This is exactly why I love KDE. It allows me to configure everything one could ever wish. Even very specific settings, like... I can't come to think of something now because it's all so given these days. But anyway, I think the KDE, or Kubuntu, team have managed to create a good balance between the freedom-of-choice and the ease-of-use. There are default applications for almost any kind of file or flash card, but you always have the opportunity of changing them to suit your preferences.

Two words. Support Chakra.

One of the reasons why GNOME became so popular in the Linux world was Ubuntu. KDE needs a distro aligned with KDE views, willing to put KDE above anything else and a showcase for all KDE niceties.

Chakra fits the bill perfectly. Its KDE implementation is superb.

First and for most, for "world domination" some peace of software needs to be pushed by some compony(relatively big one), think of Android/Ubuntu for a moment

For many users, OP is absolutely correct, choice is confusing, but there's already solution for that - kparts! Putt it simple - fight choice with choice. Remember KDE SC was known as K(ool) Desktop Environment. It is not just the apps, it's also a platform! Good, easy to use libraries will give the choice of putting simple or full feature UI on top of the task we want computer to do(somewhat of example may be Konqueror and Rekonq).
KDE is not OS, thank you for not trying to be. Hence it is distributions responsibility to choose sane defaults for their target user base. With stuff like default plasma, "search and launch", plasma-active, etc, with little optimizations for speed/memory there could be KDE for everyone(KDE everywhere)

P.S. One of the biggest problems with drastic philosophy changes is that the old user base drastically shrinks and when new users got problems(there always are probmlems no matter the OS/DE), help is hard to be found.

Alejandro Nova wrote:Two words. Support Chakra.

One of the reasons why GNOME became so popular in the Linux world was Ubuntu. KDE needs a distro aligned with KDE views, willing to put KDE above anything else and a showcase for all KDE niceties.

Chakra fits the bill perfectly. Its KDE implementation is superb.

I've installed Chakra and I'm impressed. This is really good Linux distro: fast and small, tightly built on latest KDE release. It has friendly community and fair amount of sofware packages.

This is exactly why I love KDE. It allows me to configure everything one could ever wish.... team have managed to create a good balance between the freedom-of-choice and the ease-of-use.

Yes - this is what I think also. I love that KDE is highly configurable to my needs, but easily so - I don't have to mess with config files or whatever, it's all pretty obvious and easy to do.

The way I see it: there are SO many desktop environments hell bent on removing every last shred of configurability (*cough* Unity *cough*) that it's nice to have ONE environment like KDE that is not headed that direction. Even if that means KDE will never be as popular as Win7 or something, I don't care. It just has to be popular enough to have a critical mass of useful applications available to it.

I think Plasma Active is the right direction strategically; Nokia nearly got there with encouraging KDE to develop apps which will run on mobile 'phones.

KDE is ahead of all the alternatives in terms of providing a good mobile 'phone/tablet experience. Most of the younger generation will get their first idea of a modern GUI from a mobile 'phone or tablet. Being able to use the same apps elsewhere should be sufficient to extend KDE's appeal.

Look at this:

https://verein.ing-diba.de/sonstiges/10115/kde-ev

People don't want to spend some of their time in voting for that thing they loved, so what can you expect of some people?
Do you really think most of people are going to spend their time coding for free?

Only egoism.
Luckly there are generous people in the world.

Sorry to see that - it was 237 when I voted.

Two of the most obvious answers to this question are poor quality control and no definitive goals on features. One can argue about the reasons for this. Here are some that come to mind:

1) Coders wanting to move on to the latest feature before closing out bugs on their existing projects.
2) Lack of users willing to write bug reports.
3) Developers who refer to users who don't have time or the inclination to pour through arcane man pages and FAQ's as "noobs". That is to say the developers do not have the user perspective.
4) Distributions that are committed to a release date rather than quality.
5) No commitment to release fixes in any rational way.
6) Continual churn in settings.
7) Developers unwilling to perform meaningful testing prior to release.
Project teams unable to balance the desire to release a product into mainstream use against the lasting impressions that are made by a dodgy product.
9) and so forth.

Under the current model, KDE is continuously a work in progress and something that is never truly ready for wider use. The many facets of the situation are just too easy to illustrate. I just installed OpenSuSE 12.1 on a new laptop. As a long time SuSE user, I have eagerly been awaiting its arrival because of all of the new features, new kernel, new boot script, and kde 4.7.x. It has been a real drag, and KDE, if it is not responsible, is at least the messenger. There are some serious bugs visible in the first few minutes of use.

1) On opening Dolphin, I discovered that the menu bar was not shown. Needing a feature accessible only there, I figure out how to get it to appear. One enabling it through menu, it crashes. Conclusion --> KDE does not have a working file manager.

2) Start-up Konqueror. Aim it at a webpage, and voila it crashes.

3) Setting up a wireless internet connection as a user, and I am prompted for a root password. Sorry, the only way this will fly for typical users is to set them up with root privileges. This may be the fault of KDE or polkit, and a new user will not care. They will remember that they could not do something so basic today as establish a working a network connection.

4) I turned off Nepomuk, yet the system shoots up message after message complaining that it is not running. To this date, I am not sure what nepomuk does except hog my cpu and wear out the hard disk. It really seems to be a lot of hype that leaves a truly poor impression on first time user.

5) New kmail does not provide a way to import mail from kmail 1.x versions.

KDE is great and the enthusiasm around the open development structure continues to amaze. It is as these issues show an amateur effort, and one that does not give a polished product for the mainstream.

cmrntnnr

That's nothing I wouldn't experience on windows. However, I can play some games when my frustrations riches too high levels.

Being more serious I think your points are quite accurate, but I still consider lack of games and some of the pro applications is the culprit. Regarding your points I wonder if it's KDE fault or rather distros that should just take stable and well tested KDE components. Moreover, for many times some non KDE stuff were making problems - dbus, graphics.

1) Did you try the wrench on the right side of the screen? For me, pressing Ctrl + M enabled the menu and did not cause Dolphin to crash

2) Which website did this occur with? Given you had problems with Dolphin crashing, this might very well be related (possibly bad configuration files, or something else)

3) Was a bug in the permissions shipped by openSUSE if I recall - you need to apply updates using YaST.

4) Akonadi is probably running, because you either use a KDE PIM application or because the Plasma Clock starts it. To disable that, right click on the clock > Digital Clock Settings > Calendar. Uncheck "Show Events".

Akonadi requires Nepomuk to power it's search functionality.

5) An automatic migration process should have run when you started KMail 2. If it didn't then something is definitely quite wrong with your system.

To me the last three posts reflect very well the situtation
Firstly cmrntnnr summarized very accurately the problem. Well done ! The post express exactly what I feel.

But I would add that too often we find remarks like

That's nothing I wouldn't experience on windows.

I would like to say:
1) It's definitely wrong
2) Even if it were true what is the point about always criticizing Windows? It is not by criticizing it that we will make KDE better. Instead we get less credible when we say KDE>Windows and then a user try KDE and experience what cmrntnnr related. And what I had too, or like the 1000 of other bugs with which I could write a roman (I am sorry, but shut down the computer with a power switch at least one time per day is something I have never seen anymore since I was using an infected Windows 98....)

To go further on the criticize against Windows. We always see ideological post on the linux world saying

"we should avoid MS to have to right to sell Windows together with the computer"

1) Good or bad, we won't change it. We have to live with it
2) This, as an explanation of the non popularity of KDE, does not explain why in the recent years Apple made such a strong come back (I mean with its laptop, Iphone is a different thing) The stability of OSX has probably something to do with it...
3) If KDE were outstanding in term of User Experience, anyway anyhow, it would eventually be known and people would try it (Yes they are ready for change ! Why would they buy Apple laptop if they weren't) Currently, if they try, they will go back to Windows or Apple.

Finally, each times that a person make an constructive post like cmrntnnr did (sorry if I am wrong in the spelling ) there are always comments like that

1) Did you try the wrench on the right side of the screen? For me, pressing Ctrl + M enabled the menu and did not cause Dolphin to crash

To this :
1) I think it is not the topic right now, cmrntnnr mentioned that just as evidences to support the point he were making. That comment is a narrow view which focus on fixing the problem while the post of cmrntnnr calls to a wider reflexion
2) Of course there are way to overgo this problem, this doesn't change the fact that it is a problem..


To Pawerlson and bcooksley:
I know I sometimes appear unpolite when I am quoting people on forum. If it is the case, be sure that I am sorry about it. I didn't quote to offense you or to take it in a personal way, but just to highlight some ideas and position.
Be sure you have my full respect

KDE is an awesome platform. It makes using my computer enjoyable. It is rough and quirky too. I think it is perfectly fair to compare KDE to Windows and OSX. It is necessary to do this to answer the question that is the topic of this thread. The comparison that is being made is actually something deeper. It is a comparison of softeare development models. Windows and OSX are built under a close monitoring of progress toward objectives. New versions cannot be released without the software as a whole convincing a group of people that objectives are features, capabilities, and quality are met. Users of the software may not be perfectly satisfied with the product that is released. However, what is released is a predictable known quantity. There is an effoft put into correcting flaws and bugs without adding new features. The current platform gets better with time. People have a chance to learn how to use it as well. These are some of the upsides of the model. It is also slow, regimented, and less open to the desire to immediately express creativity of its developers.

The model for KDE is the exact opposite. What is frustrating is that KDE leadership has unnecessarily compromised on quality as a whole. This is clearly not becase the KDE is developed under an open model and Windows and OSX are developed in s closed one. It is a question of leadership and standards. The linux kernel would not have achieved such a wide spread of use without a reputation for reliability and consistency. It achieved this by a focus on features, quality, and good decision making. KDE is far from meeting such a standard and does not seem to recognize that these are even considerations in reaching a wider user base.

I can't say anything else that I fully agree with you. Moreover, what I find sad is the gigantic potential KDE has, jeopardized by some bugs, small things, small wrong decision in the way od develop it, that alone can massively reduce the impression of quality and reliability of the desktop environment and or software

wotan,

It is nice to know there are others who have similar points of view about the difficulties that KDE inflicts upon its users. It really is tragic as it is such a nice and clean UI. I agree with you about the reasons for the success of OSX. It is good quality software with a nice aesthetic, too.

A good way to address this would be to recruit developers who care about quality to get involved. Another would be to put in place some stricter criteria for initiating and releasing new versions. Perhaps a stable-unstable release model could be employed. As for me, I'd like to get back into coding and contribute by fixing bugs. Where do the capable but uninitiated go for instructions to get started and shorten the learning curve?

bcooksley,

You seem eager to blame the messenger for pointing out some ugly facts about kde and opensuse 12.1. It was a fresh install of openSuSE 12.1 that led to the problems I described. I realize that bugs are inherent to any large software project. Nevertheless, it is possible to have release criteria based upon quality and types of bugs. The fact is kde 4.7.x and opensuse were released knowing they had some serious flaws. There are work-arounds for some and others not. This is where I am for the problems I mentioned as examples in my first post.

1) To answer your question, Dolphin crashed trying to activate the menubar from the wrench. I did not even think that using CTRL-M would lead down a separate code path and bypass the bug. Not sure why that would work, but I am happy to use it. Nevertheless, this is still an ugly in-your-face bug for a core component of kde and really takes the shine off of opensuse 12.1. Glad to see in bug reports that it is fixed for KDE 4.7.4.

2) Konqueror crashes on www.cnn.com and many others. Backtrace indicates it is somehow associated with handling of flash content. I ditched konqueror for firefox. This may be a byproduct of switching to a 64-bit version of the software. It is another ugly bug in a core kde component as so many websites use flash. As it stands, konqueror is kind of like a car with a flat tire. It looks nice, but you cannot drive it for its intended purpose. It simply is unacceptable to release konqueror in that state.

3) In order to be able to use knetworkmanager without divulging the root password to regular users, I figured out how to hack polkit settings. That only cost me about four hours trudging around various newsgroups to figure out how it works. It now works, but I am not really sure the changes didn't create a security hole. Haven't been able to find out any information about which yast updates if any fix the problem. In this state, the security model of opensuse-12.1 is no better than windows 98 as any user willing to keep it on their system will be running users as root. As for me, it was find a fix or toss that dvd in the trash.

4) Nepomuk warnings continue to shoot up regardless of changes made to event notification settings in the control panel. A conspiracy theorist might believe that KDE devs were paid off to implement nepomuk, akonadi, strigi, etc to burn up disks, require ram upgrades, and a cpu with multiple cores. There seems to be no solution here for a user except to suffer through and hope that the problems are resolved in a future release. Version 4.7 is pretty late in the development cycle, and I'm not holding out hope that it is finished before the next architectural code shift. In all seriousness, I am not at all against nepomuk and its relations. They very likely have good objectives and the features will be valued once they are in place. They are still works in progress and I question the decision to include them in production kde.

5) Kmail did not migrate. The only thing wrong with my system is that it is a fresh install that came with kmail2. Kmail2 does not successfully handle mail from its former versions. This can be demonstrated all day long.

With this kind of scorecard, KDE and opensuse 12.1 could not be recommended for wider use and will heavily disappoint first time users.