9 ms·

Where KDE is Going – Part 1

125 points by sciurus 12y ago

yefim 12y ago
I've always loved KDE and support everything they're going. Good job team!
mercurial 12y ago
Looking forward to KDE apps not dragging hundreds of megs of dependencies. And though I don't use it anymore, I still have a soft spot for this DE and the amount of flexibility it offers. Now, if it was a bit less buggy...
middleclick 12y ago
My experience with KDE was always that it was prettier than GNOME 2 (at that time) but a massive resource hog, so I always ended up uninstalling it. I am curious how KDE has come along in addressing the bloat issue.
- whoopdedo 12y ago
  GNOME2 is still more lightweight. Where KDE has gained popularity is with people bailing out from GNOME 3. FLTK still retains the small-and-fast crown.
  - Zardoz84 12y ago
    False. KDE 4 runs far better that Gnome 2.
ossreality 12y ago
It's a joke. Here, install Plasma Workspace 2. Open the background chooser. Make it full screen. Laugh your ass off at KDE's supposed attention to detail. That 3x3 grid in the screenshot? Yup, 3x3 even at 4K resolution.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Nice, I still remember (not so fondly) doing the full build of KDE from source in the 3.x days to get it on my desktop machine. That and a bunch of issues with things that were more gnomish breaking it in weird ways. Using Kubuntu 12 has been pretty nice though. This next step sounds better still.
reitanqild 12y ago
IMO KDE had an edge at Gnome until Ubuntu. Then Gnome on Ubuntu was the easiest/best DE until Unity / Gnome 3. Today I switch between elementary, kde and Windows 8
AceJohnny2 12y ago
Glad to hear things are still moving along and there are interesting things on the horizon. I was a longtime KDE user until a couple years ago when I switched to Awesome and a desktop-environment-less desktop (i.e, neither Gnome, Unity, XFCE...). I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release), and the following iterations. Plasma wasn't useful to me (as a coder, I like to have and editor and a shell occupying as much of my screen as possible), but I appreciated the work that went into it. I remember seeing once that KDE had a bad reputation of working around platform problems rather than tackling them head-on, unlike Gnome. As a result, they were constantly playing catch-up with the system integration that Gnome had built. I particularly remember the Network-Manager applet being bad enough that I just used the Gnome one. Nevertheless, keep up the good work KDE!
- ris 12y ago
  "I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release)" I think you mean 4.0
  - AceJohnny2 12y ago
    Quite right. My, how time flies.
pstop 12y ago
Starting to look fully commercial, that's really slick.
nisa 12y ago
I have huge respect for everyone involved in KDE and OpenSource software and I'm writing this on KDE 4.13 but damn... it still sucks. Maybe I'm the wrong user.. but I do programming and do sysadmin stuff most of the time.. First the good parts: KDE is quite stable for me. I have hardly any crashes... this is huge as Unity had some ugly bugs I could not resolve. But I had to install the Numix theme and icons and tweak knobs to get a common look between KDE/GTK2/GTK3.. I found the default Oxygen ugly and not well designed but this is probably a question of taste. With Numix the machine feels and looks great but I'm not so happy after installing Windows 8.1 on an 10 year old Pentium M notebook with 2GB RAM and having to realize that Windows is way faster and responsive and more feature-rich than KDE and Unity and requires less RAM. I'm not trolling - I'm talking about stuff like browsing files using the file manager and using a browser or office for writing documents. Back to KDE: I don't understand Plasma at all - I don't use "activities" I tried it but found it useless. I don't care about widgets. I'd care more if the widgets would not be so useless.. something like gkrellm that ran on fvwm95 gives me more and better data about cpu/disk/network usage than any widgets I've found in the collections. Memory... at least 400MB RSS after a fresh boot running only Konsole. No semenatic desktop, no Akonadi, no widgets... This is just crazy. I have no SSD and 4GB RAM - maybe I'm too cheap for KDE but Akonadi and all semantic desktop parts never worked for me. Why can't I disable the desktop search? After some hours googling I managed to kill most of Akonadi and Desktop search but I really would enjoy something like a minimal KDE desktop. Dolphin/Kwin/Konsole/Kate/Okular are really great tools, through and I enjoy using them more than the Gnome tools.. I don't think I'm an old grumpy user - I really enjoy the Unity concept and even found Gnome3 interesting but I'm still feel some longing from time to time for the speed and functionality of KDE 3.5. But overall I can work with KDE. I would be probably a lot more happy if I had a SSD and 16GB RAM and well.. that sucks. I don't want to install Windows on this machine for it to be faster! I know there are alternatives.. but running Windows 8.1 on this 10 year old Pentium M notebook just made clear to me that the problem is not the hardware - it's the software. Why is it so hard to to have a highly functional and low-footprint system?
- emilsedgh 12y ago
  About performance, I think you can tweak it even more by disabling compositing or even better, setting animation speeds in Kwin to 'Instant'. Also, the switch to Qt5/QML2/Wayland allows graph scene rendering. Expect huge improvements in that area.
varkson 12y ago
It's got a lot of promise to be the best looking Linux desktop around. I don't really like the grey they use however; I'd lighten it up. But then you're in trouble of looking like iOS.
- veeti 12y ago
  Have you seen elementaryOS? Everything they've come up with looks a million times more polished than anything else in the Linux world.
  - dikei 12y ago
    I always feel that Elementary OS is all looks, no substance. They replace many well-established applications with their own basic apps that might look better but lack functionality.
Nux 12y ago
KDE is going straight ... Down! I'm sorry to see it go (was my first Linux DE), but it's userbase has become a niche. It's mostly Unity and Gnome3 now.
pnathan 12y ago
I am generally very happy with KDE. It's much more hacker-friendly than Gnome/Unity IMO. Its footprint is huge and there's enormous power in it that I don't use. XFCE is similar but doesn't have the polish that KDE does, especially around multimonitor support. I would encourage the KDE team to focus on driving towards the hacker use case and letting that power drive the end user experience. :)
dannyrosen 12y ago
I've been using Kubuntu for about 6 months. I was originally a Windows user looking to learn more about Linux and wasn't a big fan of the OSX UI. I went to KDE because it looked and acted like Windows but had the power of Linux underneath the hood. I'm looking forward to the future of KDE and applaud the team for their effort and passion.
Xylemon 12y ago
I feel like KDE5 is ugly, I'm already missing the detailed and elegant design of KDE4. Maybe it's just my whole dislike of the "minimalism" movement in general, but KDE5 looks dull and lifeless. That's just the visuals though. There's other great stuff about it to discuss, but I still can't help be disgusted by it's new look everytime I see it.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  You know that you could change the widgets style and colours like on KDE 4 ? I don't dislike the new look&feel, but I like more what I have now (Oxygen with a dark colour scheme).
alexvr 12y ago
When I was a big Linux nerd I often found myself ditching KDE distros for those with desktop environments that look elegant and cohesive right out of the box. But the new Plasma design looks excellent. If you guys can pull off an environment with great customization options and out-of-the-box elegance, that would be fantastic. Looks like the new design is headed in the right direction.
superflit 12y ago
after so many struggle and slowish kde I quit and went XFCE all the way.. It is not fancy but does the trick
overgard 12y ago
I'm not a KDE user (at the moment, though I have been in the past), but I have to say my first reaction to those screenshots were: "it looks like a shitty windows 8". I'm not saying that's the truth, that was just the first thought that popped into my head looking at those screenshots.
malkia 12y ago
I'm excited about KDE Frameworks 5 - Wondering how easy it would be to reuse parts of them in Qt5
zafiro17 12y ago
I've been a KDE user since KDE1 and I think, despite its flaws, it's still better than Gnome. I personally like the deep configurability, love the keybindings, WM tweakability, and so on. I'm not a huge fan of Plasma but think they made the right decision by building an architecture that would allow them to use the same components to build tablet, desktop, and other interfaces. I don't use any of the widgets though - don't find them useful. And I dislike Nepomuk and Akonadi, at least in their current form. I want to love Kontact but at least in SUSE 12.3 it still falls short of the mark. But I think this desktop is headed in the right direction and it's always the default I install first!
izietto 12y ago
KDE is great, but I don't like the default icons, colors and spacings, and the other themes aren't better (or at least, I couldn't find one).
Nanzikambe 12y ago
I love and use KDE on both my workstation and laptop. However over the decades, and especially since v4, I've seen it grow into something I barely recognise. Some things have to change: 1/ Remove akonadi/nepomuk/mysql - a full mysql install just to provide a data store for "PIM and metadata" is ludicrous. 2/ Make sure the Semantic desktop/Semantic Search/nepomuk is optional. I respect that it maybe useful for some, but please respect that it may not be useful for all. 3/ Ditto for consolekit/policykit 4/ Ditto for KDE PIM. The moment Kopete, Konversation, Kaddressbook etc depended upon the PIM stuff, was the moment I dropped them for Pidgin. Why? See point #1 It took me 12 hours to get kdelibs-4.12.5 + the rest of kde-base built without consolekit, policykit, akonadi, nepomuk, udisks/udisks2, upower, raptor, redland, gstreamer, virtuoso, soprano and canberra. But the result is a clean, usable and fast desktop, ie. the desktop I want! If I have to do that each time I upgrade, I'm going to look at other options. I'm most definitely not alone in this, a search on any of #1-4 will find hordes of frustrated people spending time figuring out ways to remove all these unwanted features. For many users, removing all the above isn't an option. For users its complex and time consuming. Failing to make them optional (rather than default) KDE will suffer -- losing users, as memory consumed by an idle desktop triggers horrific flashbacks to darker Windows days. My perception as a user is that Gnome (minimalism uber alles) and KDE (everything and the kitchen sink) have gone to extremes and forgotten their user base.
- simoncion 12y ago
  > It took me 12 hours to get kdelibs-4.12.5 + the rest of kde-base built without... Gentoo and its USE flags system makes this sort of thing really easy. If you have an otherwise idle machine sitting in a closet somewhere, you could even create a Gentoo binary package builder [0] for your primary Linux machine, so you don't have to spend time building the world on your primary box. [0] You compile software on the package builder, it creates tarballs and installation instructions, then you use the package manager on another machine to install those tarballs.
  - Nanzikambe 12y ago
    Actually I do use Gentoo :) Despite the USE flags KDE's own dependencies make this rather less than easy. Try remove akonadi, consolekit, polkit, kde-base/pim add "-consolekit -policykit -udisks -udisks2 -upower -raptor -redland -semantic-desktop -virtuoso -soprano -gstreamer -canberra" to your USE flags and rebuild KDE. Ended up having to create a custom ebuild, mask a whole lot of stuff and add some stuff to package.provided to make it work. > you could even create a Gentoo binary package builder [0] for your primary Linux machine I wasn't complaining about compile time, I have 20+ cores distributed for distcc compilation.
josteink 12y ago
So the consensus on here seems to be that KDE (like GNOME) is too busy doing their own things, while not really catering to the needs of actual users. Not having used KDE in a while (since the plasma disaster) I'm obviously not that into current details, but I remember advocating KDE over GNOME because it just worked and have what I needed. Since Ubuntu those days are definitely gone. But now GNOME + unity is slipping too. My next desktop may be cinnamon. I just wish I didn't have to be desktop-hopping like this to keep a nice, simple and working desktop. (and no, lxde and xfce is not for me. I find then too minimal and underpolished)
seanewest 12y ago
Remember when the open source movement revolved around Linux? Honestly this brings back memories from about 10 years ago for me.
meatbag 12y ago
Recently I had to spend a month working on a massively important, yet incredibly tedious/repetitive, web dev project. I started with our company's standard-issue dev environment: Windows 7 running Sublime Text. I got fed up with the slow speed and having to make 3x as many mouse clicks, which add up to a lot of repetitive motions after a while. I switched back to KDE because I could use Kate with the "fish://" protocol. I was able to finish the project in 1/4 the time it would have taken me otherwise. This is not an exaggeration, though it may be a conservative estimate. Much less wear-and-tear on my hands, too. I keep meaning to learn vim and, in so doing, finally become a [SERIOUS PROFESSIONAL COMPUTER MAN], but KDE, when configured the way I want it, is the perfect development environment for me. I keep coming back to it. I have used every major computer operating system, different flavors of Gnome, XFCE, MacOS, Windows, and Linux under various lightweight window managers. If I need an OS for an older desktop machine, then I generally prefer razor-qt though :) I've mostly outgrown the whole militant-OS-partisan thing, but I guess I'm kind of passionate about KDE. Passionate enough to write a long-winded thing on the internet, at any rate. KDE is far from perfect. It's a resource pig until you learn how to use it effectively. But, so is everything else. It does seem like KDE development will chase the latest trends, but I hold out some hope that they might make some concessions for those of us who just want a lightweight system with a few powerful features.

125 points by sciurus 12y ago

yefim 12y ago

I've always loved KDE and support everything they're going. Good job team!

Looking forward to KDE apps not dragging hundreds of megs of dependencies. And though I don't use it anymore, I still have a soft spot for this DE and the amount of flexibility it offers. Now, if it was a bit less buggy...

middleclick 12y ago

My experience with KDE was always that it was prettier than GNOME 2 (at that time) but a massive resource hog, so I always ended up uninstalling it. I am curious how KDE has come along in addressing the bloat issue.

whoopdedo 12y ago
GNOME2 is still more lightweight. Where KDE has gained popularity is with people bailing out from GNOME 3. FLTK still retains the small-and-fast crown.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  False. KDE 4 runs far better that Gnome 2.

ossreality 12y ago

It's a joke. Here, install Plasma Workspace 2. Open the background chooser. Make it full screen. Laugh your ass off at KDE's supposed attention to detail. That 3x3 grid in the screenshot? Yup, 3x3 even at 4K resolution.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Nice, I still remember (not so fondly) doing the full build of KDE from source in the 3.x days to get it on my desktop machine. That and a bunch of issues with things that were more gnomish breaking it in weird ways. Using Kubuntu 12 has been pretty nice though. This next step sounds better still.

reitanqild 12y ago

IMO KDE had an edge at Gnome until Ubuntu. Then Gnome on Ubuntu was the easiest/best DE until Unity / Gnome 3. Today I switch between elementary, kde and Windows 8

AceJohnny2 12y ago

Glad to hear things are still moving along and there are interesting things on the horizon. I was a longtime KDE user until a couple years ago when I switched to Awesome and a desktop-environment-less desktop (i.e, neither Gnome, Unity, XFCE...). I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release), and the following iterations. Plasma wasn't useful to me (as a coder, I like to have and editor and a shell occupying as much of my screen as possible), but I appreciated the work that went into it. I remember seeing once that KDE had a bad reputation of working around platform problems rather than tackling them head-on, unlike Gnome. As a result, they were constantly playing catch-up with the system integration that Gnome had built. I particularly remember the Network-Manager applet being bad enough that I just used the Gnome one. Nevertheless, keep up the good work KDE!

ris 12y ago
"I felt I was in the minority for liking KDE 3.0 (the infamous "public beta" release)" I think you mean 4.0
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  Quite right. My, how time flies.

pstop 12y ago

Starting to look fully commercial, that's really slick.

nisa 12y ago

I have huge respect for everyone involved in KDE and OpenSource software and I'm writing this on KDE 4.13 but damn... it still sucks. Maybe I'm the wrong user.. but I do programming and do sysadmin stuff most of the time.. First the good parts: KDE is quite stable for me. I have hardly any crashes... this is huge as Unity had some ugly bugs I could not resolve. But I had to install the Numix theme and icons and tweak knobs to get a common look between KDE/GTK2/GTK3.. I found the default Oxygen ugly and not well designed but this is probably a question of taste. With Numix the machine feels and looks great but I'm not so happy after installing Windows 8.1 on an 10 year old Pentium M notebook with 2GB RAM and having to realize that Windows is way faster and responsive and more feature-rich than KDE and Unity and requires less RAM. I'm not trolling - I'm talking about stuff like browsing files using the file manager and using a browser or office for writing documents. Back to KDE: I don't understand Plasma at all - I don't use "activities" I tried it but found it useless. I don't care about widgets. I'd care more if the widgets would not be so useless.. something like gkrellm that ran on fvwm95 gives me more and better data about cpu/disk/network usage than any widgets I've found in the collections. Memory... at least 400MB RSS after a fresh boot running only Konsole. No semenatic desktop, no Akonadi, no widgets... This is just crazy. I have no SSD and 4GB RAM - maybe I'm too cheap for KDE but Akonadi and all semantic desktop parts never worked for me. Why can't I disable the desktop search? After some hours googling I managed to kill most of Akonadi and Desktop search but I really would enjoy something like a minimal KDE desktop. Dolphin/Kwin/Konsole/Kate/Okular are really great tools, through and I enjoy using them more than the Gnome tools.. I don't think I'm an old grumpy user - I really enjoy the Unity concept and even found Gnome3 interesting but I'm still feel some longing from time to time for the speed and functionality of KDE 3.5. But overall I can work with KDE. I would be probably a lot more happy if I had a SSD and 16GB RAM and well.. that sucks. I don't want to install Windows on this machine for it to be faster! I know there are alternatives.. but running Windows 8.1 on this 10 year old Pentium M notebook just made clear to me that the problem is not the hardware - it's the software. Why is it so hard to to have a highly functional and low-footprint system?

emilsedgh 12y ago
About performance, I think you can tweak it even more by disabling compositing or even better, setting animation speeds in Kwin to 'Instant'. Also, the switch to Qt5/QML2/Wayland allows graph scene rendering. Expect huge improvements in that area.

varkson 12y ago

It's got a lot of promise to be the best looking Linux desktop around. I don't really like the grey they use however; I'd lighten it up. But then you're in trouble of looking like iOS.

veeti 12y ago
Have you seen elementaryOS? Everything they've come up with looks a million times more polished than anything else in the Linux world.
- dikei 12y ago
  I always feel that Elementary OS is all looks, no substance. They replace many well-established applications with their own basic apps that might look better but lack functionality.

Nux 12y ago

KDE is going straight ... Down! I'm sorry to see it go (was my first Linux DE), but it's userbase has become a niche. It's mostly Unity and Gnome3 now.

pnathan 12y ago

I am generally very happy with KDE. It's much more hacker-friendly than Gnome/Unity IMO. Its footprint is huge and there's enormous power in it that I don't use. XFCE is similar but doesn't have the polish that KDE does, especially around multimonitor support. I would encourage the KDE team to focus on driving towards the hacker use case and letting that power drive the end user experience. :)

dannyrosen 12y ago

I've been using Kubuntu for about 6 months. I was originally a Windows user looking to learn more about Linux and wasn't a big fan of the OSX UI. I went to KDE because it looked and acted like Windows but had the power of Linux underneath the hood. I'm looking forward to the future of KDE and applaud the team for their effort and passion.

Xylemon 12y ago

I feel like KDE5 is ugly, I'm already missing the detailed and elegant design of KDE4. Maybe it's just my whole dislike of the "minimalism" movement in general, but KDE5 looks dull and lifeless. That's just the visuals though. There's other great stuff about it to discuss, but I still can't help be disgusted by it's new look everytime I see it.

Zardoz84 12y ago
You know that you could change the widgets style and colours like on KDE 4 ? I don't dislike the new look&feel, but I like more what I have now (Oxygen with a dark colour scheme).

alexvr 12y ago

When I was a big Linux nerd I often found myself ditching KDE distros for those with desktop environments that look elegant and cohesive right out of the box. But the new Plasma design looks excellent. If you guys can pull off an environment with great customization options and out-of-the-box elegance, that would be fantastic. Looks like the new design is headed in the right direction.

superflit 12y ago

after so many struggle and slowish kde I quit and went XFCE all the way.. It is not fancy but does the trick

overgard 12y ago

I'm not a KDE user (at the moment, though I have been in the past), but I have to say my first reaction to those screenshots were: "it looks like a shitty windows 8". I'm not saying that's the truth, that was just the first thought that popped into my head looking at those screenshots.

malkia 12y ago

I'm excited about KDE Frameworks 5 - Wondering how easy it would be to reuse parts of them in Qt5

zafiro17 12y ago

I've been a KDE user since KDE1 and I think, despite its flaws, it's still better than Gnome. I personally like the deep configurability, love the keybindings, WM tweakability, and so on. I'm not a huge fan of Plasma but think they made the right decision by building an architecture that would allow them to use the same components to build tablet, desktop, and other interfaces. I don't use any of the widgets though - don't find them useful. And I dislike Nepomuk and Akonadi, at least in their current form. I want to love Kontact but at least in SUSE 12.3 it still falls short of the mark. But I think this desktop is headed in the right direction and it's always the default I install first!

izietto 12y ago

KDE is great, but I don't like the default icons, colors and spacings, and the other themes aren't better (or at least, I couldn't find one).

Nanzikambe 12y ago

I love and use KDE on both my workstation and laptop. However over the decades, and especially since v4, I've seen it grow into something I barely recognise. Some things have to change: 1/ Remove akonadi/nepomuk/mysql - a full mysql install just to provide a data store for "PIM and metadata" is ludicrous. 2/ Make sure the Semantic desktop/Semantic Search/nepomuk is optional. I respect that it maybe useful for some, but please respect that it may not be useful for all. 3/ Ditto for consolekit/policykit 4/ Ditto for KDE PIM. The moment Kopete, Konversation, Kaddressbook etc depended upon the PIM stuff, was the moment I dropped them for Pidgin. Why? See point #1 It took me 12 hours to get kdelibs-4.12.5 + the rest of kde-base built without consolekit, policykit, akonadi, nepomuk, udisks/udisks2, upower, raptor, redland, gstreamer, virtuoso, soprano and canberra. But the result is a clean, usable and fast desktop, ie. the desktop I want! If I have to do that each time I upgrade, I'm going to look at other options. I'm most definitely not alone in this, a search on any of #1-4 will find hordes of frustrated people spending time figuring out ways to remove all these unwanted features. For many users, removing all the above isn't an option. For users its complex and time consuming. Failing to make them optional (rather than default) KDE will suffer -- losing users, as memory consumed by an idle desktop triggers horrific flashbacks to darker Windows days. My perception as a user is that Gnome (minimalism uber alles) and KDE (everything and the kitchen sink) have gone to extremes and forgotten their user base.

simoncion 12y ago
> It took me 12 hours to get kdelibs-4.12.5 + the rest of kde-base built without... Gentoo and its USE flags system makes this sort of thing really easy. If you have an otherwise idle machine sitting in a closet somewhere, you could even create a Gentoo binary package builder [0] for your primary Linux machine, so you don't have to spend time building the world on your primary box. [0] You compile software on the package builder, it creates tarballs and installation instructions, then you use the package manager on another machine to install those tarballs.
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  Actually I do use Gentoo :) Despite the USE flags KDE's own dependencies make this rather less than easy. Try remove akonadi, consolekit, polkit, kde-base/pim add "-consolekit -policykit -udisks -udisks2 -upower -raptor -redland -semantic-desktop -virtuoso -soprano -gstreamer -canberra" to your USE flags and rebuild KDE. Ended up having to create a custom ebuild, mask a whole lot of stuff and add some stuff to package.provided to make it work. > you could even create a Gentoo binary package builder [0] for your primary Linux machine I wasn't complaining about compile time, I have 20+ cores distributed for distcc compilation.

josteink 12y ago

So the consensus on here seems to be that KDE (like GNOME) is too busy doing their own things, while not really catering to the needs of actual users. Not having used KDE in a while (since the plasma disaster) I'm obviously not that into current details, but I remember advocating KDE over GNOME because it just worked and have what I needed. Since Ubuntu those days are definitely gone. But now GNOME + unity is slipping too. My next desktop may be cinnamon. I just wish I didn't have to be desktop-hopping like this to keep a nice, simple and working desktop. (and no, lxde and xfce is not for me. I find then too minimal and underpolished)

seanewest 12y ago

Remember when the open source movement revolved around Linux? Honestly this brings back memories from about 10 years ago for me.

meatbag 12y ago

Recently I had to spend a month working on a massively important, yet incredibly tedious/repetitive, web dev project. I started with our company's standard-issue dev environment: Windows 7 running Sublime Text. I got fed up with the slow speed and having to make 3x as many mouse clicks, which add up to a lot of repetitive motions after a while. I switched back to KDE because I could use Kate with the "fish://" protocol. I was able to finish the project in 1/4 the time it would have taken me otherwise. This is not an exaggeration, though it may be a conservative estimate. Much less wear-and-tear on my hands, too. I keep meaning to learn vim and, in so doing, finally become a [SERIOUS PROFESSIONAL COMPUTER MAN], but KDE, when configured the way I want it, is the perfect development environment for me. I keep coming back to it. I have used every major computer operating system, different flavors of Gnome, XFCE, MacOS, Windows, and Linux under various lightweight window managers. If I need an OS for an older desktop machine, then I generally prefer razor-qt though :) I've mostly outgrown the whole militant-OS-partisan thing, but I guess I'm kind of passionate about KDE. Passionate enough to write a long-winded thing on the internet, at any rate. KDE is far from perfect. It's a resource pig until you learn how to use it effectively. But, so is everything else. It does seem like KDE development will chase the latest trends, but I hold out some hope that they might make some concessions for those of us who just want a lightweight system with a few powerful features.