OSNews

"KDE has more of a sense of community for developers and users"

I am pretty sure that Gnome and Gtk have far more developers than KDE. The support of FSF is helping them a lot. Many geeks still think Qt is not free (please remember, Qt is GPL). Look for example at the number of patches available for Sylpheed. If KMail had that many patches waiting, it would be for sure the greatest mailer ever.

"KDE is also installed by default by more distributions."

Have you ever wonder why ? My guess is simply that KDE is better for the basic user. This is also why KDE has a wider user base than Gnome.


"But it's fate is sealed by a dependency on Qt"
I agree. It is condemned to succeed because of that.

"Qt, which is tightly controled by a proprietary vendor, Trolltech."
I fail to see how a vendor can be labeled "proprietary" when it gives away a GPL toolkit. Once product is GPL, you don't have that much control on it. Anybody can fork Qt.

And trolltech has long proven to be composed of very talented developers, which, yes, have a tight control on their version of Qt. They satisfy a huge customer base and the KDE project (see, Waldo has almost nothing to suggest to improve Qt). Because trolltech developers are paid to work on Qt, the toolkit move forwards very fast and is very good quality. Trolltech is one of the key to KDE success, not to KDE's doom.

By the way, are you aware than Gtk is tightly controlled by Redhat ? Do you think it will doom Gnome too ?

"Kde does look more "commercial", though."

You mean professional! In KDE, the look is standard. Every toolbar can be configured the same, the KDE UI guide is respected, every applications works mostly the same to configure stuff, and all look consistent.

Every time I run Gnome, I see that this is not the case. I understand it will improve. I hope so.

"Evidently that attracts the type of person who wants a desktop to look more like Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows, but these people are always switching back and forth between Kde and Gnome"

Obviously, you don't know the user base very well. The people you descrive usually settly on one desktop that seems to them the closest to what they want (on usually not very argumented reasons) and don't switch. This is the kind of people that want their computer just to work, not to work with the latest software, or with the FSF desktop. Just a desktop that work.

"So, I don't think Gnome has much to worry about in the long term."
Gnome is initially 9 month late on KDE. Now, the distance is something like 2 years. KDE is moving forward, Gnome is still strugling to get more application to be ported to Gnome 2.

Many people have predicted KDE's doom many times, when they have started with a non GPL toolkit, when they have dropped Corba, when Ximian and Eazel were funded, when Sun has chosen Gnome.

KDE is till there, on schedule, though, and far better than Gnome despite all the support KDE does not get.

Gnome has to worry in the long term. Not for KDE which is already a success, but for Gnome. The poor technical choices that were made in the beginning now have their consequences.

I agree with you on statistics, it would be good to have accurate ones. But these thing are hard to get.

"In the short term it doesn't help much for kde boosters to be making a big deal about statistics."

You are probably suggesting that we should ignore them ? If people choose KDE, we can be proud, just like Gnome can be proud to have Sun support