Post B7X7AsJtDfhQlX16yu by lianna@micro.webgarden.click
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 (DIR) Post #B7X7AsJtDfhQlX16yu by lianna@micro.webgarden.click
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       I love #KDE a lot, but if I had to come up with something to criticise, I think it would be the contrast in quality between the flagship components (i. e. Plasma, Dolphin etc.) and the myriad of more obsure KDE applications.Many of the latter don't follow KDE's own UX or design guidelines, are long obsolete, lack important features, have long-standing bugs with occasional critical impacts on usability, are missing integration with other KDE system components, are worse versions of more modern KDE applications, or are simply strangely low-quality.To be sure, I don't know a solution either! There is just no good way to handle such cases.Outright removing them would be awful and a waste of resources; they work perfectly fine after all and it would be unfair to take that away from both users and developers.Releasing them from the KDE umbrella and into independence if they don't meet quality standards sounds good at first, but it doesn't solve any problems when you think about it any more. There won't be any more development efforts magically pouring into an independent project all of a sudden, and all you did is create administrative difficulty and sever communication routes and infrastructure.Say you determine that Tokodon isn't good enough to be part of the KDE suite. You remove all KDE branding from it, remove it from metapackages and just release it into the wild. In the future, when people ask whether KDE has a Fedi client, you'll have to say "no, but the closest thing is that we used to have one" and point them towards the now-independent Tokodon. Did this actually help anyone? No. You only made it even less likely for someone eager to contribute to a KDE Fedi client to stumble upon Tokodon because you let it go.But without significantly more volunteer work that just isn't available, these programs can't really be updated or improved up to standard either, and active volunteers are super rare.So they just kinda... float around in a bad state, but not bad enough to be removed.But this current state of affairs is also not a good solution, because now there's a ton of lower-quality official KDE projects that look to the end user like they're going to be just as much an equal, integral part of one's system as something like Dolphin or Konsole, but with no way of communicating that they're actually hardly maintained nicheĀ apps that aren't representative of KDE as a whole. This might reflect negatively on the project and confuse users.I think the root cause of why this happened is multi-dimensional.There are just not enough volunteer developers willing to maintain niche applications.Not all KDE applications' development processes are as integrated into the general KDE dev community as the flagship apps; many smaller applications are one-person projects with little oversight or assistance.A lot of programs are very old former glory flagship projects, from times where KDE's scope used to be a lot wider (e. g. Konqueror, KOffice, KMoney etc.), and nowadays there are way fewer people working on them than would be required to maintain such behemoths.But what do we do?
       
 (DIR) Post #B7X7Asgvq08BuznVtg by Simx72@tkz.one
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       @lianna I think it's okay like that. Usually, when I don't like the "kde" version, i use the "gnome" version, and there is almos always a gnome version. For example, I like a lot Baobab, and I just don't like Filelight, like the ui don't match the rest, or sometimes it takes longer to load. Of course, in a perfect world, everything's UI would match and computers would be easier to use. But even in Windows and Mac some apps look very different from others because sometimes devs want their apps to look different from others so it is more "remarkable"?So, in my opinion, what they are doing now is just fine, leaving them under the Kde umbrella but letting people know that they are not as updated as the flagship ones, but they are also open for more volunteers to come and for people who depend on it (like KMyMoney). And also lets people now what apps are kde's, or know that the app uses qt