Konversation terminated! (was: Introduction and (full?) body)

[Philippe Cloutier]

Greetings,
Given that this discussion started a while ago, I hope none of the other 
participants will be offended that I took the liberty to conclude: 
https://www.philippecloutier.com/blogpost141

Le 2019-12-28 à 13:57, Philippe Cloutier a écrit :
> Dear community,
> [...]
> And I installed Kubuntu 19.04 when it came out. Unfortunately, that 
> was a disappointment too. 2 major bugs I had been experimenting on 
> Debian 9 persisted on a fresh Kubuntu 19.04: all notes keep 
> disappearing from KNotes, and KOrganizer still loses reminders. 
> Additionally, there is a big window manager bug and several Plasma 
> crashes. All of that on a 6-year old solid desktop which I carefully 
> shopped for quality and GNU/Linux compatibility. And I didn't even try 
> using KDE software for package management, browsing or mail. One of my 
> worst disappointments was to realize that my migration got me to lose 
> the KDE product which had been my favorite for more than a decade, 
> Amarok, which was removed from Ubuntu starting with 19.04.
> Perhaps I didn't get the best version, but all of that got me thinking 
> once again about what I should do.
>
> But the worst issue was a serious KOrganizer regression, which made it 
> basically unusable. A few months later, I got a few weeks of vacation 
> and attacked that one. To my surprise, I found that almost none of the 
> underlying issues had been reported. I filed several tickets, 
> culminating in a "summary"/end-user ticket against Kubuntu: 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/korganizer/+bug/1837156
> I noted a number of KDE tickets in need of love during that reporting 
> spree and used the occasion to triage a few. This eventually got me to 
> report a bug against bugs.kde.org. That (plus more triaging) in turn 
> got me to report more bugs.kde.org issues.
>
>
>
> I eventually identified 2 meta-issues affecting bugs.kde.org and asked 
> for help dealing with them in a thread I opened in November: 
> https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2019q4/005637.html
> I reported 2 major issues in that thread:
> 1. Much difficulty getting ticket "severity" (importance) adjusted
> 2. Recurrent ticket mishandling from Nate Graham
>
> There were enough replies to that thread, but answers can easily be 
> summarized to Harald Sitter's following assessment:
> "Nate is well. He's a treasure to this community. I have read through 
> the reports and couldn't find him in the wrong."
> This made me firmly decide to give up on recommending measures to deal 
> with Nate.
> There was no useful answer about point 1. Probably as a result of the 
> thread, there was some activity in 
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272388
> One trivial fix was made, but the issue remains and the ticket was 
> marked as resolved. I consider the net outcome as negative.
>
>
>
> This long path has now lead me to ask this list a question which I 
> myself find vague, because I want it open: Am I missing a much better 
> way to use KDE?
> I know that Kubuntu is a bit of a SCC. But if I look at all 
> "universal" GNU/Linux distributions, the only (apparently?) serious 
> option I seem to find which is focused on KDE is openSUSE.
> I say serious because I want something minimally popular. I don't mind 
> dealing with and reporting a few issues sporadically, but I'm looking 
> for a product first, not a project.
> And does openSUSE even have a 10% market share on the (free software) 
> desktop?
> In fact, this brings me to an equally important question: do we have a 
> fair estimation of KDE's current market share on GNU/Linux? As I 
> wrote, I settled for KDE in part because it was dominant, but when I 
> look at distribution defaults nowadays, I'm under the impression that 
> KDE has plunged a lot. Much of that must be to blame on higher 
> fragmentation in the desktop environment landscape, but I now wonder 
> whether KDE is still more or even as popular as GNOME?
>
> The mere extensiveness of the yearly report 
> https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2018/ shows this community still has 
> some momentum. At the same time, while it is very good at showing that 
> KDE has IRL meetings (and justifying the high share of expenses 
> dedicated to these), I failed to identify metrics showing increasing 
> (or even stable) momentum. Besides for one element: the yearly income 
> is reportedly "record". Unfortunately, this record is not quantified, 
> and it's not even clear in which year this record was set. There is 
> not a single link pointing to data for previous years. I did my best 
> to report these issues, but this hasn't helped so far.
> We used to have a weekly "commit digest", with statistics on tickets. 
> Now, even our yearly report doesn't say a word on tickets. Were less 
> tickets reported than previously? Were less solved than in previous 
> years?
>
> Don't get me wrong - I remember where KDE on Mandrake was 15 years ago 
> and the progress since is enormous. KDE is much more usable, but its 
> architecture also evolved a lot, software on which it depends evolved 
> tremendously too and dependencies are more flexible.
> I'm sure I can use an even way better KDE operating system in 15 
> years, but I'm still worried if the pace is slowing down.
>
> And I'm not just worried about where we'll be in 15 years, I'm also 
> worried about how we'll get there. A large part of the issues I faced 
> this year weren't there 15 years ago. If for every step forward we 
> have to take 1 step left, 1 step back, 1 step right and an extra step 
> forward, some can enjoy the physical training, but if the erratic 
> dance resulting is mocked by others, the journey is just a lot more 
> exhausting and frustrating.
>
> I recently bought a new laptop, which unsurprisingly came with an 
> infamous proprietary OS. I must say that while I evaluated 1 KDE 
> product on Windows, I still haven't installed KDE. If there are 
> encouraging news about KDE, options I missed, or if someone has 
> convincing indications that the project is progressing at good speed, 
> with less deviation from the straight line to our goal, now would be a 
> good time to tell me to prevent me from going back to where I once 
> came from...
> Can we expect that quality control will become more respected, 
> rewarding, efficient and ultimately attractive, so that more users 
> will share the work? Or will we ensure KDE products are marketed in a 
> way which better reflects their maturity?
>
> Thank you
>
-- 
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Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com