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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

I still remember fondly the KDE 3.5 times when we had Konqueror. The best browser AND file manager in one. It was amazing.

Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features. Bad times.

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It feels rather rude to the volunteer developers to accuse them of enshitification. Especially when it's not even true in this case as enshitification implies trading the user experience for shareholder value - there's no share holder value being extracted here. The developers made the decision based on its merits. Furthermore, as I remember KDE4 did still have Konqueror - though it became slowly less maintained throughout its lifecycle as the web browser bit was hard to maintain in the changing web climate and Dolphin was providing a good user experience for many users.

They traded user experience for developer egos. Ego is the equivalent of wealth in the OSS world, just as it is in academia. KDE 4 developers had some grand ideas to push on the world, such as the semantic web, regardless of whether or not their users cared for them.

Yeah just like gnome 3 with its grand ideas that's now more barebones in terms of configurability than macOS.

to be fair, gnome3 unwritten moto was "we macos now", so, mission accomplished?

IMO they're worse than macOS now. But yeah this is why gnome 3 is absolutely not for me and I'll never support it as Linux' single recommended desktop.

it's been almost twenty years since KDE 4 came out. it was terrible, yes. but Plasma 6, which was released this decade, kicks ass, so why are you so mad, Grandpa?

because gramps had to suffer gnome or the tiling wm du jour while kde was fixing itself.

and if you think we were exaggerating in how bad our school route was, get ready for this one...

That was a bad time for KDE. They pushed 4 out with a lot of fanfare and it turned out that GUI wise it was a bad windows vista clone that broke every great established KDE 3.5 application.

Definite enshitification. They took something great and replaced it with a craptastic DE that didn't reach feature parity for a decade!

I bailed for XFCE at the time, never gone back to KDE, wouldn't trust them to not do the same thing again.

Konqueror has always been clunky as hell in my opinion. It was like an open source version of Internet Explorer except with tabs. I thought people would've realised mixing files and web pages in one single program was a mistake somewhere around 2000, but I guess it stuck for a while.

Ubuntu still has Konqueror in its repos, though. You can still download it if you want to go back to the early 2000s UI. I think they're using Chromium as a render engine now? EDIT: nope, they use KHTML and KDEWebKit.

> Then the KDE 4 enshittification came and they had to have a separate file manager with half the features

That sounds rather entitled. As if they're doing it just to spite you, or because they need to maximise shareholder value. There are plenty of services that got enshittified because they saw chances to earn more money over their users' backs, but most people using that word just want to complain that the thing they got for free (especially open source stuff) or for a price that will obviously never cover the basic service costs (Youtube, all kinds of hosting, various streaming services, every AI product I know) now doesn't work like it used to, or tries to seek funding to continue existing.

Clearly the team decided it was better this way, and thanks to the power of open source, everyone could've disagreed and forked KDE 3.5 to stick to the old design.

> thanks to the power of open source, everyone could've disagreed and forked KDE 3.5 to stick to the old design.

And thus was born the Trinity Desktop Environment.

> if you want to go back to the early 2000s UI.

Seamonkey's also a great choice for that.

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