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Comment by qplex | Hacker News Reader

I saw screenshots of KDE 1.0 desktops [0] in a local computer magazine. I thought it looked very cool and wanted to try it on my machine. This was many years ago.

I'm not sure if KDE was ever very popular, but these days it seems to be hard to find anyone who actually uses it.

[0] https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/ganroth.jpg

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KDE has never been my cup of tea, but I spent a solid two weeks using Plasma on a test laptop just to see how it fared, and it's perfectly usable. That's the best I can say. There were alot of things I liked about it--the deep level of customization options, fairly good performance and not too heavy on resources, and Yakuake might still be my favorite drop-down console app--but at the end of the day I said "Okay, cool" and went back to a Gtk-based desktop where I felt more comfortable.

I would have agreed a couple of years ago, but when I moved this spring it just worked. Everything was in the right place and intuitive.

Oddly enough there seems to be an EU/US split with KDE and GNOME. SUSE has long been a KDE backer.

Not that odd: Qt, the toolkit KDE is built on, originated in Europe at Trolltech. There has always been a pretty clear split where European companies (like SuSE) built on KDE/QT/C++ and American companies went with GNOME/GTK/C.

What does it matter if Trolltech originated in Europe? I didn't know that until now.

The closer the company, the more likely the local ecosystem will adopt its solutions over competitors from afar. Customers get better access to top hackers and top management, and the network of users can reach critical mass and influence others: why choose GTK when everyone that could help you in Oslo knows Qt so well? And the same, vice-versa, in other places.

It’s one of the reason the SF / Portland / NY / Boston / Berlin / London clusters are so valuable for companies of all sorts: the network effects are real.

This was even more critical back then, 20 years ago: the internet was in its infancy (and slow), and flying was much more expensive than it is today.

The comment [1] could be relevant.

I use KDE, if I introduce someone to Linux they're likely to use KDE as well. If significant "influencers" use KDE, like universities and people writing software for the public sector, then many casual users will follow.

SUSE is German, Mandrake (Mandriva) was French, both defaulted to KDE. When I first used Linux, it was easy to find a magazine with an installation CD for one of these. Presumably there was some sponsorship, or simply network effect.

Also, Gnome's top menu bar felt like it was trying to imitate Mac OS, which has always been less common in Europe than North America.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18367356

Actually, most of the packages in openSUSE related to KDE software are handled by community people: two SUSE employees are part of the team, but they don't work on KDE stuff as part of their day jobs.

Disclaimer: I co-maintain the KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications packages in openSUSE and I'm not employed or affiliated with SUSE.

> I'm not sure if KDE was ever very popular

Back in the days of KDE 3, every survey showed KDE being the most popular Linux desktop by a very wide margin. I have no idea what the numbers are today.

When KDE3 was around, I would use KDE3 apps in a GNOME 2 desktop, with the KDE4 transition, I found KDE quite annoying to use and switched to using a variety of applications to fill in the gaps (never found a really good replacement for Amarok 1.4, though, these days I make-do with mpd). Then Gnome decided that the KDE3-4 transition was worth emulating for some reason, and pushed out the monstrosity that is Gnome 3. So, these days, I run stumpwm on my linux boxes but I do most of my work on a Mac. (although, I have a suspicion that Apple's about to lose everything I like and I'll find myself cobbling together a linux desktop again soon).

Consider Clementine as a replacement for Amarok 1.4, it's a fork that's been doing standard porting work without the controversial UX redesign.

I have grown to prefer tiling managers, and because I try to give gpl preference, that means these days Im on awesome... now that Ive been using it for a couple years though, I dont think ill ever go back to either kde or gnome, and in my experience so many of the issues newbies have with linux are because of kde/gnome and not linux itself...

Same here. However, packaging awesome window manager for RHEL/CentOS is a PITA. I end up using older fedora packages for it hehe

Wouldn't it be better in that case to compile from source?

At my Uni in Germany there is a lot more KDE user than gnome user.

Well, it depends on where you search. I know at least 6 people (friends and family) who use KDE and nobody who uses Unity or Gnome.

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