The KDE Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

The KDE Manifesto

manifesto.kde.org

42 pointsTsiolkovsky6 comments

I'd like to see some kind of vision, focus, or specific goals for the future on that page. Being nice to each other and concentrating on the end-user are certainly good things, but where is KDE going next? Broad strokes here. Is it going to focus on being the best desktop environment out there or is it going to try to include tablets? What kind of user is it going to focus on? Is it in a race to the newbie filled bottom with Unity and OSX or is it trying to appeal to power-users? What weaknesses most urgently need to be addressed?

Nobody has to lay down the law and say what can and cannot be done with KDE projects, but expressing specific aspirations to motivate developers would be very helpful to the platform.

> What kind of user is it going to focus on?

From the website:

> End-User Focus: to ensure our work is useful to all people. [the emphasis is mine]

Does somebody else have a problem with the idea of focusing in being helpful to all people? Is this supposedly opposed to "Developer-Focused" or something like that?

The problem with focusing on all people is that KDE will never be used by such a broad group until how Linux is distributed is fundamentally changed. Maybe it's good to be ready for the unlikely scenario in which KDE one day comes installed on tablets being marketed to your mom, but perhaps KDE can become more useful to those who use it if those developing it recognize that it's appeal is inherently limited.

I agree.

To put it bluntly, focusing on all people is not having a focus at all.

http://manifesto.kde.org/benefits.html

http://manifesto.kde.org/principles.html

The above are a lot less touchy-feely than the main page.

I don't know that this is saying much besides "Join the club, we have cool hats."

Well, part of the reason the Manifesto was made up was to help answer the question of what it even means to be part of "the club" in the first place.

KDE was started to provide a complete desktop environment. Though the work there is certainly not finished by any means, it's predominantly done (and has been so since KDE 3.5, if you ask some).

Yet, KDE developers are branching off into different software types and different hardware form factors. Plasma Active is a mobile platform built on KDE libraries. The ownCloud software stack was started by developers affiliated with KDE and even shared some infrastructure initially. None of these things are part of "the desktop" though.

So, we (at KDE) have had to come to grips with lots of questions. "Are we done? Is this it? If not, what's the reason for continuing, what do we accomplish further?". We've built the community and the software, where do we go from here? And at the end, what is "KDE.org" and what isn't? What does KDE give to those who contribute, and what do we expect of those who carry the imprimatur of a KDE-affiliated project?

It's probably touchy-feely and pretty generic, but then KDE has always been kind of amorphous in my experience, for better or worse.

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