Thank you KDE folks - I contribute in terms of bug reports and attempts at fixes sometimes but this time I am signing up for a monthly donation - I encourage people to do what they can to keep a good thing going! https://kde.org/donate/
A week ago I bought a cheap mini-htpc and put Plasma Bigscreen on it, using a phone with KDEconnect as remote. So easy to use! So much better than AndroidTV let alone proprietary crap.
KDE is just great.
I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.
Qt is now its own company, namely Qt Group. Wikipedia quotes:
> In 2018, the company had 5,000 customers. Approximately 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are customers of Qt Group.[22]
So it's self-sustaining now.
AFAIK, KDE is still mostly volunteer work, but the way they develop software is pretty robust.
However, KDE rocks. My colleagues called me "a maniac" once when they see how I use that thing (i.e. Dolphin + KIO + fast window switches + multiple desktops).
The KDE4 days were rough, by then I had jumped over to fedora, and that one didn't shy away from shipping very early and unstable versions of it. That had me hopping for alternative DEs, I seriously tried several (and stuck for a while with some) of the minimalistic ones (enlightenment, XFCE, ...) and quickly ended up depending on either KWin, and/or some battery/networking/disks applet from plasma, or configuring something via systemsettings. The plasma desktop itself is fine (I don't mind it so much, I'm not crazy about shell theming and customisations, I do love my global menu on top, though), but what sells KDE for me is all the clever ancillary stuff that makes it "smart and usable" (dealing with Bluetooth, network setup, local and remote drives, audio output, ...), that's where the "environment" metaphor kicks in and elevates the experience above that of a "desktop shell".
Back then whenever I had a chance to try a distro with KDE 4, the Crash Handler window would pop after doing stupidest and simplest things within the desktop. Gnome 3 wasn't any better - it was more stable but departing from desktop metaphor to this mobile-desktop hybrid made me avoid it and pick Xfce instead. Which is shame because KDE4 despite the problems looked really well (and still does); I once said here that it had this "younger sister of Vista's Aero" vibe. It's really cool that they managed to bring Oxygen theme back.
Have those actually meaningfully changed in the last couple of decades of KDE? If so, I haven't noticed.
6 has been great. If you are a windows or mac user, it's very close to that experience and very familiar.
Can't say the same of Windows or Mac OS.
I really enjoy that it showcases all the work that goes into making a desktop actually good, even the small things you bearly notice, things like "When a grouped Task Manager task is flashing to get your attention, opening its group popup now reveals which specific window wanted attention. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #4225)"
A change doesn't need to be big and flashy and make headlines, even small changes deserve to be showcased and credited
And yes, a lot of work goes into the small things.
It's crazy how slow and bloated windows has become over the years.
I asked in the Linux IRC channel some help, gave my root account to a helpful user and very quickly learned about computer security.
I remember the switch to KDE4, and it was indeed brutal. I feel bad that they took as much flak as they did for that.
Plasma has come such a long way, y'all deserve so much for the perseverance and vision.
Thank you for sharing the story!
About eight years ago I wanted to try a tiling window manager, ended up settling on Awesomewm and still with it today, but I still use Dolphin as I've found no other file manager compares. (Or maybe I'm just too comfortable with it to change.)
Also still use Konsole, but honestly, as soon as Ghostty or similar implement being able to switch tabs in MRU order instead of round-robin I'll jump.
I have a low-priority todo to give Cosmic, Hyprland and Niri a go at some point. Would be nice to go back into a fuller desktop experience over what I've cobbled together around "just" a window manager.
What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesn’t actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didn’t care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.
Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.
So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.
I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. That’s fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.
What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.
So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.
App development for KDE is still essentially limited to C++ and janky Python.
I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.
Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.
After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.
I highly recommend giving it another try, I'm super picky and modern KDE simply delivers the best and most flexible desktop experience, bar none.
KDE 6 is really good tho. It's so fast, works great, Dolphin is the absolute best file manager there is...
I totally hated that whole mess. It almost ruined KDE for me. The real disaster there wasn't that KDE released v4 prematurely, but that they didn't make it crystal clear to the distro maintainers (and end-users) that it was not ready for "prime time" use yet (it was basically "pre-release"/alpha quality), and the major distros of the time jumped on making it the default (forced it on everyone) when it was still basically utterly broken compared to the prior versions of KDE (which had become overall quite solid and reliable by that point).
GNOME is the mishmash of macos and, like you said, mobile design.
Actually nothing mimics Windows either. Linux desktop almost completely missed the biggest desktop UX advancements happened in late 2000s.
KDE deserves a lot more.
I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.
Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.
I can understand it to start your own thing, but not even starting a discussion seems a bit immature.
I frankly doubt it. GNOME has pushed many problematic choices which KDE hasn't, or at least hadn't initially. From the anti-usability bent of the UI (few buttons, monochrome over color, non-configurability), to the dependence on systemd, to dropping X in favor of Wayland etc. And this is in part motivated IMHO by the organizational backing for GNOME which is different than KDE.
Regarding paid developers, it used to be a few people working for Suse on KDE vs a lot of people working for Red Hat on Gnome. That's not all there is to it because team Gnome also had to maintain GTK and team KDE didn't have to maintain Qt. Gnome had the advantage of having people paid to work on low-level services such as libxml, libdbus and such. AFAIK, today no desktop has many developers paid by distros. You can see it for example on GTK being maintained by like one guy.
Reportedly, external people and companies find KDE is easier to work with than Gnome, and that probably at least played into Valve selecting KDE. Valve's support led to (among other things) KDE having a really really good compositor / window manager. Highly reliable multi-screen support, fractional scaling, high dynamic range, variable refresh rate, frame scheduling for minimum latency (hell yeah), dimming with and without backlight control... a lot of good stuff.