KDE Doesn’t Suck Anymore, People Finally Realize

Not to sound harsh (well maybe), but that blog post doesn't really seem to add anything to the article it links to. Why not just link straight to said article?

A few years ago (ca. 2005), I was a minor contributor to the Gnome project. At the time, I remember it being my favorite desktop in terms of usability and clarity, and thought it was headed in a fantastic direction to make the Linux desktop accessible for everyone and their grandmother. There was some real thought given to it in terms of what experience it should provide (for example, its Human Interface Guidelines were much more extensive than KDE's)

I sort of dropped it after a while out of lack of time, and a year or two ago I looked into it again out of curiosity. The development is much more disorderly now, with no unified goals or direction. The accessibility and usability mailing lists have pretty much become irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if 90%+ of the core developers pay no attention to them.

LXDE seems close to what Gnome used to be 5 years ago, but that's the problem- 2005 Gnome was good for 2005, but we can't be content with it in 2011.

Coming back to Linux after a couple of years under OSX, it took me less than a week to start loving Unity. Sure it's got its glitches, but no more than anything else in the open-source UI world. I'm sure I'd react differently, if I hadn't unlearned the X11 worldview beforehand, though.

All this to say that Unity makes sense even out of netbooks; but I'd like to address address the final question: "can anyone figure out what the point of netbooks is?"

The netbook itself isn't much. It's the first and wrong answer to a legitimate question: "is there some room for something beyond the server and the workstation, which most non-developers would love to have?" The iPad and the iPhone provide much better answers to the same question. What matters is that the question exists, it matters, and although the right answer isn't completely known, every OS company wants to be a key part of it.

Remember a few years ago? The key question to Canonical and others was "how to dislodge Microsoft from its monopoly on workstations?". Today it's "are we really sure that MS won't dig itself out of the workstation hole when it falls into irrelevance?", and the debuts of Windows 7 for phones and Windows tablets are encouraging.

So they basically bet that there will be some room between Android and Windows for them, which they can claim. It seems worth a shot, especially given Android peculiar understanding of "open". If they manage, they can then try to re-expand back into the workstation market, successfully this time.

I've been using KDE since 4.4, and it's been consistently awesome. There were a couple of niggles earlier on, but they've actually all been improved by 4.7--it's as if the KDE developers were reading my mind.

Overall, I have no doubt that KDE now offers the best desktop and laptop environment available now, bar none. And it looks great too!

kde is the default on opensuse. it's been stable for ages; lots of people use it. the "people" in the title should be "ubuntu users".

ps opensuse released 12.1 just a few weeks ago - http://software.opensuse.org/121/en (kernel 3.0, kde 4.7, latest code, but not crazy cutting edge, huge range of repos, what's not to like?)

So what would be a great KDE distro to try?

I've been a KDE user forever. It IS a good GUI, but the knock on it has always been it's too much like Microsoft Windows.

My fave distro is Kubuntu and I highly recommend it.

Love the netbooks=WMD's metaphor!