Last weekend, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting took place in Brussels. KDE was present there with a lot of developers, a devroom and several interesting talks. Among the speakers were Jonathan Riddell from the Kubuntu distribution, Sebastian Kuegler from KDE’s Marketing Working Group, Bart Coppens from the Krita development team, and Raphael Langerhorst and Sander Koning from the KOffice teams.
I’ve always prefered GNOME to KDE, but I am constantly amazed at the quality of work that comes out of the KDE community. I believe that the vast majority of developers are also volunteer (someone correct me if I’m wrong), and this makes it all so much more impressive. Really unbelievable. Great job guys.
It’s interesting that KDE retains so much market share even though it’s pushed so much less by the bigger distros.
I would be interested to see good usage statistics/market share comparing GNOME and KDE because it is a rather difficult metric to measure.
Regarding the success of KDE in spite of any lack of support from the bigger distros, I would say that they do have support. The most commonly used distro among corporations might be Red Hat (particularly on workstations), and they are focused on GNOME. However, there are other big distributions that have been focused on KDE and continue to offer great support for KDE such as Mandriva and SUSE. Many of the “newbie friendly” distributions also use KDE for the desktop. So, I would say that there is ample reason to understand the success of KDE.
The biggest reason for success and the reason that many distributions rely on KDE is because of the great work done by the developers.
“Many of the “newbie friendly” distributions also use KDE for the desktop. So, I would say that there is ample reason to understand the success of KDE. ”
This is kind of strange, since GNOME is often criticized (by even Linus Torvalds himself), for hiding functionality because it might “confuse the lusers”.
Really, I just love KDE because of Konqueror. The eye candy/neat usuability things (like having a universal menu at the top of the screen, like a Mac), are just gravy.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.1 (like Gecko) Kubuntu 6.04 Dapper
cool to see the article linked here 😉
yeah, FOSDEM was fun, and KOffice is really really amazing, believe me. 2.0 will kick OO.o’s ass, i’m sure about that.