[HN Gopher] Health of the KDE Community
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Health of the KDE Community
Author : ognarb
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-04-29 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (carlschwan.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (carlschwan.eu)
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| ognarb wrote:
| The plans for plasma 6 and kde frameworks 6 are mostly around
| removing old deprecated features, simplify our dependency tree
| and porting to qt6. And there is no plans of adding any big
| features.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| KDE 4 frequently failed in weird ways for me, but KDE 5 has
| been stable and much more pleasant than Gnome. It's not only
| that I learned to avoid the weirdness, it definitely improved
| significantly.
|
| If only it didn't assume my external screens are part of the
| same touch surface of my laptop, because that makes touch
| unusable... maybe KDE 6.
| sdesol wrote:
| 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
|
| https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...
|
| 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.
| ognarb wrote:
| Take a look at https://invent.kde.org/explore/projects/starred,
| this should give you a good overview of the most popular
| repository.
| kleer001 wrote:
| Always happy for a bit of good news. Lovely analysis, good clean
| graphs. Aces.
| jogu wrote:
| 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.
| topspin wrote:
| I agree. I had been using OpenSUSE for years, then converted to
| Kubuntu about 2 years ago. No regrets. KDE is currently
| excellent; quality is high and they are thankfully being very
| conservative in design and development. This has produced a
| pleasant, complete and stable DE.
|
| The only real problem KDE has now are the scars of past
| mistakes that have kept people away and all too often mired in
| Gnome.
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| I always preferred thunar or pcmanfm back when I was into
| exploring all those Desktop Environments and Window Managers ;
| some of the xfce/lxde tools are particularly light on
| additional libraries needed, which makes them great options if
| running a wm only and wanting a slim system. lxterminal with i3
| or dwm for example. Actually preferred that compared to rxvt-
| unicode. But happy to agree on the larger point: it's been
| showing in the end product. Particularly the KDE community has
| done a wonderful job slimming down its codebase.
|
| Tried KDE a few months back for a short time, was surprised
| that KDE's footprint (in mb of space on disk, not ram) was not
| that much heavier than LXQT. The desktop experience seemed
| polished, though for me it has far too much gimmickery (in
| settings), and at this point I'm quite used to Ubuntu's Gnome.
| But happy for a healthy ecosystem. When I got into Linux (back
| in ~2008 probably?), I remember the choice with regards to full
| DEs was KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE vs LXDE ; there are more today,
| but I would hate to see one of them gone for good, and wish all
| of them well. Good to read that KDE seems healthy.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I'm just a casual user, but three features I really like in
| Dolphin that I haven't seen elsewhere:
|
| - Split window, so you can have two explorers right next to
| each other.
|
| - Tabs
|
| - If you drag a file/folder into another folder, you get
| prompted about "copying or moving?"
|
| In terms of health, I also appreciate that many of the devs
| frequent the kde subreddit, and they all seem really chill
| and receptive.
| Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
| I am not that aware of the various file managers and their
| specific features these days. I guess it's about use case.
| I always want primarily something "which doesn't annoy",
| since the file manager is mostly there "just in case" for
| me. I live in the terminal, even for most file operations.
|
| Back when I tested them out (years ago, so not relevant
| today, still): Considering dependencies (if not running
| KDE), but even then Dolphin always seemed to do something
| quite not intuitively for me. Can't name examples anymore.
|
| Different people, different tools.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| - Split window (just use your window manager?) - Thunar has
| Tabs, and I'm sure lots of other file managers do too -
| That is a nice option, and others should copy it.
| shorts_theory wrote:
| I love the integrated terminal too! It's such a great idea
| which is now integral to my workflow.
| eredengrin wrote:
| Like GP I'm a very happy pcmanfm user most of the time, but
| I use spacefm sometimes and I know it has split window as
| an option. Not trying to convince you to leave dolphin,
| just mentioning in case you like exploring.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| 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.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| > 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.
| https://gist.github.com/nyanpasu64/d92f346d75131d5338466eb4b...
|
| 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.
| ognarb wrote:
| Yeah there is definitely ways to fix it with some simple SQL
| statements but I was probably a bit too lazy.
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(page generated 2021-04-29 23:01 UTC)