How is KDE able to produce so much software? | Hacker News Reader

How is KDE able to produce so much software?

kde.org

22 pointsAerbil31311 comments

The answer has to do with Ross Weljean, 64. After coding the base versions of KDE's core software packages as a 36 year old back in 1996, he has considered KDE's software library to be his life work. Living primarily on a diet of Kraft American Cheese singles pushed under his doorway by open source aficionados, he has remained committed to the open source movement, taking breaks only to fight his landlord in court, to trial new mechanical keyboards, and to play John Conway's Game of Life between projects.

He hopes one day to release his masterwork, KRW, the new social media network that will replace your bank, your church, your spouse and your local fast food restaurant into one incredible virtual reality network that will allow you to see into the future and the past simultaneously.

> Living primarily on a diet of Kraft American Cheese singles pushed under his doorway by open source aficionados

This part, at least, is a Microserfs reference.

Despite extensive search, I can't find anything about him or his project KRW anywhere. Nonexistent on the web. Are you by any chance Ross Weljean or affiliated with him?

Qt is amazing. That's why all the best Linux apps (Dolphin, Okular, KolourPaint, Gwenview) are Qt apps while the GTK competitors are toy apps by comparison. And probably why GNOME's philosophical cornerstone is removing features with every update.

Yup couldn't agree more. Qt is the most productive and one of the nicest GUI framework I have used during my programming career. Used it from C++ and also from Python (PyQt). And on top of it it is also the best I have used when it comes to very good native OS integration (looks, behaviour...) when you need cross-platform support. GTK+ yeah not nice, I am trying to forget it just as all those Java GUI frameworks. Terrible experience.

Is there a Qt app that looks great on Windows? Breeze is awesome when on KDE, but I don't remember a single Qt app that'd actively look good on Windows.

Yeah I'm not sure if it's Qt but the whole design philosophy of "user choice matters" really makes such a difference between software you can rely on and stuff that's just in the way like gnome or macOS.

Scrolling their home page, it looks like they are trying to reinvent the entire consumer desktop. I started writing a list of all apps listed here, but then I gave up because I realized they created every single type of desktop app except a browser (actually they used to do that too, both Blink and Webkit are a fork of KHTML engine from Konqueror browser). Yet I very rarely see them as a community mentioned, which is odd, considering the amount of FOSS software they produce.

How are they so productive?

I would say there are several factors. Qt itself is a very powerful and feature-full framework already offering a lot as a base. So by reusing it and building on this base KDE developers can focus on additional things. And even on top of this KDE developers are very good at creating their own KDE Frameworks providing additional abstractions and common code that all KDE applications can reuse and also provide a lot of consistency/integration between them. Finally KDE is also one of the biggest FOSS projects (I think it is the second, right after Linux kernel) so by having so many people and using the best in class GUI framework is what makes it possible to create so many powerful apps.

My theory:

- they didn't invent the framework for graphics new.

- reuse of existing components

- many people working on it, even some which aren't involved in kde itself. this is viewable in the group of mascots: writers, translators, users, artists, ...

Popularity combined with the fact that most apps are fairly simple and can be developed more or less independently. They have a platform where productivity scales linearly with the number of developers, and a lot of developers.

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