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!)
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.
One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop.
Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is highly customizable, full of power user features but also really simple with its current defaults (looks pretty much like Windows) and generally robust.
Shoutout to some KDE applications like Okular (great document viewer), Kate (solid tech editor), Krusader (double pane file manager) and KolourPaint (a simple image editor even I can use).
I agree it's really impressive, it brings a lot of things together into a cohesive package and experience. I'm a huge evangelist, I think it's the best desktop experience.
I remember when it first came out. Very impressive at the time. I was never a fan though personally, I always hated the look of KDE. I used it recently on CachyOS for fun and it worked great, just not for me visually. I'm glad it exists, I just wish there was something visually appealing with less settings bloat. It feels like going to a diner with 300 items on the menu and they're all sorta half baked.
I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!
If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like.
But also just fast and low memory. You can run KDE on ancient hardware. If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine.
I don't really use Plasma itself (and soon i wont even be able to if the rumors of them dropping X11 support are to be believed) but i do use various KDE apps, like Krita (which i use for most painting stuff), Kate (my main programming editor, coupled with clangd for C/C++ programming), KolourPaint, Spectacle, Ghostwriter, etc and in general i find KDE/Qt apps to be more to my liking in their UX than anything based on Gtk (or at least Gtk3-or-later, Gtk2 stuff is for the most part fine).
I will donate my entire pension if they make it so I can have a Windows 2000 theme that actually works and doesnt require me to hack a dozen files each time they push and update.
Have an agent do it and have it write out what it did to an md file as guidance for each update. To be fair though if you configure things correctly it should never break. Mine hasn't been broken in years.
I hope someone comes along with a better recollection than I have. When KDE 1 came out there were some bitter licensing discussions on /. and elsewhere, largely regarding Qt. I had high hopes for Enlightenment and later Gnome but they mostly seemed to fail.
It's impressive for the project to have come so far. Between the oversimplified, hyper-opinionated GNOME, the rock-solid but dull and minimal XFCE, the nostalgic MATE, and whatever Enlightenment is doing these days, it’s nice to have a continually polished, modern, well-integrated yet customisable experience like KDE, even today. And save for Akonadi (which just never seems to work reliably, rendering software like KMail useless), it’s been a pretty stable one for me, too. Here’s to another 30 years!
Window Maker is still really cool! Not a full desktop environment, though. I tried using it with GNUstep for a while, but while the base libraries are apparently still actively developed and maintained, a lot of the applications are antiquated, and they’re very hard to make blend in with EFL/GTK/Tk/Qt apps.
Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)
> Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)
It's derived from GNUStep which was from NeXstep who Apple bought. OSX and now macOS are descendants of that design. That's where the macOS dock comes from. Not a 1 to 1 design obviously but a marriage between the operating systems thanks to Steve Jobs.
Oh, it’s still alive! Development stalled a while back, so I was worried something may have happened to the author, with their land being invaded and all.
It seems more focused on the retro aesthetic, which I personally don’t love, but it’s still really nice to see.
I lament the times when open source projects were open source software projects instead of political platforms for people who arrogantly think that their private political opinion is important enough to overshadow the project they participate in.
This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.
Your comparison is dishonest and wrong. printer drivers are a piece of software, sexual orientation is completely disconnected from software or technology.
This implies that the difference actually matters. In both cases there is a political goal behind the actions. Yes, printer driver software itself is very different from sexual and gender orientation, but wanting for the printer drivers to be free is a political statement and principle, and so is the uplift of LGBTQ+ people and celebrations of PRIDE month. Both are political despite being about distinct subject matters.
You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!
Yes, it matters. You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?
Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).
So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?
> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!
It's Pride Month and the organization is doing Pride things, its not that complicated.
> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
"undoubtedly" is absurd here. Does KDE really have a stable of consistent transphobes donating? Do they outweigh additional donations from supporting the LGBTQ community?
Regardless, if the only point of KDE were to make money it wouldn't be a non-profit. Extremely passionate people are often passionate about a lot of things beyond just what you want from them. KDE is a community project and that community loves and accepts non-binary people.
With all due respect: it is just a picture of a cute lizard.
Thinking practically, having a male and female lizard is sort of inconvenient for a mascot, since leaving one out is a message in itself. Having a genderless mascot with art assets ready to go makes practical sense to me.
Side question: why would having a male or female mascot be "a message in itself"? Why do people want to see a message, and especially a $currentDayPolitics one, in every single thing? A mascot can be a cute mascot without having to represent anything more than exactly that.
Just as a random example: Let's say some OG founder of a project had a cute dog named Laila, and the project makes this dog its mascot. Why should that be a problem, AT ALL?
And what's even worse, if you think this "everything has a message and we have to be super careful what the message is" thing through, the conclusion is: No project ever again can have a solely male or female mascot. Which is of course absurd.
And this whole "we need to send the RIGHT message" thing falls apart with time anyway, because what the right message is, WILL change over time. You're not at the end of all human enlightenment.
I mean it's not a HUGE issue by any means, just sort of inconvenient.
Like, most mascots aren't in gendered pairs normally (like your dog example!), you just have 1 option to represent the thing. People see Laila the dog and think "oh yeah, LailaOS".
But given you have 2 mascots, with 1 being pretty ambiguous, but the other being dressed in a pink dress with bows, it does mean you probably want to use both when presenting KDE, just so you're not accidentally saying "this is the KDE event for men" or "this is the KDE event for women". If you made your mascot the AIGA bathroom symbols, you'd have the same issue.
My thinking about the "right" message is just that... I don't think that's what they want to tell people right now, in our current time. Everyone can use KDE. It's not a historical impact sort of thing.
Again, not a huge issue really. Just seems practical. Hopefully I'm getting that across. Sorry if I'm not.
They could have hung a Star of David pendant around its neck and it would still have been “just” a cute lizard, and surely only an anti-Semite would object to such neutral, normalizing messaging?
No it is not just a picture, it is also a descriptive text and specific emojis attached. I don't think anyone would have raised an eye if it was just for the picture.
I used to think this way but with the rise of fascism pretty much everywhere I think it's important to know what I am consuming and what they support now.
Is it perfect? No. Does it piss some people off? Probably, and I don't care.
But yes, the free software movement is political, and the FSF is by all intents a political organization with a specific political goal and message.
Politics is multifaceted, it doesn't purely relate to government either. Politics is how humans decide who gets what, when and how. You can't run a community or organization without politics.
I think it’s a little different to simply have the mascot than it is to make their introduction an officially endorsed celebration of ‘pride month’ and have them ‘presiding over KDE’s 30th anniversary celebrations’. If something has a greater chance to ‘create tensions’, it’s probably the latter, for better or worse.
My tolerance for donation begging is directly proportional to how A) non-evil the thing is asking for the donations and B) how much utility I get out of said thing. KDE, personally, falls squarely into the "By all means, beg" category for me. I use their stuff every day for free, and their hard work deserves recompense.
I used to feel that way about prominent banners / cards. Then I tried to get donations on my own site and until I became hyper-aggressive I never received even a dollar. It was frankly disheartening. Now, it is not yet sustainable but at least moving in the right direction. In other words, they really have no choice.
I want to see KDE still improving and keeping up in another 30 years. To me it's no different from a telethon for PBS or a poster for Friends of the Library. Intrusive? From a certain point of view, but it pays the bills.