Is it time for a KDE fork?
To put it bluntly Hell No!
In a post over at Pratical Technology, they argue that it might be time to fork KDE, while I think the title was just meant to stir the pot, I really thinks his title should be true.
First, let me start by saying that Forking is not the solution. Go look out on freshmeat or sourceforge and see how many empty half finish projects are out there, or even the number that are 80 – 90% there, but just lack the polish or last few features to make the project really complete. That is the one problem with opensource, is when people don’t like what they see, they fork it. While there is nothing legally wrong with this, I believe technically this can cause problems. Most of the time projects are forked because of a disagreement between developers and either other developers and/or users. This leads to split development and re-inventing the wheel at times. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a split needs to happen because they want to take the project in a different direction. Sometimes projects split only to merge back together years down the road. But to split a project just becuase you aren’t happy with the current alpha or beta release is pretty sily
More specifically to this case, he spends the first 9/10 of his post talking about what is wrong with KDE 4.1 beta. While most of the time in the Open Source world Beta’s can give an accurate picture of what the final release will be, normally only small time bug-fixes are found in beta’s has most of the others are found in SVN or in the alpha’s. But his biggest compliant is he doesn’t like the new interface. He says it isn’t any faster (that he can see) and that it doesn’t allow him to get his work done any faster. Fair Enough. But isn’t this the same arguement Windows Users give us when switching to Linux. That the interface isn’t what they are use to, and it doesn’t “seem” any faster?
In his last paragraph, he mentions one thing, that could actually be usefull. To rebuild KDE 3.5 with Qt 4.x. This is actually very interesting. Moving to Qt 4.x should provide a small speed improvement, along with the newer features Qt 4.x brings, mostly visual changes to most people though. But you are still using the old framework which ties KDE 3.5.x together. While some like it, I’ve never really cared much for that system. And you are still limiting in moving forward by the fact all the other KDE apps being developed are being ported to Qt 4.x with KDE 4 in mind. KDE 4 provide a lot more to the table. Backporting KDE 4.x features to 3.5.x is really a waste a time. To keep from getting stuck in the past, we need to be looking at Porting the things people like about 3.5.x into 4.x. Be it the GUI, File Browser, Web Browser, whatever. But don’t fork it, and don’t limit yourself on an old system/framework
If there’s enough interest out there for a fork, and people want to do it, then they should go ahead. What’s the problem? That’s what open source is all about – options, and freedom.
I used to like KDE but I’ve tried the 4.1 beta and it pushed me back to GNOME. I just want to be able to slap files on my desktop and move them around easily. KDE 4.1 is too much eye candy and not enough simplicity. KDE 3 was much better in my opinion, and I understand why some people are asking for a fork. KDE 4 is like New Coke to some folks.
If there’s interest, I’d be happy to see a fork happen. If not, then that’s OK…I’ll probably stick with GNOME now unless KDE brings back the positive things that made the KDE desktop solid in the past.
While normally I would agree, and as a I said, some forks are good. And I would even venture to say all forks for the right reasons are good.
Here, the basic problem is, people don’t like the current state and quite possibly the direction KDE 4.x is taking. I was never a full KDE 3.5 fan, but it was nice, and I use it on a few red hat servers over the older GNOME. I can defiantly see how KDE 4.x is lacking the polish that KDE 3.5 had.
I don’t think KDE 4.1 will be ready like the developers thought it would, or how most would think 4.1 was. They are too eager to release early and release often. While that is fine and dandy, don’t call it stable when it isn’t.
As for the fork, I still thinking “Forking KDE” in the true sense is a bad idea. There are too many half dead projects out there. What I would like to see is a branch started from the KDE 3.5 that focus on moving Qt4 and maybe even Dolphin and a few other apps to KDE 3.5. The biggest problem this or any other type of fork with KDE 3.5 is the way that KDE handles applications, in my limit expereince and knowledge, it seems KDE 4.x has change the libs and the services that bind all KDE apps together. So as more applications are migrated to KDE 4.x that very well might stop working on KDE 3.5. Now you are asking to fork every core KDE application and make it work, back porting features bugs fixes everything.
Either way it is a danting task that effects more then just the core of KDE. What would be nice to see is the old KDE interface migrated to KDE 4.x. You get your panel and desktop just as before, but with all the added benefits of KDE 4.
We should be moving forward with change, not hanging onto legacy apps and old methodologies. (Assuming moving forward isn’t moving back
)
I completely agree with Ryan.
In my opinion the point is there’s no need to fork KDE.
KDE4 isn’t just an evolution of KDE 3.5, is a revolution, a completely new framework, which is still in a work in progress stage. The truth is it’s just not ready for production use yet.
Forking it wouldn’t do any good. Wanna speed up its development? Go help the developers out instead, there’s no point in forking it.
P.S.: I’m glad to see your blog is online again.
Of course a fork of KDE 3.0 makes ALL sense (for me, even a fork of KDE 1.0 makes sense!)
I just can’t run KDE 4.1 (or any KDE 4.X) on my Core2Duo MacBook running Ubuntu 8.X, and i’m not seeing it running fine on the first version of EeePC as well – and it seems to come with KDE 3.X
KDE 4.X can be the risk of the death of KDE development, really.
Not only, the KDE 3.X fork can call nicelly as LKDE (Light KDE).
And i suggest a challenge for QT4 developers to create a window manager lighter than LXDE (which is based on Gnome, isnt’ it?), named LQDE – can it be possible? i really and deeply doubt, and please show me that i’m wrong – very difficult challenge, isn’t it?
After almost one year, I (a long time KDE user) am convinced a fork would have saved KDE. I can’t see any way out for KDE as of today, and the figures of adoption show just that.
The develpoers never stopped listening to their users a long time ago and none of the people I know are even giving new KDE releases more than a 5 minutes try on a virtual machine anymore. Most migrated to gnome, I’m still on 3.5 but…
Eh… it has been fun, now, IMHO, it’s almost over.
KDE 3.5 is extremely stable. It is a great way to get windoz users over to linux. I would love to see it fork and keep advancing. If it goes away I will go to gnome desktop and hope it doesn’t go the way of kde.
Thanks for the opportunity to respond.
As an ex-KDE user I don’t see much point forking KDE. OK, The 3.5 -tree is great and so on. But it’s crystal clear to all of us (disapointed KDE users) that KDE4 is going to kill the whole KDE. Now I see it’s just better to port all the good apps of KDE (K3b comes to mind) to XFce, LXDE or some other promising desktop environment (by that definition, I exclude KDE4 and any version of Gnome, but that’s just my opinion).
…saying that, I must state that, while i did indeed love KDE 3.5, I really never liked QT. In my opinion it would be time best spent to port these old QT3 apps to GTK+ or whatever than QT4. I do like GTK+ nearly as much I hate Gnome
See, I’ve always used GTK+ has my primary and then forced QT to look as much like it as possible, never liking the result and blaming it on QT. Now that I’ve been in KDE4 for a while, I am starting to like QT a lot, and even better – GTK+ apps still look great using one of the KDE4 themes