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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, it's always sort of been like this for KDE. Even going back to some of the earlier releases, it was always "That one DE with the funny library license". Qt was eventually moved to LGPL, but when stuff (desktop Linux) was starting to take off, KDE 4 came out and it was awful at first release. I vaguely remember Linus dumping on how bad it was which sure didn't help things.

Then Ubuntu came out (well, before KDE 4, but during the funny licensing thing), which used Gnome because Debian used Gnome. Debian used Gnome because Qt had the QPL licensing: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Q_Public_License_.28QPL...

Ubuntu got popular super quick, which got the DE popular, and the entire community just sort of got behind it.

If you're creating productivity tools for your customers, you probably don't want to channel money into multiple projects that compete with each other. So, it's not too surprising that RH wants to focus on just Gnome.

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Ubuntu came long after the "funny licensing thing" - Qt was licensed under GPL for the first time in v2.2, which was in 2000. So the switch happened in KDE 2.x timeframe. And then KDE 3.x (which was arguably the pinnacle of the "classic" KDE series - the one that was competing against Gnome 2.x) was GPL from the get go, and that was 2002. The initial release of Ubuntu was in 2004.

You're right. Ubuntu warty shipped with libqt3. However if you remember back when, there was still an axe hanging over the KDE team in the form of Trolltech. The fear was that if Qt free stopped existing one day (or if Trolltech wanted to stop licensing as GPL), the community would be up a creek.

The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-fou...) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know.

As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.

I don't remember licensing being an issue in 2002, when I first started seriously experimenting with desktop Linux. Qt being dual-licensed under GPL was generally seen as good enough, since it meant that KDE could fork it if they needed to. There were several major distros running KDE 3.x out of the box - notably, SuSE and Mandrake.

I think Ubuntu went with Gnome because back then it was perceived as the less configurable and flashy, but also less confusing of the two. KDE 3 was for those who wanted to configure everything - the "power user" crowd. Gnome 2 was more spartan (and became more so over time - I remember the outcry when they replaced the path textbox with breadcrumbs!), but mostly "just worked" in ways that people coming from Windows or OS X could readily understand. And Ubuntu was supposed to be the Linux distro for casual users...

Ubuntu was intentionally based on GNOME – before Ubuntu and Canonical even had names – because of the GNOME community's attitude towards usability and integration. (I was there.)

Don't forget the C vs C++ wars, which were also a factor on the whole GNOME vs KDE discussions.

It's funny that people object to C++ while having no problem with GObject model which is a bit like doing the work of Cfront manually. The worst of both worlds and I am saying this as someone who generally prefers C to C++.

As someone on the C++ side of the fence I once did something similar.

Our data structures second term required a medium size project in C for a DB management system based on B-Tree and low level i-node manipulation.

I decided to go with anonymous structs, using pointer fields as methods, so something like GObject. Additionally each translation unit played the role of a poor man's module.

While it was an interesting experience, it isn't something I ever considered doing again.

Make MATE default!!1!

I survived the Gnome 3 transition in Gentoo by masking it and staying on 2.4 until Mate was ready. Throughout it all I've been able to keep my wobbly windows and window decoration with compiz and emerald, too.

Mate doesn't need to be the default, but it does need to be easily installable. I never understood the "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. line of distros when the alternate DEs were easily available in stock Ubuntu. Similarly RHEL ought to make sure KDE is easily installable no matter what is their default... (Though is it common to even run a DE on Redhat?)

I have to run a wm for our LDAP servers but apart from that, we don't install it on any of out Servers.

i ran xfce on centos for a while.

we were running centos on the server, so figured i'd use it for my dev vm as well.

KDE is the 2000s model of window management, reminiscent of Vista with its gaudy transparency and compositing. The modern way is tablet-oriented UIs like Windows 10 Metro UI, which Gnome copied pretty well. Also Gnome is now scriptable with JavaScript. JavaScript for UIs is where the future has been headed for a while.

Tablet oriented UIs only work if you're solely consuming material. They really don't work for producing it. That's why Windows had to bring back the start menu, and many larger applications still don't use Metro.

NAILED IT.

Touchscreen UIs are not for creating. They're for taking what you're given, pecking at giant canned buttons in a dumbed-down UI.

A pigeon can peck the colored button to get a food pellet. That's tablet UI.

> The modern way is tablet-oriented UIs like Windows 10 Metro UI, which Gnome copied pretty well.

Gnome 3.0 was released in June 2011.[1] Windows 10 was released in July 2015.[2] Perhaps your assertion is incorrect.

[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/gn... [2] https://www.lifewire.com/windows-10-2626217

Metro ui dates back to Windows 8, though that is still later than 2011, as it was released in 2012.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good thing that there are other options - for those of us who are not thrilled about such Metro-esque futures where everything is either a tablet, or ignored. Just as "old=good" is a fallacy, so is "new=good".

(Tbh I don't give a damn about transparency or fancy effects, either)

I'm not sure what you mean by that. With its default settings, KDE is as "tablet-oriented" as it gets -- the UI of the shell and application are pretty similar to Windows 10's. Also, the whole thing is very scriptable in JavaScript -- KWin is at the point where, if I had the free time for it, I could make it do things that even FVWM couldn't do easily.

Plasma's frontend is entirely written in QML, which is JavaScript.

And it shows on CPU usage!

After Ubuntu dropped Unity I am seriously considering switch back to KDE or a plain old window manager even if I dislike them.

Never thought GNOME performance was that bad.

I've been using KDE (via Kubuntu) for the past few months now on my work and personal computers. I liked Unity except for its occasional crashing. I would definitely recommend KDE or Xfce because they feel more like GNOME 2 or Windows.

And what's wrong with that? If it works, why mess with it?

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