KDE's rough edges... what are your experiences?

[Duncan]

Michael posted on Tue, 29 Oct 2013 06:48:40 +0100 as excerpted:

> Oh, KDE4 is more or less in "maintenance-mode"? Err... scratch that. As
> of now I still believe maintenance is something that does not apply well
> to the KDE-kind-of development-style, so KDE4 is more or less obsolete
> now?

That would seem to be the case, yes.

> Well, it would fit the (current and as of now unofficial)
> description. If KDE5 will have the same QA-style, I guess KDE will go
> into the history books of open source software, as always shiny but
> buggy to a degree that it may even be unusable.

Call me an optimist (heh, wrote that before noting your email address 
=:^) if you will, but I believe the kdeers are on the right track with 
this kde frameworks five stuff.

Both the kde foundations and the qt it's based on are becoming a lot more 
modular, with the ability for developers to pick and choose the 
dependencies they want/need without having to bring in the whole big 
currently monolithic qtlibs and kdelibs.

Qt itself is maturing as a developer-community-based toolkit in its own 
right, and qt5 is far more community-driven than any qt ever before in 
history.  As part of that, it's both expanding and going modular, with 
most of its components becoming optional -- developers only pull in what 
they need, and will no longer have to depend on (and ship, for platforms 
where bundling is common) the parts they don't pull in.  As part of the 
expansion and because it /is/ more community focused now and kde has been 
and remains a large part of that community, parts of what were kdelibs 
are now becoming part of qt5.  But at the same time, because qt's 
becoming more modular and much of it is now optional, all those extra 
features aren't bloating qt5 out of control, because if a developer 
doesn't need them he simply won't pull them in, and the modular 
components that are pulled in may well be far slimmer with qt5 than with 
qt4.

At the same time, kdelibs and the kdebase platform is similarly 
modularizing, allowing the same choice at the kde developer and user 
level as well as blurring the lines between what's qt and what's kde, 
since parts that were once kdelibs are now qt, but either way, they're 
now optional, so a formerly kde app may actually find itself only needing 
qt now, and even if it does pull in some kde libraries, because both the 
kde libs and qt are going modular, the dependencies may now well be 
smaller as a full kde app than they were previously as a qt-only app!

Up the stack at the application level, kde5 is breaking up and shipping 
most individual apps with their own version tagging and release timing, 
so apps that are evolving fast can ship updates every month or even every 
week if they wish, while already mature apps in primarily maintenance 
mode might ship an update a year, mostly just to keep them building on 
current libraries with current tools, with the occasional security update 
as well when necessary.

So the kde frameworks 5 core is going to be MUCH smaller, while most of 
the bundled apps we know as kde today will be unbundled and shipped 
separately, either as individual apps or possibly as a functional bundle 
-- dolphin and kmail and rekonq and konqueror and plasma will likely all 
release separately, with their own versions.  (Actually, some of them 
have their own versions now; kmail is version 2.something these days for 
instance, but nobody knows their kmail version without looking, they 
simply say kmail 4.11.2 or whatever, the kde version.)  But kdegames (for 
example) may still ship as a kdegames bundle, with a common kdegames (not 
kde) version.

That means currently qt-but-non-kde apps and desktop options may become 
more popular as well.  There's smplayer, and the razor-qt desktop.

The effect should be that individual kde apps will be chosen on their 
merits, no longer simply because they're part of kde, and people doing 
what I'm effectively already doing here, mixing a few kde apps with a few 
gtk apps with a few independent apps, picking the app in each case that 
best fits their needs, will become much more common.

Of course since I'm effectively already doing that, rejecting kmail since 
I don't like its akonadi and semantic-desktop dependencies and don't need 
that additional functionality, preferring the gtk-based claws-mail, and 
preferring firefox to konqueror/rekonq, but running it all on a (semantic-
desktopless) core kde desktop including plasma.

But what's going to be interesting is what happens with plasma vs the 
relatively new and much lighter razor-qt.  I expect the latter to become 
very popular as a kde-lite desktop base, while plasma will continue to be 
the full-featured alternative.  And then there's lxde, formerly a gtk-
based "lite" desktop, that's switching to qt and cooperating with razor-
qt in some development areas.  I expect quite a few former lxde folks 
will end up running more kde apps, since the dependency gap will be FAR 
smaller than it was with gtk, and some former kde/plasma users will end 
up finding they prefer the lxde desktop as well, since it'll now 
integrate far better with the kde and other qt apps they continue to run.

So the qt5/kde-frameworks-five generation is going to bring with it an 
entirely new level of choice and flexibility, both at the developer and 
user levels, and it's going to be very interesting indeed to watch how 
that ends up working, and what the fallout is in terms of app popularity 
say five years from now.  Throw in the coming X-to-wayland switch, and 
the Linux application and desktop landscape could look VASTLY different 
five years from now!  Which apps will survive and thrive, and which will 
lose popularity and may even cease development all together?  Will there 
be a new sort of bundling going on to replace the desktop environment 
paradigm that seems to be dissolving before our eyes, or will independent 
flexibility be the rule of the day?

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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