Health of the KDE Community
carlschwan.eu
carlschwan.eu
Tried KDE a few months back for a short time, was surprised that KDE's footprint (in mb of space on disk, not ram) was not that much heavier than LXQT. The desktop experience seemed polished, though for me it has far too much gimmickery (in settings), and at this point I'm quite used to Ubuntu's Gnome. But happy for a healthy ecosystem. When I got into Linux (back in ~2008 probably?), I remember the choice with regards to full DEs was KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE vs LXDE ; there are more today, but I would hate to see one of them gone for good, and wish all of them well. Good to read that KDE seems healthy.
- Split window, so you can have two explorers right next to each other.
- Tabs
- If you drag a file/folder into another folder, you get prompted about “copying or moving?”
In terms of health, I also appreciate that many of the devs frequent the kde subreddit, and they all seem really chill and receptive.
Back when I tested them out (years ago, so not relevant today, still): Considering dependencies (if not running KDE), but even then Dolphin always seemed to do something quite not intuitively for me. Can't name examples anymore.
Different people, different tools.
About the menu, it is nice, but not unique. Windows' Explorer, for example, shows it when dragging with the right mouse button. Options include copying, moving, zipping and actions from any registered shell handlers.
That said, I think KDE is still the best desktop environment across all the operating systems I've tried.
"Just use your window manager" - and have two separate Dolphin windows? I mean, yeah. But it's very nice to have everything contained in one window. Right now I have five Dolphin tabs, four of which have split windows (I don't NEED this setup, but I like it).
I still see some weird artefacts / behaviour in Dolphin, notably around the sizing of the quick-access panels on the left, after window resizing, or display switching (effectively causing the former).
The copy/move option was present in Konqueror also, along with the same ctrl/shift modifier option to force copy / move without the pop-up.
FWIW with Microsoft Windows, for as long as I can remember, in Explorer you can right-mouse drag directory entries around, to trigger a similar copy/move pop-up. A little-known feature, but increasingly handy as Microsoft continues its war on its own users and obfuscates actual locations & paths, with the default move-if-on-the-same-drive / copy-if-not becoming harder to intuit due to these location abstractions.
One person's gimmickry is another's convenience.
Does the alleged surfeit of configuration options materially affect your usage of KDE, or just offends your sensibilities that they're available?
The only real problem KDE has now are the scars of past mistakes that have kept people away and all too often mired in Gnome.
And that's a shame, because OpenSUSE is excellent. If KDE continues to thrive SUSE deserves a lot of credit for keeping it alive.
With Gnome we can see the interest went down after Gnome 3 was released. Many people like me ran away from it scared by the usability problems and unreliability of the extension system. And Gnome kept the same complained-about interface until today, and the project never picked up the pace it had before.
While KDE4 was also seen as a big failure during its release (many bugs!), the biggest issue was simply bugs: not so many people complaining about the direction of the project, although these people probably existed. The project was able to fix the biggest issues and keep moving on (although KDE is still quite famous for being buggier than some of the alternatives), and now they have a community that can probably be described as "healthier than before", and certainly much better when you compare to what's happening to Gnome.
Disclosure: I use Cinnamon.
One area where I think KDE does a lot better is with QML. At the moment GTK doesn't have anything as nice as that to build apps, and that hurts contributions. There's some neat new declarative UI things like vgtk [0] that are looking promising though.
I really appreciate software projects that place a higher priority on evolution rather than rm'ing huge swaths of working functionality, designing a worse replacement, and then calling it innovation. KDE did this with 4 and then took a decade to get back to something stable. Let's hope the cycle doesn't start over again anytime soon.
If only it didn't assume my external screens are part of the same touch surface of my laptop, because that makes touch unusable... maybe KDE 6.
I've made a shell script to automatically rename specific authors in Git repos. It's based around git filter-repo, so you'll have to install that first. https://gist.github.com/nyanpasu64/d92f346d75131d5338466eb4b...
It may be possible to ignore email addresses when replacing names, I haven't checked.
Perhaps you could create a SQLite query or update to achieve the same effect in the aggregated statistics.
I never understood why Gnome got all the attention from distros when KDE feels like a superior option.
In addition, Richard Stallman made lawyers nervous of KDE by claiming that using GPL libraries with Qt (which at the time was under a proprietary license with source code available via FreeQt, definitely not a FSF-approved license) meant the KDE developers had no legal right to use GPL programs at all, even after KDE and Qt were relicensed under GPL.
Stallman eventually relented and granted permission to use the FSF’s own software, but the KDE project didn’t ask for it and didn’t bother to get forgiveness from other GPL license owners. Whether they need to go through that ceremony was never tested in court. GPLv3 switched to a much more reasonable standard, just provide the source under a compatible license.
By the time the license tempest-in-a-teapot reached a conclusion, GNOME and KDE already had substantial-enough installed bases and corporate sponsors to keep going indefinitely.
See the History of Qt section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
The bulk of QT and KDE developers are European; the only major European distribution, SuSE, went with KDE - but apart from that, the project could never attract the same level of investment as GTK-based efforts. It’s kind of a microcosm of the US/EU imbalance in digital tech.
Add to it that C++ (Qt) was never as popular as C (Gtk) in academic circles, which are major contributors of fresh developers to opensource in general.
Another aspect is the licensing, GTK was licensed under LGPL way before Qt and RMS casting doubts on the legal aspect of KDE even after Qt was re-licensed under GPL didn't help.
All these played a role in the early 00s, nowadays the problems is mostly that GNOME has many more enterprise features and integration with other RedHat products and it is hard to catch on.
I've studied hundreds of popular open source projects and I've found that "days active" and having lots of developers with mid to high level impact to be extremely good indicators of project health.
vscode and GitLab are probably my favorite repos that best highlights this. If you look at the vscode project
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...
and switch to the impact view and sort by "days active" you can get a sense of what I mean. The more developers above 25%, the better. "First commit" which is also discussed in the post, is also another good indicator. For vscode, you'll find a lot of developers with 5 years of experience.
And something that may seem counter intuitive is, you don't want contributors to have "very high" impact, as this indicates high bus factor risk. For impact, you actually want people to lie on the bottom of zone 2, as that indicates high individual impact and evenly distributed effort. Since GitLab isn't on GitHub, I can't share the insights for it, but that's what GitLab looks like.
Note: Don't install my tool as the docker image has an expired license, which I need to fix.
The biggest issues I still have are not KDE related:
- touchpad experience on Linux just sucks compared to macos. Even started sponsoring the gitclear because of that. I haven't tried the mtrack yet, but lack of the reasonable configuration tool is a bit discouraging.
- there is no modern mail client for Linux. The only "serious" mail client is thunderbird. Unfortunately it hasn't received enough love/attention in the recent past :(
I was in high-school and being enamored with the open-source concept ("You mean I can modify anything I want about it?" - hah) I wanted to make my mark in a simple little way. I remember fondly when lurking around in IRC and somehow decided I would change the login screen. Got pointed to the KDE greeter channel and that is how it all started for me. I kept annoying them, did not know how to build, compile, nothing. Thanks to d_ed for answering my annoying questions, that is how it all started for me.
However there are a few KDE apps I still cannot live without, including Dolphin, Konsole, Choqok and Yakuake.
I'm sure there are others, but they are the obvious ones I can see on my desktop right now.
Add a .mailmap file with
Laurent Montel <email1> Montel Laurent <email2>
That sounds like an Arch packaging issue, a misunderstanding of what the packages actually do or you're installing a metapackage and not realizing it.
```
sudo pacman -S kaddressbook resolving dependencies... looking for conflicting packages...
Packages (89) accounts-qml-module-0.7-3 akonadi-21.04.0-1 akonadi-calendar-21.04.0-1 akonadi-contacts-21.04.0-1 akonadi-mime-21.04.0-1 akonadi-notes-21.04.0-1 akonadi-search-21.04.0-1 attica-5.81.0-1 grantleetheme-21.04.0-1 jemalloc-1:5.2.1-3 kaccounts-integration-21.04.0-1 kactivities-5.81.0-1 kalarmcal-21.04.0-1 karchive-5.81.0-1 kauth-5.81.0-1 kbookmarks-5.81.0-1 kcalendarcore-5.81.0-1 kcalutils-21.04.0-1 kcmutils-5.81.0-1 kcodecs-5.81.0-1 kcompletion-5.81.0-1 kconfig-5.81.0-1 kconfigwidgets-5.81.0-1 kcontacts-1:5.81.0-1 kcoreaddons-5.81.0-1 kcrash-5.81.0-1 kdav-1:5.81.0-1 kdbusaddons-5.81.0-1 kdeclarative-5.81.0-1 kded-5.81.0-1 kdepim-runtime-21.04.0-1 kglobalaccel-5.81.0-1 kguiaddons-5.81.0-1 kholidays-1:5.81.0-1 ki18n-5.81.0-1 kiconthemes-5.81.0-1 kidentitymanagement-21.04.0-1 kimap-21.04.0-1 kio-5.81.0-1 kirigami2-5.81.0-1 kitemmodels-5.81.0-1 kitemviews-5.81.0-1 kjobwidgets-5.81.0-1 kldap-21.04.0-1 kmailtransport-21.04.0-1 kmbox-21.04.0-1 kmime-21.04.0-1 knewstuff-5.81.0-1 knotifications-5.81.0-1 knotifyconfig-5.81.0-1 kontactinterface-21.04.0-1 kpackage-5.81.0-1 kparts-5.81.0-1 kpimtextedit-21.04.0-1 krunner-5.81.0-1 kservice-5.81.0-1 ksmtp-21.04.0-1 ktextwidgets-5.81.0-1 kuserfeedback-1.0.0-1 kwallet-5.81.0-1 kwidgetsaddons-5.81.0-1 kxmlgui-5.81.0-1 libaccounts-glib-1.25-3 libaccounts-qt-1.16-2 libakonadi-21.04.0-1 libdmtx-0.7.5-2 libkdepim-21.04.0-1 libkgapi-21.04.0-1 libkleo-21.04.0-1 libkolabxml-1.1.6-15 mariadb-10.5.9-1 mariadb-clients-10.5.9-1 media-player-info-24-2 pimcommon-21.04.0-1 plasma-framework-5.81.0-1 prison-5.81.0-1 purpose-5.81.0-1 qgpgme-1.15.1-1 qt5-networkauth-5.15.2-1 qt5-speech-5.15.2-1 signon-kwallet-extension-21.04.0-1 signon-plugin-oauth2-0.25-1 signon-ui-0.17+20171022-2 signond-8.60-3 solid-5.81.0-1 sonnet-5.81.0-1 syntax-highlighting-5.81.0-1 threadweaver-5.81.0-1 kaddressbook-21.04.0-1
Total Download Size: 91.18 MiB Total Installed Size: 487.96 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
```
I'll have to admit it has gotten better. Before It would want to install the whole KDE desktop.
Now we split everything, and people complain that they are too many libraries. There is no way to make everyone happy. Note that all this packages are very small and all provides features you really want to have.