Just out of curiosity, I'm wondering what people are saying about KDE now...I mean, I haven't heard much in the way of criticisms lately...

From my own looking around, it seems most critics have been silent...hopefully I'm right

Oh well, then just have a look at the kde-mailinglist. To me it seems, that every second or third started thread is getting hijacked to "spread the word", what a big mistake KDE4 was/is and KDE3 was/is the best thing ever made by hands...

On the other hand, i know a lot of people, who are using KDE4 quite a while now and are more than satisfied (including me )

The people who are happy with KDE rarely say so (thanks to those who do take the trouble to do so); they just get on with it. They are more likely to talk about it when things aren't going well - as Linus did when KDE4.0 came out and he defected to Gnome for a while.

For example, the biggest single deployment of KDE is in Brazil but you hear very little of it because it seems to be working OK. As the journalists will tell you, bad news sells much better than good news.

It doesn't take many people to make a lot of noise. Yes, many threads are being hijacked in that way. Equally true is that many people are getting fed up of reading the same people with the same complaints, and the threads just get ignored after a while. It's a real annoyance, but there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. We can't start banning people for airing opinions, even if those opinions are founded on misunderstanding just about everything, so we have to put up with it. What is absolutely necessary, though, is for the strongest FUD to be countered by satisfied users, because so many people find the threads in a google search. The doom-sayers mustn't be allowed the last word when they are provably wrong.

I've seen a lot of hate with Nokia rewriting their stuff with Qt...

Now, I'm not much of a programmer myself when it comes to widget toolkits, but isn't Qt the more advanced option released under the LGPL? (or was it the GPL?)

Smooth, sleek animations...a lot of development, a lot of love, and in my personal experience Qt apps tend to require less resources then GTK+ versions...


You know what's gonna happen though, right? The same kind of people that poo-pooed KDE 4 are gonna poo-poo GNOME 3, and I have to wonder if GNOME's user-base could handle that, I'd be very interested to know what some enterprise distros will do with GNOME 3... (On a sidenote, I find it distressing they are only focusing on the interface, and not the old legacy code that has a tendancy to slow things down)


I'm sure some of you remember the MONO-debacle (I don't hear much from it these days), did it ever strike you as funny that GNOME and KDE kinda switched roles?

When Matthias Ettrich and his colleagues founded KDE, they chose to use the Qt toolkit which at the time was not free - so got a lot of flak. However, within a couple of years Trolltech, who had created Qt, had decided it was in their interest to open source it and ever since then it has been free for non-commercial use.

Qt4 broke the mould by being cross-platform but that prompted the KDE developers to rewrite everything from the bottom up to take account of the new facilities. At the same time Qt benefited from seeing how the toolkit was being used within KDE. So there has been a mutual benefit through the cooperation.

For a company like Nokia, used to designing software for a device and only finding out how people would use it after it had been finished, the Qt-KDE relationship opens up a whole new way of developing software that gives them an idea of what people might use the software for and what the problems might be long before they have to commit it to a device.

I've also noticed just how much Qt has been improved as a direct result of KDE 4.x testing, and hence how much KDE 4.x has improved as a result of that... I wonder if it's ever been like that for Gnome/XFCE/whatever and GTK, or if they all decided to put up with/work around the problems with GTK...

On the other hand, GTK is only used for the actual rendering of graphics and widgets, relying on external or home-brew libraries to do the hard work behind it, while Qt includes everything needed to develop a lot of different types of applications, so it's kinda oranges and apples really...

Well, if I remember from browsing last years gnome-dev mailing list, a lot of folks were complaining about gtk+'s problems...