I think that was the point, he offered maintainership because it didn't need any work done.

Which is sorta my point. (That is to say who says KDE4 needs any work done too it?)

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The scale between lilo and all of KDE4 is just so completely different your point is entirely invalid...

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Scale between the two doesn't invalidate my point / question.

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The part you are forgetting is that KDE4 is an entire ecosystem dependent on the aging, unmaintained and somewhat broken qt4 and numerous other software where many of the devs involved have moved on. On the other hand lilo is a simple standalone bootloader which is more or less finished software and its supported features just work. Come on, get real...

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Maybe; but, perhaps actually listing the problems with the various pieces would prove your point. Otherwise its just educated conjecture. (which is my point)

Yes, I'm aware of that, but I think the situation is even worse, in that it's not even being actively TESTED for security/stability issues, as it is likely assumed that most players have moved on to KDE5 due to KDE4 being EOL'd.

Receiving updates is obviously ideal, but if a project is not receiving such updates but is at least being actively tested for flaws, as CVE's come to light, volunteers could at least come forward to write patches for such flaws. I'm not saying that's ideal, but at least it leaves it open as a possibility. But if that testing is not even happening, that puts us in a much worse situation.

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The problem with KDE (and Gnome) is that the moment the software is stabilised, they abandon it. They eventually -- miraculously -- reduce the number of bugs to near zero, and that's when they drop it and move on to the next bug-ridden stage of the project. Really? It seems to me that if you spend years fixing bugs, as the KDE team seem to do, abandoning the project completely just when you've finally brought the number down to near zero is missing the whole point of the exercise. You mean to say they spend years fixing all those bugs and then abandon the project the day they achieve their goal? Is that not when you put your project into low-maintenance mode and keep it humming along nicely for another 5 years?

KDE really do epitomise the lemming-like behaviour and immaturity of so many open source projects. Not forgetting rudeness. Because it is the ultimate in rudeness to string your users along with one release after another, each release introducing as many bugs as it fixes, and then to tell your users they were wasting their time, trusting you to finally deliver the perfect desktop environment for Linux and then watching you kill it off the very day you achieve your goal. So you can create another mess and spend the next ten years fixing it.

So how many bugs have been fixed in the latest Plasma? And how many introduced?

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I don't agree with this. I mean, I do appreciate what you're saying to a certain extent, because KDE4 was such a solid platform. But at the same time, KDE is in a bit of a unique position because they have based their project on Qt from day one, a project they don't have direct control over. So when Qt goes from major version to major version, they are more or less forced to port their DE to a new toolkit, lest the previous toolkit should become EOL'd and unmaintained.

If you look at KDE5 and its development cycle, it is not a radical departure from KDE4. The early versions, around 2015, were quite buggy IMHO but nothing out of the ordinary for a new major release. I thought it was very clever how they updated the platform in a somewhat piecemeal fashion - many apps were still based on the KDE4 platform for quite a long time after the first stable releases of the KDE5 desktop, and this allowed for a more transitional approach. At the same time, stability and security updates continued for KDE4 so that users who weren't quite ready to abandon ship on KDE4 for a brand spankin' new desktop environment didn't have to.

Now, if you look at KDE5, it's all ported to Qt5 and has a level of polish that is difficult to match.

I definitely agree that GNOME3 has been a total mess and abandoning GNOME2 raised many eyebrows, including mine. I can see how GTK2 was getting long in the tooth and probably needed a major version bump to cover more modern use cases like touchscreens, mobile interfaces, and all of the accessibility concerns that go along with it. But they had the unique advantage of having full control over the toolkit AND the DE, whereas KDE only had control over the latter. It's amazing to me that KDE has come out of this looking as good as they do, whereas GNOME has just made a total mess out of GNOME3 even though they have had so much more control over the process.

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It might be a bit of a stretch to say "... right when they get it almost bug free they abandon it .." but I think the point is still largely true -- despite being a bit of a stretch. Your post (Poprocks) made me a bit more sympathetic towards the KDE devs; but less in favor of QT as a whole.

This is what has me thinking. Maybe if people took the time to demonstrate the flaws in KDE4 that are being reasonable conjectured... it might motivate Pat to move on to KDE5; or might get things patched -- either way would be some kind of a success (maybe?). (Obviously there is more what ifs that are possible.)

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If inventive and creative developers had not been so bold to take revolutionary steps from time to time, we would probably all still be typing while facing the greenish glow of a phosphor screen. But, now we have the choice between typing at a text terminal fulltime, OR use a systemd powered GNOME3 shell, OR sit in front of a KDE Plasma 5 desktop, OR... etc.

I mean, there's no one who forces you to use one or the other. There's plenty of possibilities for everyone, from bare to exuberant workspaces.

I get it that a desktop environment grows on you and you can be sad to see it being replaced by its successor. I had that with GNOME 2 when that was yanked from Slackware, and I had never touched KDE or XFCE until then. But, I switched to KDE (grudgingly at first) and it did what it had to do. I never liked KDE3, it tried too much to be Windows XP. But KDE4 was a big improvement and something that felt native to my Linux boxen. Plasma5 was yet another solid improvement (my personal opinion) in UI design, functionality, and hardware support. I do not agree to people who state that Plasma5 looks like Windows 10. The paradigm of User Interface Design is such that user interfaces are always converging. Whether Plasma5, Android, Windows 10, OS/X - everybody went from pixelated images to curves and splines to 3D interface elements and now to a flat interface design with lots of GL-powered effects. But it is the engine behind your OS and behind your Desktop Environment which counts. And in that regard, Plasma5 is in no way similar to Windows 10.

And until this day, KDE has managed to keep itself separated from the hardware by a thin abstraction layer and has not forced us to adopt systemd. That makes me happy too.

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I don't really have time to play with KDE to make it look different. Granted I do change the theme and icon set from the what would be considered "default" for Cinnamon (that's about all I change), XFCE I use all default settings as well as with FVWM, but I suppose that's not my only issue with KDE. Most of the programs that come with KDE, no matter what version, I will never use. And it's not the packages that volkerdi builds, it's the ones that come bundled in core packages. Not only that "they take up disk space", but they also clutter up the menu way too much (IMO). Then there is "wallet" that I absolutely despise and would have to be the first thing turned off or else it was a PITA afterwards.

I have used KDE3, KDE2 and probably earlier versions. And at that time I didn't even know about GNOME. I started using Debian in '99 when it was download the install CD and build the rest from source while downloading it all across my 56k modem. (Man was that a PITA)

This is *one* of the reasons that I left Debian (the systemd takeover was just the last straw).
https://i.imgur.com/A7uOJcB.png
https://i.imgur.com/6CD2acb.png
Notice the taskbar and menubars. That was a clean install of 6.0 IIRC, and those are totally Debian issues, but it was not helping KDE in my eyes at the time.

This is exactly why I use and like Slackware. It is a rock solid powerhouse core that is easy enough to "strip the paint off" and paint it my own way. Like creating packages is one of the easiest I have seen. And tools that have been created by the community make it even easier. I used KDE for probably the first year using Slackware when I found Willy's CSB. I took that and slowly built on top of that with more packages to make my DE what I wanted. Then I eventually figured out how to rebuild the ISO leaving KDE, XFCE and XAP (minus the very few packages that are needed) out and added my own packages.

Now I have a PC that only builds packages and acts as my own personal repo/mirror that I can just grab my packages from and whip out a custom ISO in about 10 minutes. I have also expanded my desktop environments to quite a few as you can see in my (currently) NotABug repo in my sig, and it is far from perfect. Also worth mentioning is that not all those SlackBuilds are my own, I could not have done any of it without learning and borrowing from our community maintainers. It took me a few years to get it to that point, because obviously the day job and I had to learn what Debian could never have taught me. Like learning how to build a .deb, that in itself is such a process that is probably best left to their devs.

In the end, I think that it is all personal preference, and each DE has it's own ups and downs. Cinnamon fills my needs, has very good performance, and a fairly light footprint while it is a good "traditional" style DE on my aging '07 Inspiron 1520.

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@poprocks

Then go ahead with KDE5 without abandoning KDE4. Consider for a moment what's happening here - a craftsman spends ten years making a violin. Just when he has polished and refined it to perfection, the company who supplied the wood go out of business. Should he then go out and bury the violin in the back garden, never to be seen or heard again? Or is this not rather the moment the violin is finally used and appreciated? Who cares what his suppliers do?

It is an absolute absurdity to refine software to the point of perfection only to abandon it when that perfection has been achieved.

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This is not a great analogy, because the wood isn't going to have issues that the supplier may need to fix. Plus, KDE4 isn't "buried in the backyard", you can still download the source and you can still get it included in a few distros... there just won't be any further updates, just as the violin manufacturer won't be releasing any other violins containing wood from that supplier, but you can still use that violin.

QT4 will continue to have bugs and security issues found and they aren't going to be putting out any additional updates. So KDE devs can keep working with this outdated and potentially insecure software with no possibility of any fixes being included in future releases, or they can switch to a supported release that will continue to get updates.

But if KDE4 has been perfected, why worry if there's different releases? If you perfect one thing, do you just stop or do you find something else to do? You can still download and compile KDE4, even though they're developing KDE5, and if KDE4 is so perfect, there should be no worry if the KDE devs aren't developing for it anymore.

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But the supreme irony here, as we all know, is that, when it comes to KDE, bugs are multiplied tenfold in the newer software. It's not as though they're leaving "outdated and potentially insecure" software behind and replacing it with more secure, newer software. They seem to be fixing just as many bugs in the newer Plasma. It's a never-ending merry-go-round with KDE. Fix one bug, introduce a new feature and all of a sudden they have two more bugs to fix.

The whole security thing is done to death anyway. Beat the desktop into shape, reduce the showstopper bug count to near zero, and put KDE in low maintenance mode for 5 years. When it comes to security Linux has far bigger concerns than the desktop. Introducing docker and systemd, for example, when they were barely out of beta, if indeed they were out of beta, was a recipe for security leaks much more serious than anything a desktop is going to leak. Even the so-called enterprise distributions have this suicidal wish to leave stability behind as soon as it has been achieved and move on to the next daredevil stunt.

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