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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

KDE was probably continually stymied by "it's nonfree" FUD, but part of the problem must be them blowing their foot off by releasing an alpha quality release as "4.0". (And why did distro packagers switch to it? Because users would see the version number and demand the new thing... It wasn't fair to expect packagers to hold back.)

Before then it seemed like KDE and Gnome were on roughly equal footing, but maybe that was just my perception.

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Oh, the memories. I was always excited about new releases at that time and KDE 4 really had me rethinking that. It was so bad.

I really loved KDE 4, but then again, I'd just come from Vista.

First versions of KDE4 were unstable (notably, there were memory leaks I think, and frequent crashes - maybe related to the memory leaks - in plasmoids), but last versions were rock solid (starting from version 4.4 maybe), and it was a very nice desktop environment back then.

(Now, we have Plasma 5, and Plasma 6 in a few days, which are even better :-))

Yeah, KDE 4.0 wasn't bad because of its design philosophies or functionality. Everytime people hear that phrase, they instantly jump to that conclusion for some reason. No, it was resource hungry and crashed a lot (mostly due to aforementioned resource needs).

The later versions of KDE4 didn't change much, they just pared down resource requirements, stabilized things and let the average computer specs catch up to them. Now KDE is considered the more "conservative" DE.

>No, it was resource hungry

Was it really, or was that just a rumor from non-technical "C++ is bloated" Linux crowd?

I used to run KDE in the early 00's, and it run just fine, in very primitive CPUs of the time.

I was a KDE mainliner and switched to GNOME2 because KDE4 was too resource intensive for my machine.

So our anecdotes are contrary to each other's.

I did say "early 00s".

KDE4 was released in 2008.

I think you meant to respond to the sibling comment

KDE4 was latter half of 00's. Oh, the bitter memories of having your CPU and memory getting hogged by the mysterious daemon called Akonadi. Or was it Nepomuk? At that time, many waved away concerns that Linux was simply using the unused memory for caching stuff, which is why the resource usage viewer displayed very small free memory amount, so they say. Well, that didn't explain the excessive swap thrashing that was occurring in the background.

Hunted for workarounds only to find out that disabling the above services also disables some essential desktop features, and made me rethink whether the switch from GNOME 3 was worth it. Sure, GNOME 3 had horrible UX, but at least my PC still had resources to do other stuffs then. But I sure missed GNOME 2 at that time.

There were also basically no applications for it when fedora decided to ship it

I wouldn't call it conservative. Compared to Gnome probably. Compared to XFCE not as much.

But it's totally with the resources <3

Totally worth i meant. Oops

Yes but they really made up for it with Plasma, to be fair. They learned from their mistakes.

More recently, there's a trend of devices or newer device-centric distros tending to ship Plasma by default (e.g. Steam Deck/SteamOS, Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon Macs, a bit earlier the PineBook).

KDE is easier to pare down/minimize due to it's classical componentized structure ("KFrameworks").

It's really hard to do the same with gnome-shell, without either forking it or writing a replacement.

Not that the latter is a bad thing, necessarily, gnome wants to provide a cohesive experience. That just doesn't fit in as much for environments trying to go against that vision (Pop_OS!, SteamOS, etc).

There's a timeline mismatch.

I'm speaking about the time when Gnome was created.

KDE 4 happened long after these issues of Qt being non-free (and it's not FUD, Qt was not free, it's a fact). Qt was released under the GPL in 2000, 8 years before KDE 4. At the time of KDE 4, nobody was (even) mentioning the non free Qt issue anymore. It was already old history.

The instability of the first releases of KDE 4 might have played a role in Gnome success, but Gnome was already the dominant desktop. It was Ubuntu's default desktop, and Ubuntu was the major desktop linux distro. I think it was still Gnome 2, with Unity about to be released.

KDE 4 was a big shiny promise and took some time to be released (because it was a huge revamp), that's why we wanted to have it.

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