

[starshipeleven]

People actually believe KDE libraries should ... what a shocker ... NOT be used to create third party applications which were the exact reason for KDE to become popular.

The exact reason why KDE became infamous you mean. We still get people claiming KDE is bloated because all its apps rely/relied on a single huge monolithic library so even if you wanted to run ONE application not linked to KDE in any way you had to pull down basically the whole KDE with it.

As long as the applications are the basic stuff bundled with a desktop that's OK as you need those libs for the DE anyay, but when someone wants to use say Kwrite (basic text editor) outside KDE and sees that there are hundreds of MBs of dependencies, something is wrong.

Sure they have been working to modularize that a bit, but historically it was like that and you can't deny it.

What's KDE good for then?.

It's a DE, Desktop environment. That's a hard enough task. The name is an acronym of "K Desktop Environment", btw.

And then the biggest gem: "AUTHORS refused to port them"? Are you imbecile? People created perfectly working applications like they do with Windows/Win32. Alas the latter work for tens of years (most 32bit applications created for Windows 95 run just fine in 2016 in Windows 10, 21 years after they were created) while for some retarded reasons AUTHORS should bother rewriting their applications for wonderful KDE every time its developers decide to break backward compatibility.

AHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH

Nice troll bullshit, but what you just said is wrong. The majority of applications insta-crash on start or are unstable even when jumping from XP to Win7 (even by using compatibility modes), you don't really want to know how hard win95 stuff breaks in win10.

You have no fucking idea of how much winXP VMs I had to install in some places because their total shit company software would NOT run at all in windows 7 or 8. (or how many company PCs are still on XP now because of the same reason)

And let's not go into games, many require hacks to start at all, IF they can be hacked at all.

[stikonas]

It's been replaced with QDialog, kdialog is part of kdelibs4.

kopete on the list is the only program which I'm using. That bundled crap on mint 18 does not stay online and forgets my client settings all the time(was it transmitter or something like that).

In this context Kdialog referenced wasn't a class in qt or kdellibs. It is an application with the same name https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdialog.git

[Azrael5]

For legacy program is convenient to install legacy operating system: see at XP (which is the best for legacy programs and legacy machine in 32bit mode). So it's good to have at least one machine or one hard drive used for legacy.

[ileonte]

And then the biggest gem: "AUTHORS refused to port them"? Are you imbecile? People created perfectly working applications like they do with Windows/Win32. Alas the latter work for tens of years (most 32bit applications created for Windows 95 run just fine in 2016 in Windows 10, 21 years after they were created) while for some retarded reasons AUTHORS should bother rewriting their applications for wonderful KDE every time its developers decide to break backward compatibility.

Fuck it, I'll bite: maintaining an API that was invented more that 20 years ago (in a totally different environment, with totally different expectations of where and HOW that code is expected to run) just for the sake of having old applications run is not only stupid, it's criminally irresponsible. Just look at all the horrendous shit WIN32 API has in it, like the whole global atom tables crap that was recently highlighted. Sure, your 20 year old FoxPro executable still works in 2016, enjoy the exploit which OH BY THE WAY is 100% correct usage of the API.

Yes, AUTHORS are supposed to keep their apps updated. This includes making them work with new APIs as they become available. If you don't think this is true then please, just stop writing apps. We'll all be better off in the end.

[birdie]

It generally isn't difficult to port applications from Qt4 to Qt5. It should only take a couple days to do, so if nobody feels like doing it then there really is no point in holding onto them.

Gee, you know nothing about the internals of KDE, right? Because if you had a modicum of knowledge you'd soon find out that KDE4 had KDE3 compatibility classes which were finally removed in KF5 which made all those yet to be ported properly applications suddenly incompatible with KDE5.

In short KDE devs believe they know what applications we should run and we shouldn't use anything but that. Actually Gnome developers have the same plans ;-) They want to make the life of independent devs a hell on Earth.

[boxie]

Gee, you know nothing about the internals of KDE, right? Because if you had a modicum of knowledge you'd soon find out that KDE4 had KDE3 compatibility classes which were finally removed in KF5 which made all those yet to be ported properly applications suddenly incompatible with KDE5.

In short KDE devs believe they know what applications we should run and we shouldn't use anything but that. Actually Gnome developers have the same plans ;-) They want to make the life of independent devs a hell on Earth.

So... nothing should change, ever, because you got your code working?