4 ms·

I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE

by dagw 4y ago

I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE right around then (although I cannot quite remember exactly why, or what the specific complaints at the time where.). I wonder if we can still be seeing the echos of that backlash as most of the people who left KDE simply never came back. That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on. KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.
simcop2387 4y ago
If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as critical for me.
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see why people like tiling desktops but I also really think they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).
- robonerd 4y ago
  KDE 4.0 was abysmal, so bad it seemed like deliberate sabotage, and it didn't get much better through 4.2. That's when I gave up on KDE for several years (until about a year or so ago.) Now I'm trying to like it again, all the right pieces seem to be in place, but the constant introduction of new bugs to basic functionality has me questioning why I'm even trying.
- account42 4y ago
  > despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. The KDE devs are the ones who decided to call the alpha version 4.0 so I wouldn't put all the blame on the distros here. I think the problem with KDE 4 was not just but also experimental technologies like Nepomuk (desktop search is great in theory, but an EU research project is probably not the best fit for a production DE), Akonadi (yay let's run a MySQL server on each desktop), Plasma widgets (if you thought one widget set was enough for a DE you thought wrong apparently) and Activities that just didn't provide enough value for the overhead and change that they forced onto the whole system. A more straightforward Qt4 upgrade of KDE 3 would not have been nearly as problematic.
akagusu 4y ago
The transition from KDE 3 to 4 was a completely disaster, but KDE devs learnt from it. They made a successful transition from KDE 4 to 5, and are committed to users needs, so we can expect a smoothly transition to Plasma 6. Now, compare it to Gnome, where every release means deeply changes for both users and 3rd party developers, and Gnome developers simply don't care.
pxc 4y ago
KDE 4.0 was essentially a preview for app developers, where the system had lots of new APIs but applications and desktop functionality built on top of them was still incomplete and not widely tested. Many KDE-based distros nonetheless went with 4.0 as their first KDE4 release. A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity. Eventually KDE4 did mature nicely, and the transition to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 was way, way, smoother. There were enough little quirks to notice the transition was happening, but you had more or less harmonious coexistence between KDE4-based apps and KF5-based apps as the developers of KDE apps each migrated theirs over as they saw fit. There was no big moment of widespread breakage or loss of functionality. Afaict they're taking the same approach to rebasing things on Qt 6. To me it seems like the painful transition between KDE3 and KDE4 is something the developer community learned very well from, but I haven't followed along with any discussions which would really show whether that's the case.
- account42 4y ago
  > A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity. KDE4-based Amarok was its own trainwreck. Released without support for dynamic playlists based on hard filters because FUZZY FILTERS ARE THE FUTURE. And it managed to trash its database twice on my system. It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program. More or less the same for me. I loved Amarok until KDE4, but had to abandon it then. For a few years I used an XMMS2 client I wrote myself, but I grew weary of keeping that updated so I switched to VLC, and later mpv, with playlists loaded from my (custom, but general purpose) file manager.

by dagw 4y ago

calvinmorrison 4y ago

Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on. KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.

simcop2387 4y ago

If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as critical for me.

snapplebobapple 4y ago
This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see why people like tiling desktops but I also really think they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).
robonerd 4y ago
KDE 4.0 was abysmal, so bad it seemed like deliberate sabotage, and it didn't get much better through 4.2. That's when I gave up on KDE for several years (until about a year or so ago.) Now I'm trying to like it again, all the right pieces seem to be in place, but the constant introduction of new bugs to basic functionality has me questioning why I'm even trying.
account42 4y ago
> despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. The KDE devs are the ones who decided to call the alpha version 4.0 so I wouldn't put all the blame on the distros here. I think the problem with KDE 4 was not just but also experimental technologies like Nepomuk (desktop search is great in theory, but an EU research project is probably not the best fit for a production DE), Akonadi (yay let's run a MySQL server on each desktop), Plasma widgets (if you thought one widget set was enough for a DE you thought wrong apparently) and Activities that just didn't provide enough value for the overhead and change that they forced onto the whole system. A more straightforward Qt4 upgrade of KDE 3 would not have been nearly as problematic.

akagusu 4y ago

The transition from KDE 3 to 4 was a completely disaster, but KDE devs learnt from it. They made a successful transition from KDE 4 to 5, and are committed to users needs, so we can expect a smoothly transition to Plasma 6. Now, compare it to Gnome, where every release means deeply changes for both users and 3rd party developers, and Gnome developers simply don't care.

pxc 4y ago

KDE 4.0 was essentially a preview for app developers, where the system had lots of new APIs but applications and desktop functionality built on top of them was still incomplete and not widely tested. Many KDE-based distros nonetheless went with 4.0 as their first KDE4 release. A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity. Eventually KDE4 did mature nicely, and the transition to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 was way, way, smoother. There were enough little quirks to notice the transition was happening, but you had more or less harmonious coexistence between KDE4-based apps and KF5-based apps as the developers of KDE apps each migrated theirs over as they saw fit. There was no big moment of widespread breakage or loss of functionality. Afaict they're taking the same approach to rebasing things on Qt 6. To me it seems like the painful transition between KDE3 and KDE4 is something the developer community learned very well from, but I haven't followed along with any discussions which would really show whether that's the case.

account42 4y ago
> A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity. KDE4-based Amarok was its own trainwreck. Released without support for dynamic playlists based on hard filters because FUZZY FILTERS ARE THE FUTURE. And it managed to trash its database twice on my system. It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program. More or less the same for me. I loved Amarok until KDE4, but had to abandon it then. For a few years I used an XMMS2 client I wrote myself, but I grew weary of keeping that updated so I switched to VLC, and later mpv, with playlists loaded from my (custom, but general purpose) file manager.