I've followed and written about the development of the KDE 4.0 project on the old version of this blog. Until now however, I've never addressed the criticism that some sections of the Linux community have heaped on it. So I'll just start with this post in the blogosphere that caught my eye.
I wonder if KDE 4 has hurt the KDE project?
No, as has been said by others countless of times before, it hasn't. It's as they say - no pain, no gain. If you want your project to become a long-term success you have to take risks, and the KDE development team should be lauded even now for their early release of KDE 4.0 with a warning that it was meant for experimental and development purposes to provide a platform for developing Qt4 applications and take the KDE project in a new direction. GNOME clearly aren't in the spotlight yet, because they're not rewriting the desktop from the ground up (or atleast judging by the GNOME 3.0 shell reviews I've read, they aren't). Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.
Just by taking a look at a list of distributions out there, the major distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian all use GNOME as their desktop environment of choice, and there are not really any major distributions with commercial backing that use KDE as their primary desktop.
openSUSE is a major distribution with commercial backing from Novell that uses KDE as their primary desktop environment. The same can be said about Mandriva. Slackware is the Godfather of Linux distributions and while they aren't commercially backed, they use KDE by default.
The major problems with KDE 4 in its current state is its patchy development, performance, and reliabilty — something corporations do not want attached to their software.
The state of KDE development is far from what's been mentioned here. You have monthly releases which cater to patches to the desktop. The same frequency isn't sported by GNOME. Indirectly if you consider security, KDE is reacting faster than GNOME, but that again is subject to what vulnerabilities if any, have been found. KDE suffered with the early poor performance on NVIDIA systems, but if you look back at it now, NVIDIA responded reasonably quick to the pressure from the community considering this is a new, heavily experimental open source project we were dealing with at the time.
KDE’s development seems to be all over the place, without much order or quality controls. It is claimed as a work-in-progress. I know from experience people want software that is complete, something that is stable enough for them to rely on for their work.
Again, this work-in-progress statement is a bit overused. I thought even with the openSUSE 11 KDE 4 release, KDE 4.0.2 was reasonably stable if not perfectly usable. In fact, it was so minimal you could compare it to GNOME if you wanted. But we're down to KDE 4.3 right now with 4.4 coming in February, 2010. Slackware considered 4.2.4 to be stable and useable enough so you can imagine how rock solid their next release could be. I'd go as far as saying KDE 4 will be as rock solid as 3.5 by then.
I believe that KDE 4 development has come too slow, and for an impation community that expects development to move at a pace that can compete with proprietary competitors with similar or better quality, KDE 4 is really not up to quota.
Isn't this what the Linux community was crying for? "Slow down, KDE we can't keep up with your use of ARGB and your rapidly evolving system tray?" GNOME in my opinion, does a good job of releasing few features now and then through their development cycle and I believe that suits them considering how mature the GNOME 2.x series is now. But we're talking about KDE 4 here and at it's point three release (KDE 4.3) more than a year on, we have an amazing development team thats created a desktop for the future that is likely at some point soon to put Free Software more prominently on the map.
KDE’s patchy development leads to little oversight on how the many features and eye-candy effect performance.
Turn the desktop effects off if eye-candy is not your thing. If you use Compiz Fusion or actually like desktop effects then you should be admiring KDE's efforts to incorporate these features natively, which GNOME simply integrates into its environment. The jury is still out on GNOME 3.0 and its direction on this.
Many people, including many who commented on the original post, have complained that the desktop environment seems too slow, and forces them to buy new hardware. Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.
Honestly, I've seen this kind of comment on how KDE 4 is slow on hardware right now rubbished off on the Ubuntu forums so often, its not funny. If you think questions that require reading the wiki or something are annoying to them, you can add this hardware criticism to their list of statements that are annoying. If you honestly think its slow for some reason, get another distro, go lightweight and get over yourself.
Of course, this does not go over well with a community known for using old, outdated hardware to run their Linux systems.
Just as an addon, if you manage your installation well then like me, you can run KDE 4 even on 256MB RAM. It's not that hard if you choose your distribution's packages wisely.
Connected to the patchy development and random inclusion of new features has led to the mass number of bugs hindering the software from reaching its full potential as a desktop contender.
Why not contribute to some of the KDE bug days instead of whining like an old granny? Random inclusion of new features? If you're referring to something like the next-generation of Semantics in Nepomuk, improved multimedia integration through Phonon and a new way of looking at the desktop through Plasma as randomly included features, then you're saying the KDE 4 developers are retards. Take a second to look at the number of bugs that were fixed for the KDE 4.3 release alone. I've seen charts on Planet KDE by developers now and then showing how the number of contributors and bug-fixers is only going up these days. KDE 4 has brought new life to the project and nothing else.
People care about the work they do on their computers, and having that at risk is certainly not in the interest of both companies or mainstream users. Perhaps this is the reason that KDE 4 has failed to make an impact on the major distributions and unseat the much-criticized GNOME desktop environment from being the most popular desktop?
Sure they care. But that didn't stop openSUSE, commercially backed and community driven from releasing KDE 4.0.2 in the openSUSE 11 release with KDE 3 as the alternative, now did it? Patches and bugfixes were released and the only thing keeping it from being a long-term option was the lack of features. But backports were made to fix bugs, so it didn't end up being messy before 11.1. When Debian comes out with their release of KDE 4 through Debian Squeeze a good while from now, I'd like to see you talk about KDE in the same way then.
From my observations of the software, the number of features and eye-candy is truly amazing. However, I find that in many cases that some of the features do not contribute to the usefulness of the software and are poorly implemented.
I'm not going to question what GNOME does or what they plan to do. That would just be plain fanboyism. So I'll remind you of Nepomuk, Phonon and Plasma to name just a few of the pillars of KDE 4. Some of the features don't contribute to the usefulness of the software? KDE has always been highly integrated with its applications with Qt being the common link. The same can be said about KDE 4 as it matures. With every release of Qt 4.x we're seeing enhancements being added to improve the KDE 4 experience, be it performance, bling or features. Why, with Qt 4.6 we're going to get a glimpse of Kinetic and I'm sure KDE and Qt applications will take advantage of the potential of Kinetic in animation, soon enough.
The overall look of the system is nowhere as clean as it was in the earlier versions, and instead today it is a translucent mess. Also, much of the artwork is starting to take the look of KDE 3, a bit “cartooney,” with exceptionally large icons and images that look as if they were placed together in a matter of a few minutes, without much concern for whether or not the system would look better as a whole — that may be harsh, but I see the seeds of what could become a giant mess for the KDE project.
Wow, you must really hate KDE. I wonder how much time you spend on GNOME-Look trying to get rid of the defaults. Exceptionally large icons? Have you ever heard of SVG being employed so extensively in a desktop environment? It's what lets you make your icons and widgets however big you want, so really, stop crying. And please do think twice, when you call the wallpapers "cartooney". I mean if you don't like a couple of pretty flowers or some nice landscapes, it doesn't mean they're "cartooney". Nuno and the Oxygen team have done a fine job making KDE look fantastic and they deserve better than that.
Just by taking a look at the major KDE applications such as Konqueror, KMail, and KOffice, they are in not as mature as their mainstream counterparts, or for that matter the other competitors in the Linux arena.
I'm only going to agree with you on KOffice here. Building an office suite from scratch is as hard as building a desktop environment from scratch, and add to the fact you're naturally going to have less personnel behind it. But Konqueror and KMail are very much part of the mainstream of KDE development and most of the bug fixes in the monthly point releases end up fixing bugs in KHTML rendering and KMail crashes. So they get a lot of attention and are far from ignored.
GNOME Office is not even close in comparison to OpenOffice or IBM’s Lotus Symphony, and the Epiphany web browser is not complete enough to compete with Firefox.
I don't want to resort to bashing GNOME. But sounds like you're just going against your own cause.
Surely distributions could work on implementing better software into their version of KDE 4. Applications seem to be a sticking point, and the fact that many major applications are rarely written specifically for the KDE desktop is not a good sign for the acceptance of the system by developers — a potential problem for them in the future.
Pardus is a fine example against this point. Take a look at how they've developed their own installer, own package management interface, own control panel and more tools of their own, all in Qt4 to complement their distribution. In my opinion, as KDE 4 matures further, they only stand to gain popularity.
So, how important is KDE 4? To the KDE project, it is absolutely crucial.
It is important, yes. But I don't think there's any cause for worry if you look at KDE's work with the right mindset. Remember, Vista was criticized heavily and now with Windows 7 on the horizon, things seem rosy (or so people think) with Microsoft's operating systems again. Naturally, the future of any project and the direction it takes is vital for a team of developers, no matter how big they may be.
I hate to say it, but it looks as if KDE 4 has become KDE’s “Vista.” The KDE reputation has been tainted with a divided community, mediocre products, and a seeming lack of solid direction.
You've just contradicted yourself, you know? Vista no matter, what people think of it, is the product of a commercial giant like Microsoft and obviously required a lot of manpower and investment to make it what it is. The fact that you compare KDE to Vista in that sense, is itself a compliment to KDE, considering the lack of such commercial backing and the considerably smaller size of the development crew behind it. I've already covered why clearly KDE 4 isn't a mediocre product before and so to the fact that it clearly doesn't lack solid direction.
I can only hope KDE becomes stable at some point in the near future, perhaps by choosing to make their “4.5″ release their stable release fit for refinement and development, much like with KDE 3.5. Perhaps creating that stable environment for people to improve upon could lead to the creation of a new, thriving community, one just as influential as the one when KDE 3.5 was around. Otherwise, they may lose the market they have fought so hard to gain.
KDE 4 hardly has anything left to prove, and you only have to be a part of the current KDE community to know that there is only a small section of users, who depending on the lifecycle of the distribution they use, are waiting a little longer with KDE 3.5 before plunging into the now mainstream KDE 4. They're just playing it safe, which is fine if it suits them.
I must conclude by emphasizing that I have no disrespect intended to the author of that blog post, I just feel that some of the criticism KDE has received is unwarranted and out of line.
attention to the fact that, being ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=056398b8-b6d0-48c3-92e1-4704d2153719)
