As it turns out, I start to dislike the way the KDE project is proceeding, and I don’t refer to the Gentoo KDE project, but to the whole of KDE project.
I dislike the way KDE 4 is being developed, with a focus on eyecandy rather than on features. This is easily shown by the Oxygen style; not only it is taking up a amount of screen real estate for widgets that remind me of Keramik (and if you remember, one thing that made happy a huge amount of users was the switch from Keramik to Plastik as default style in KDE 3.3), but it’s also tremendously slow. And I’m sure of this, it’s not just an impression: as soon as I switch Qt to use Oxygen, it takes five seconds for Quassel to draw the list of buffers; once I use QtCurve, it takes just one second. I don’t know if this is because Enterprise is using XAA and not EXA, but it certainly doesn’t look like something that the default theme should do.
And no, I’m not expected to use a computer that has less than an year, with a hyper-strength gaming videocard to be able to use KDE.
But this is just one of the issues I have with KDE recently. There are some policies I really, really, dislike in KDE. The first is one I already mentioned quite often and it’s the move to CMake. The only “good” reason to move to CMake is to be able to build under Windows using Microsoft’s Visual C++ compiler; yet instead of just saying “we needed cmake because it’s necessary to build for Windows” I see so many devs saying “cmake is just better than everything else out there”. Bullshit.
The other policy that I dislike regards the way KDE is developed and released as a single, huge, monolithic thing. One of the things that made KDE difficult to package in Gentoo (and other source-based distributions) was the fact that by default the source has to be built in those huge amorphous packages. And if the autotools-based build system of KDE sucked so much, it was also because of that.
But even if we leave alone the way the releases are made, it’s just not possible for everything to fall into a single release cycle kind of thing. There are projects that are more mature and projects that are less. Forcing all of them in a single release cycle makes it difficult to provide timely bugfixes for the mature projects, and makes it impossible for the not-so-mature projects to be tested incrementally. The last straw I could bear to see because of this stupid way of releasing, was knowing that Konversation in KDE 4 will probably lose the IRC-over-SSL support because KSSL was removed from the base libraries.
And now KDE 4.1 is on the verge of release, and Kopete still segfaults once you connect to Jabber. Yet when I tried (multiple times) to gather information about the possible cause in #kopete (so I could at least try to debug it myself), I had no feedback at all; maybe it’s because I run Gentoo, although the same happens on (K)Ubuntu. Yeah not the kind of people I like to deal with.
I’m not saying that I think Gnome is perfect for policies and other things. I dislike the fact that it’s always more Linux-/Solaris-centric than cross-platform centric; but I think KDE4 was a set back for that too, for what I read. And their release method does look a lot more sane.
I started using Linux with KDE 2. I moved to Gnome once KDE 3 was being taken care of. I came back to KDE just a bit before 3.3 release. Now I’m going to try Gnome for a while, and if I like it, I’ll think more than twice before going back to KDE. Yeah sure I liked KDE 3 better than I liked Gnome before that, but it’s just not feasible that I have to switch DE every time they want to make a new release.
Besides, since I last used it, Gnome seems much more mature and nicer to deal with.