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Comment by oliloz | Hacker News Reader

I know my message won't be well received here but I wish KDE had a leadership with a pair of balls that could say to developers "stop losing your time on these side projects and polish the core desktop and libraries". There are so many pet projects in KDE while the desktop rots in its instability and lack of polish...

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In my opinion KDE Connect is one of the absolute core applications of the whole KDE project!

> [...] while the desktop rots in its instability and lack of polish

This is not true at all. Yes, the KDE desktop has a few rough edges but for me it is still by far the very best DE in existence.

You seem to be having some grave misconceptions about

1. How open source projects work, 2. How polished and stable KDE already is, and 3. How useful piece of software KDE Connect is.

1) Of course you can't force contributors to do anything but there are ways: tell them repeatedly there are bugs that need fixing, refuse to give them infrastructure to host their pet projects and make it clear they are not official and can't bear the KDE trademark, etc.

2) Don't make me laugh.

3) I don't even own an Android so I could never know. And that's not the point.

I know this is just some ranting and nothing will change. KDE went down a hole a long time ago when they lost their funding. But I'm sad to see the things that are happening to it. KDE does not deserve to die like this.

KDE just recently received a 300k donation [1].

You seem to remember KDE from the 4.x dark times. Give it a try, it has vastly improved in the last 2 years.

[1] https://dot.kde.org/2018/10/15/kde-ev-receives-sizeable-dona...

2) You are the one making people laugh here :P

Refuse to give them infrastructure? You seem to know the recipe to kill an open source project.

Have you considered working in enterprise software?

Speaking of balls, please don't be a dick. I totally get it if you want the absolute stable experience (although, if your install of plasma is that unstable, my bet is that it's poorly configured, either by you or by your distribution defaults), but this is only an acceptable expectation for software you pay for - or on which you fix the bugs yourself.

I'm saying such comment is not OK because there's nothing as demotivating for a freesoftware developer than being blame for what they think is their gift to the world. With such comment, you're not only being dismissive of other people hard work, you're killing it for all of us as you may very well demotivate some core developers, or contribute to do so. This is basically negative contribution.

Those guys do an amazing job. Many thanks to them.

I am not blaming the developers at all, I am blaming management/leadership. Every team needs a strong leader to call the shots, which KDE evidently doesn't have.

I am purposely putting aside the fact that (some of[0]) the developers that work on KDE don't get paid, because I believe saying "this software is bad and that is acceptable and normal because it's open source" is a shitty, defeatist attitude that doesn't bring us anywhere.

[0]I don't really know if any of the KDE developers are being paid. I know they lost most of their funding years ago, but I don't know the current situation. Given the status of the project, I assume there are no full time developers.

I contribute sometimes to fix some bugs. In your opinion I should be forced to learn graphics/OpenGL to contribute to KWin, or design to submit themes because some dude does not likes the corner radius of a button or implement features that I do not need but some entitled person wants and I should spend my free time implementing that while he is playing some video game.

Open source does not work like that, if a company wants something it will pay a full time developer to implement it, if a user wants something he needs to implement it or find someone to implement it, this may mean you may want to pay someone or convince a maintainer to implement it.

What KDE needs is a billionaire to hire a few developers to go trough the bug tracker and fix some bugs.

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