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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

It feels to me that a lot of the bigger ideas in KDE fell away over the years. In the 2000s I would log in every morning, open a KWord doc in one Konqueror tab, a KSpread sheet in another, and some browser tabs alongside them, then I'd launch Kate and open some files over SSH or FTP and get to work. It felt like someone had really embraced OO and applied it to every part of the desktop, and I assume something like KParts and KIOSlaves still exist. But for the most part, I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works. I am grateful that it hasn't been dumbed down quite as much as GNOME over the years, but I hope they have a few bold experiments left in them (and would love to hear what I'm missing if it's already there!)

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I still find a decent amount of the integration, like KIO, is still there and works well - it puts MacOS and Windows to shame in terms of how I can just interact with files anywhere as if they're native within KDE apps.

It's kind of a shame that Konqueror fell to the wayside, but modern browsers are so complicated I cannot fault them for focusing elsewhere.

> It's kind of a shame that Konqueror fell to the wayside, but modern browsers are so complicated I cannot fault them for focusing elsewhere.

KHTML became webkit (Safari) and then blink (Chrome) so they created the foundation for quite many browsers ...

it kind of vaguely reminds me of the OpenDoc concept although tbh I didn't really understand what Apple was describing at the time

KDE-connect is my preferred cross-platform local clipboard/file/whatever sharing program when venture out of a walled garden

I feel the same. A lot of big projects fell by way side over time for various reasons. Goes with the nature of experiments, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

k3b - died with the cd-rom

calligra office - creation of LibreOffice stole the thunder

konqueror - maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days

amarok / kmail - rewrite lost features, introduced bugs, and many existing alternatives filled the gap

That said there are still a lot of good ones still there that continue to improve every day. Kate, dolphin, KDE connect, etc.

> maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days

> maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of konqueror is a tall ask these days

FTFY

Kmail worked great for years then one update akondai would no longer sync and that was the end of it.

All the development action went to the web. Dolphin's still pretty awesome.

KDE4 killed too much momentum; many promising features and apps disappeared for whatever reason or slowly faded out into irrelevance. Stuff like KIOSlaves is still around, but never really evolved beyond what it was 20 years ago.

Well, Trinity Desktop is alive and kicking and is a fork of the 3.5.12 series. over 16 years of steady releases now.

Isn't Trinity just maintenance and small improvements of KDE3? I don't remember to have heard about any revolutionary changes, or even just significant evolutionary improvements.

Definitely not revolutionary. Plenty of evolutionary changes - because linux itself has changed. the last major release brought

- LUKS encrypted disk support desktop-wide, - storage device hot plug/unplug - new Bluetooth GUI (tdebluez) - new media player (kplayer), - PulseAudio support - window tiling

> I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works

"bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works" is a low key major achievement - I love it !

Yep, I'm past my days of wanting my OS to be "exciting" :) now boring and functional is king.

And in case this comes off too negative, I don’t think anyone has mentioned KStars, my favourite KDE app for many years. All my early Linux experiences were eye opening and mind expanding about what computers could be, but somehow none more than that.

Still using Kate for all of my coding

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