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Comment by qha | Hacker News Reader

That's true, there was cronyism. For example, they used the worse, slower KDE instead of better options like MATE because KDE has a considerable European (and even German) legacy. I imagine they took many decisions like that.

Take a computer that used to run Windows 2000 and install KDE on it, it's no wonder people got pissed and they had to revert their decision.

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I still use KDE (4.x) on CentOS 7, with older hardware.

It's not quite as as snappy as XFCE, or probably MATE, but it's still easily good enough to get the job done.

On CentOS, being a stable platform, KDE itself is also really stable. (important to me, as I have better things to do that screwing around just keeping a desktop updated)

KDE is not worse than MATE. A full featured desktop environment with software suite compared to a fork of GTK 2.

MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, which is a full featured desktop environment as well. MATE runs orders of magnitude faster and is much more stable than KDE. Especially on the old workstations where they installed LiMux.

I'm not going to say that the project failed entirely because of technical reasons, but at first glance it really looks like they took bad decisions. It's hard to defend a move where you end up with worse software and a worse experience for users, no matter how much money you save.

There's barely any development on the GitHub. And also it seems like there are few contributers.

Whilst KDE is a much bigger project that is actively developed.

If that's your indicative of the quality of a project then I understand your position.

First, being abandoned for new development is a great indication of the quality of a project.

Second, you haven't given us any arguments for your "indications of quality" regarding MATE and KDE.

Third, like Gnome, KDE has a huge legacy in FOSS, and is a great project in itself based on a top notch GUI backend. Some of its code even went on and become the basis of the modern web (KHTML -> Webkit -> Blink -> Node -> now also Edge), other tools like KDevelop, Krita, etc are among the best in class in what they do.

What are you, some teenage Linux nerd, with a "favorite" desktop to promote in flame wars?

And I who thought the KDE/Gnome wars was over.

MATE is not a GNOME project. When GTK3 was made and the decision to build Gnome Shell was made, the MATE project was started to fork GTK2 and the old shell.

Orders of magnitude faster? 100 times faster? Gonna need to see some numbers before I believe that.

> a fork of GTK 2

For strict accuracy, MATE is not a fork of GTK2, but of GNOME 2. MATE did originally use GTK2, though without forking it, and it has since switched to GTK3 (while still keeping the GNOME 2 "look").

It's obvious you're being provocative on purpose but I don't see this leading to any fruitful discussion. Maybe try a more constructive approach next time.

The LiMux project started in 2005, so the KDE version used back then would be KDE3. That was not really worse in performance than GNOME2 (or today MATE), although comparing it to Windows 2000 would not be easy.

> Take a computer that used to run Windows 2000

out of a museum, or a skip perhaps

>and install KDE on it

Then put Windows 10 on it, or any other fully featured modern GUI OS. And we have proved what? Computers from 18 years ago don't run modern OS's very well, but can run ok with an OS specifically pitched as 'lightweight'.

On the other hand I have a PC right here on my lap that is 10 years old that is running Kubuntu problem free.

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