KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it". Gotta love the consistency over the some 15 years I've used it.
KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
Everybody who remembers the KDE 3->4 transition will probably violently disagree with that. Hopefully that was an educational moment for the dev team and they've actually internalised that lesson.
edit: just realised that 3->4 transition was more than 15 years ago, which makes me feel very old...
For me one of the biggest accomplishments of our community is that people really do stick around. It's very multi-generational. Therefore the memory is there and the lessons do get learned.
I want to thank you and detail some of the reasons you deserve thanks.
Thank you for the conservative evolution of the KDE DE. In my mind the best praise of any major DE release is that there is no reason to fear it, and you've done that. Again.
Thank you for protecting KDE from iconoclast mentalities. This is a difficult thing to do and only hard nosed managerial discipline can achieve this, especially for an open source DE.
Thank you for accommodating compositor-less operation.
Thank you for Konsole. Yakuake is also great and I'm making use of it as well. However, what I appreciate most is that the latter has not disrupting the former. I can have work-a-day Konsole and Yakuake can be used where it works well at the same time. Thank you!
Thank you for not adopting the minimalist, "golden path" mentality. Options have great value to me and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that KDE, almost uniquely among both commercial and open source mainstream DEs, doesn't take them away: KDE is the only conventional DE that doesn't demonstrate contempt for my preferences.
The single-click/double-click activation choice is a excellent example of the thinking that makes KDE awesome. It goes without saying that changing that default must have been a tough decision. Yet you made the pragmatic, correct choice. Thank you for that.
The vestigial voices still beating KDE over the head for the 3->4 issues, despite over a decade of clear evidence that the lessons have long since been learned, are diminishing. They're being replaced by full throated, well deserved praise.
I humbly ask that you hear one concern of mine: X11 is crucial and will remain so for a long time yet. I have absolutely no problem with Wayland and imagine myself adopting it, some day, perhaps even accidentally. In the meantime, please do not neglect the X11 experience. I have yet to see any evidence that you have, but it is a worry for me.
Thank you - From a loyal and deeply appreciative KDE user.
This is not the only snarky comment about the 3->4 transition, but I feel they are overly harsh. A big problem with that transition was distros jumping to ship pre-release software to users long before the release was ready, which really soured the perception of the new version. There were bugs, but the perception lasted longer than the reality, IMO.
That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
From a purely technical perspective perhaps, but overall I don't think so. KDE3 was hugely popular and regularly depolyed. Based on my personal observations (admittedly EU based), it was the single most popular *nix desktop at the time. KDE4 more or less killed that over night and as far as I can tell KDE has never recovered neither marketshare nor the mindshare it had.
On a personal note I went from a huge KDE fan, and someone who deployed and managed KDE3 workstations at a small company, to literally not using it for over a decade.
the perception lasted longer than the reality
Which is the one really important lesson in all of this.
> That being said, I'm still sad about the Amarok 1.4->2 transition and subsequent death.
Strawberry Player (the fork of Clementine which is the fork of Amarok 1.4) is still going and it is ported to Qt 6 so it works okay with many highdpi environments
