hey old people. something in open source history I don't recall very well and would appreciate links of it is already documented...
kde was nice but not "open source" so gtk and gnome came and drove lots of contributors. i think it was around kde3... then Ubuntu and later google dumped lots of money on gnome and some designers just stole the leadership it became a race to the bottom with copying all bad ideas from apple UX. then Ubuntu parted ways and did it's own thing. then they merged and rewrote the thing in JavaScript and release without even a settings application working... and then contributors mostly moved back to kde and 5 was great. now 6 is polishing everything and building on dbus everywhere and designers already started the UX capture but doesn't seem it is going anywhere.
anyway, i don't have much reference material for the time most contributors moved from kde to gnome in the name of GPL (noble goal that wasn't used since distros didn't abandon the broken release for the mint fork when they should have)
KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk.
That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now.
First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died.
Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists.
Digia actually spun it off and Qt again is an independent publicly traded company. I suppose KDE community is the place to start looking for Qt open source resources.
No offense, but Nokia was dying long before Elop joined. He just made sure to burry it in Microsoft's back yard. By 2008 it was clear iOS and Android will be the dominant platforms, and Elop joined Nokia towards the end of 2010 when it was already a sinking ship.
Even if Elop were to be the most competent CEO in the world he could not save Nokia from its inevitable downfall at the hands of Apple and Google, no matter what he did with Symbian or MeeGo or whatever Linux based touch OS they had in their toybox.
The world had already standardized on iOS and Android so Nokia coming to the market with a new touch OS platform after 2011 and convincing users and developers to jump ship from Android and iOS, would have failed to get traction either way, same how Windows Mobile failed.
According to Wikipedia, Qt was open source since Qt 2.0 with QPL and in Qt 2.2 it was released under GPL because their custom QPL was not compatible with GPL. This was in 2000, so during KDE2 times (KDE3 was released in 2002). AFAICT technically it was only KDE1 that relied on non-opensource Qt.
I don't even know why people think that slow animations/transitions are a good idea. I noticed that especially on newer KDE. The default configuration with enabled animations is SO slow, it's super annoying. If you turn them off it's okay-ish, but could still be a tiny bit snappier here and there
I have been happily using Trinity for more than a decade now. It works well for me and it's much less resource hungry than all the newer eye candy that desktops have been trying to push.
I never cared too much for KDE3, but KDE4 and KDE5 to me is much better than GNOME.
The main reason was KDE3 would set my eyes on fire, GNOME never did (on the same hardware). KDE4 was better with that and KDE5 I have no issues with eye strain.
I never used KDE6 so no opinion. FWIW, I still use simple window managers and will continue until forced onto Wayland. Hoping that never happens since I really dislike all Desktop Environments. If I had to use a D/E, it would be KDE.
But one comment about Trinity was with KMail, the version with KDE3 was great and I use to use it, but the KDE4/5 versions to me is hard to use. That is when I switched over to Thunderbird.
I haven't tried Plasma 6 on my 2013 laptop with a slow spinning rust disk, but Plasma 5 is fine. Way better than Windows 10 which i rageformatted when it took hours to apply some stupid update and i almost lost a business video call (my laptop is the only PC i have with a camera).
I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed which sadly seems far from I/O efficient, not sure why (there is almost a hundred of background processes doing who knows what). Perhaps a lightweight distro would be better since i mainly use it to make calls or try out some graphics code (it is the only Nvidia device i have), but while it takes a couple of minutes to boot up, once it does it works fine so i don't mind much as i'm only rarely using that machine.
Readit News
Thank goodness we still have instructions for patching KDE under FreeBSD.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under...
kde was nice but not "open source" so gtk and gnome came and drove lots of contributors. i think it was around kde3... then Ubuntu and later google dumped lots of money on gnome and some designers just stole the leadership it became a race to the bottom with copying all bad ideas from apple UX. then Ubuntu parted ways and did it's own thing. then they merged and rewrote the thing in JavaScript and release without even a settings application working... and then contributors mostly moved back to kde and 5 was great. now 6 is polishing everything and building on dbus everywhere and designers already started the UX capture but doesn't seem it is going anywhere.
anyway, i don't have much reference material for the time most contributors moved from kde to gnome in the name of GPL (noble goal that wasn't used since distros didn't abandon the broken release for the mint fork when they should have)
KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk.
That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now.
First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died.
Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists.
Agree that gnome still looks like Apple envy.
As opposed to Windows envy that apparently drives pretty much all the others, including every single version of KDE.
No offense, but Nokia was dying long before Elop joined. He just made sure to burry it in Microsoft's back yard. By 2008 it was clear iOS and Android will be the dominant platforms, and Elop joined Nokia towards the end of 2010 when it was already a sinking ship.
Even if Elop were to be the most competent CEO in the world he could not save Nokia from its inevitable downfall at the hands of Apple and Google, no matter what he did with Symbian or MeeGo or whatever Linux based touch OS they had in their toybox.
The world had already standardized on iOS and Android so Nokia coming to the market with a new touch OS platform after 2011 and convincing users and developers to jump ship from Android and iOS, would have failed to get traction either way, same how Windows Mobile failed.
i could find a good write up of the problem then.
It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.
https://opensourced.me/#desktop-audit-and-benchmark-comparis...
The main reason was KDE3 would set my eyes on fire, GNOME never did (on the same hardware). KDE4 was better with that and KDE5 I have no issues with eye strain.
I never used KDE6 so no opinion. FWIW, I still use simple window managers and will continue until forced onto Wayland. Hoping that never happens since I really dislike all Desktop Environments. If I had to use a D/E, it would be KDE.
But one comment about Trinity was with KMail, the version with KDE3 was great and I use to use it, but the KDE4/5 versions to me is hard to use. That is when I switched over to Thunderbird.
Konqueror was great. I also liked that you could use it as both a file manager and a browser, and that you could switch browser engines.
KHTML was also some great work.
KDE 5 and 6 look ok I guess, but are buggier and perform worse than XFCE, so why would I ever use them?
The "Win95 pixel art" era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png
The "wtf" era of KDE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png
The "we give up, just make it look like XFCE" era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kon...
But Plasma 5 & 6 are so good I would feel like I'm missing out. Even on old hardware they are quite lightweight.
At some point I wanted to try Trinity but didn't find packaging for my distro at the time, but will probably try some day.
I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed which sadly seems far from I/O efficient, not sure why (there is almost a hundred of background processes doing who knows what). Perhaps a lightweight distro would be better since i mainly use it to make calls or try out some graphics code (it is the only Nvidia device i have), but while it takes a couple of minutes to boot up, once it does it works fine so i don't mind much as i'm only rarely using that machine.