I am not sure what your second paragraph is referring to. KDE might be many things, but dead is not a valid descriptor. It's been going strong with a new iterat

I am not sure what your second paragraph is referring to. KDE might be many things, but dead is not a valid descriptor. It's been going strong with a new iteration based on Qt 5, the project just released Frameworks 5.8 which support compilation against Qt 5.5. In addition to Frameworks 5, the KDE project is porting their applications to Qt 5 while adding security fixes, usability improvements and new features. The KDE project has a full-featured mail client, including smart OpenPGP integration, an IDE, a modern XMPP client with OTR integration and a pretty wonderful general document viewer. There are people who don't like KDE for whatever reason, but it is far from dead. On a related note: I've interacted with several KDE developers when submitting bug reports over the years and I have found them to be really nice, responsive and respectful overall. [Edited: added valid to first paragraph]