Health of the KDE Community

174 点作者 ognarb大约 4 年前

15 条评论

jogu大约 4 年前

Great to see the KDE development community being so active. I think it has really been showing in the end product. Over the past 2-3 years KDE has easily become my favorite environment, even over macOS or Windows as of late. For the most part things just work, all the default apps are solid. In particular Dolphin is hands down the best file manager out there. Kudos to the KDE devs.

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dyingkneepad大约 4 年前

The author also links to a similar assessment in the Gnome community, which I find really interesting.With Gnome we can see the interest went down after Gnome 3 was released. Many people like me ran away from it scared by the usability problems and unreliability of the extension system. And Gnome kept the same complained-about interface until today, and the project never picked up the pace it had before.While KDE4 was also seen as a big failure during its release (many bugs!), the biggest issue was simply bugs: not so many people complaining about the direction of the project, although these people probably existed. The project was able to fix the biggest issues and keep moving on (although KDE is still quite famous for being buggier than some of the alternatives), and now they have a community that can probably be described as "healthier than before", and certainly much better when you compare to what's happening to Gnome.Disclosure: I use Cinnamon.

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bityard大约 4 年前

Interesting write-up. I was a big fan of KDE 3 but never used KDE 4 or 5 in earnest because every time I gave it a serious try, it would start crashing randomly or some critical piece just wouldn't work the way it was supposed to. And that was _after_ disabling a bunch of the "fluff." But a few weeks ago, I decided to give it another try (via the packages in Ubuntu 20.10) and it's been _wonderful_. I can tweak all the knobs I want to tweak, and it has been very solid so far.I really appreciate software projects that place a higher priority on evolution rather than rm'ing huge swaths of working functionality, designing a worse replacement, and then calling it innovation. KDE did this with 4 and then took a decade to get back to something stable. Let's hope the cycle doesn't start over again anytime soon.

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nyanpasu64大约 4 年前

> If you are wondering who in the 1999 cohort made most of the contributions, it’s Laurent Montel and who in the 2010 disappeared in 2018 it’s “Montel Laurent”. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a nice way to merge both.I've made a shell script to automatically rename specific authors in Git repos. It's based around git filter-repo, so you'll have to install that first. <a href="https://gist.github.com/nyanpasu64/d92f346d75131d5338466eb4b0b5798a" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/nyanpasu64/d92f346d75131d5338466eb4b...</a>It may be possible to ignore email addresses when replacing names, I haven't checked.Perhaps you could create a SQLite query or update to achieve the same effect in the aggregated statistics.

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auxym大约 4 年前

Just wanted to chime in and say I've had a great experience submitting a small bugfix patch to KDE, even as someone new to C++. The dev docs provided a good intro, the devs were helpful in pointing out relevant sections of code (as comments to my bug report) and constructive feedback was given on my first patch submission, leading to a second attempt that was merged.

thevagrant大约 4 年前

Recently got back to using KDE and it is really polished with Opensuse Tumbleweed.I never understood why Gnome got all the attention from distros when KDE feels like a superior option.

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sdesol大约 4 年前

I can't say I'm familiar with the repositories behind KDE, but can somebody point me to say the top 10 - 20 repositories with the most activity, that would be good for determining overall health? I'd like to analyze them and I'll share my findings.I've studied hundreds of popular open source projects and I've found that "days active" and having lots of developers with mid to high level impact to be extremely good indicators of project health.vscode and GitLab are probably my favorite repos that best highlights this. If you look at the vscode project<a href="https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=github%3Amicrosoft%2Fvscode&v=repo" rel="nofollow">https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...</a>and switch to the impact view and sort by "days active" you can get a sense of what I mean. The more developers above 25%, the better. "First commit" which is also discussed in the post, is also another good indicator. For vscode, you'll find a lot of developers with 5 years of experience.And something that may seem counter intuitive is, you don't want contributors to have "very high" impact, as this indicates high bus factor risk. For impact, you actually want people to lie on the bottom of zone 2, as that indicates high individual impact and evenly distributed effort. Since GitLab isn't on GitHub, I can't share the insights for it, but that's what GitLab looks like.Note: Don't install my tool as the docker image has an expired license, which I need to fix.

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ceceron大约 4 年前

Always happy to hear good news about KDE. Recently I've installed OpenSuSe Tumbleweed for my wife (previously she was using macos and she is not 'technical') and it's great, even better than I remembered. Stable, customizable, one can make it beautiful with a minor effort.The biggest issues I still have are not KDE related:- touchpad experience on Linux just sucks compared to macos. Even started sponsoring the gitclear because of that. I haven't tried the mtrack yet, but lack of the reasonable configuration tool is a bit discouraging.- there is no modern mail client for Linux. The only "serious" mail client is thunderbird. Unfortunately it hasn't received enough love/attention in the recent past :(

SMFloris大约 4 年前

Shout out to the great people in the KDE Community.I was in high-school and being enamored with the open-source concept ("You mean I can modify anything I want about it?" - hah) I wanted to make my mark in a simple little way. I remember fondly when lurking around in IRC and somehow decided I would change the login screen. Got pointed to the KDE greeter channel and that is how it all started for me. I kept annoying them, did not know how to build, compile, nothing. Thanks to d_ed for answering my annoying questions, that is how it all started for me.

anotherevan大约 4 年前

I've been a KDE fan for many, many years. About a year ago I got the tiling window manager bug and after a lot of fiddling I landed on Awesomewm.However there are a few KDE apps I still cannot live without, including Dolphin, Konsole, Choqok and Yakuake.I'm sure there are others, but they are the obvious ones I can see on my desktop right now.

maxnoe大约 4 年前

kleer001大约 4 年前

Always happy for a bit of good news. Lovely analysis, good clean graphs. Aces.

magicalhippo大约 4 年前

Been a very happy user of KDE Neon on a NUC for several years. Just keeps on chugging, and is overall a pleasure to use. Thanks!

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iamarkadyt大约 4 年前

I really like GNOME 40 though. KDE is nice, but GNOME 40 is simple and is "just what you need". <a href="https://forty.gnome.org" rel="nofollow">https://forty.gnome.org</a>

encryptluks2大约 4 年前

The thing I don't like about KDE is that it is that KDE apps aren't individual components but part of a large framework. Anytime I go to install a KDE app on Arch, it wants to install like 30+ packages and unnecessary apps with it and I just end up finding something more lighter weight that doesn't have any or only a couple dependencies and it usually ends up performing a lot better.

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