Go KDE!

[Fintan]

I just read this and thought it may be of interest:
http://www.datamation.com/open-sourc...-future-1.html

Cheers to KDE!

[GreyGeek]

Interesting read, but typical Byfield ... a Mafia kiss.

KDE may have lost 7-9% of its users after releasing KDE 4.0, that is less than half what GNOME lost, or maybe as little as a third.

What he fails to note is that KDE not only has gained back that "7-9%", but it has picked up much more in the last couple years, especially since Gnome took the dive.

I also noted that he linked to another of his "kiss" articles, one titled "The KDE Death Watch". It postulated that KDE was in danger of dying because Canonical dropped its support for Kubuntu, which was wild speculation and, as it turned out, totally wrong. I do agree, however, with the assumption implicit in the title and article, that Kubuntu is the premier KDE based distro.

[vw72]

The mistake that the article makes is in ignoring that Unity and Cinnamon are still Gnome 3. I like to think of Gnome 3 as an iceberg. The tip of it, above the water, is the shell or user interface, but the brunt of it, that which makes it formidable, is under the water. Everybody deploying Cinnamon and Unity are still deploying Gnome 3.

The ability for Gnome 3 to swap out shells (ie Gnome shell or Unity or Cinnamon), is similar to the various plasma interfaces available with KDE (desktop, netbook, active). In other words, a smart move by the developers.

Another force left out of the article, but cannot be ignored, is that the most common linux applications are GTK based. While GTK integration with KDE has come a long way, it still isn't perfect. Why run a desktop based on QT widgets when most of the apps you use are based on a different widget set? It works, but it detracts from the overall experience. It is one thing for Gnome users to use K3B as compared to KDE users running Gimp or Firefox.

Anyway, my point in all of this is that while I agree that Kubuntu is one of the best, if not the best KDE distros, neither the Kubuntu or the KDE developers should allow the reasoning given from this article or those like it, to give them a false sense of security. For any of the desktops to grow, they have to attract new users. Canonical actively seeks out new users and by default they will be using Unity running on Gnome 3. Kubuntu and every other KDE distribution needs to take the same approach. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how superior KDE is over Gnome/Unity. History has shown that the technologically superior product does not mean it is the successful product. BetaMax was superior to VHS, but marketing led to VHS being the default format. We don't want Kubuntu/KDE to be Linux's BetaMax.

[GreyGeek]

Good points.

Unity is a good DE, if you like it. A lot of Linux folks with Gnome2x experience don't seem to, but the market Shuttleworth is gunning for is the tablet/smartphone market that is fleeing Windows & Apple, so it doesn't really matter how many Linux folks like Unity, IF the number of new Unity users significantly exceeds the number of Ubuntu Gnome 2x users.

[SteveRiley]

Gotta love the stones Joey Hess demonstrates:

switch default desktop task to xfce

This ensures that the desktop will fit on CD#1, which gnome currently does not.

There may be other reasons to prefer xfce as the default as well, but that is a complex and subjective topic. Unfortunatly, Debian does not have a well-defined procedure for making such choices, though it certianly has well-defined procedures for reviewing them. So, I've decided to be bold, and continue the tradition of making an arbitrary desktop selection for Debian in tasksel.

[GreyGeek]

This ensures that the desktop will fit on CD#1, which gnome currently does not.

For a LONG time KDE demonstrably had a smaller memory footprint. Now, it appears to have a smaller CD footprint as well.