KDE’s Ideological Direction — Suggest Offering Xfce Version for Rock & Rome

[Thomas-Cee]

I have loved KDE and seeing them invite radical conference speakers really saddened me.

I will say I do the best I can with choosing softwares and tools, while knowing it will never be perfect. Some I can avoid, some I either can’t, or I’ll just hold my nose. Our church streams with OBS which is hilarious considering I’m sure they hate us (“nazi religious Christian nationalists” )

@JDMorris81

I really appreciate the OM community’s approach here. The feedback was respectful and constructive, which honestly isn’t something you always find in other forums.

You should install Rock on a partition or secondary computer and give us a try! It’s really a great community with great great software. @gour too if you ever give OMLx another try

Is anyone a part of the KDE project? Are they largely a radical bunch? Or do they see the value in not going off the deep-end? I hope they don’t truly get hijacked

[zeroability]

They rely heavily on GTK. Sadly, this is going to be an issue no matter which way you go.

[JDMorris81]

Noted, might have to forego DE altogether and go the WM route.

[AngryPenguin]

@zeroability

They rely heavily on GTK. Sadly, this is going to be an issue no matter which way you go.

Why?

[zeroability]

@AngryPenguin

Why?

Because a lot of these projects care more about hating people they disagree with than they care about what they are making. GTK/GNOME is just one minor example of that. Meanwhile, people that just want things that enable them to have value from the output of projects and businesses. They are often caught in the middle of irrelevant and often detrimental decisions and policies leveraged against them. This can be to retaliate for criticism (even constructive) so that people making the product do not need to be skilled. It can also be to influence how grants are obtained and funded.

[DD15]

@tristanbiesecker

Xfce is stable, resource-efficient, and similarly apolitical, making it an excellent option for users who prioritize neutrality and performance.

Regarding the statement about XFCE being apolitical, I recently looked at their about page, and it states:

Another priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org.

freedesktop.org conforms to the Contributor Covenant, which has been associated with much political activity, so it may not be as apolitical as you might imagine.

I am not a programmer. Wouldn’t know where to start. What the average user needs is a desktop environment that is stable and works without having the latest agenda forced on the users. Why do I now get the strange feeling that there really is no desktop environment that is capable of this basic requirement?

[zeroability]

I am going to write a post about testing TDE. They forked KDE and Qt around version 3 and 4.

[WilsonPhillips]

I remember KDE 3 to 3.5 and it was glorious! Then they gave us 4.0 and a serious shock that some people have never recovered from.

[rugyada]

@WilsonPhillips

Then they gave us 4.0 and a serious shock

I agree, KDE4 was a nightmare in its early release(s). But later it became better and better and personally I would never go back.

[LeeTalbert]

Is TDE in our repos?

[zeroability]

No.

See the following:

Enabling the Trinity Desktop Environment repository

Many thanks to the TDE project for adding OpenMandriva Lx into their official packaging project: Enabling the repos will require manually creating a .repo file that will exist in /etc/yum.repos.d. For this, you can create a file such as trinity.repo with the following contents: [TDE-x86_64] name="Trinity Desktop Environment - x86_64" baseurl=https://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/trinity/rpm/omvcooker/trinity-r14/RPMS/x86_64/ gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/trinity/rpm…

[vannax (Mike)]

This is good to know. KDE is almost ubiquitous in the Linux world, and pulling all of the local OM talent off KDE and onto a DE that isn’t engaged in punitive policies may be difficult. Sadly, these weaponized CoCs seem to be proliferating, and it may be impossible to avoid them altogether, but I’m sure that the most egregious outfits can be avoided, those who actively ban folk, deplatform folk, and so on. I did some research on OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and the Servo browser project, and found some pretty nasty CoCs lurking there.

[DD15]

@WilsonPhillips

I remember KDE 3 to 3.5 and it was glorious! Then they gave us 4.0 and a serious shock that some people have never recovered from.

Is it just me, or was Windows XP a half-baked attempt by Microsoft to make Windows look like KDE 3? I was using XP at the time, and there was quite a bit of whining going on by users about how Microsoft didn’t get enough KDE 3 features copied into XP.

I looked around the Internet. TDE seems to have the appearance of KDE 3. Back in 2020 I still had a 2006 vintage Winbook laptop that was on extended life support. When it did work (battery issues), I installed Q4OS. As I recall, TDE was usable on that distro. I spent some time (weeks) trying to decide between Q4OS with TDE and Kubuntu with Plasma 5.x before settling on Kubuntu in 2021 and never going back to Windows.

[WilsonPhillips]

At that time, KDE 3.x was far ahead of Windows. We had features that Microsoft envied. XP had a lot of those features (not multiple desktops). I can see using TDE as a light weight and fast system, but Plasma is not 4.0 anymore. Plasma has come a long way and I would not want to go back.

[tristanbiesecker]

@Thomas-Cee

Is anyone a part of the KDE project? Are they largely a radical bunch? Or do they see the value in not going off the deep-end? I hope they don’t truly get hijacked

This is a great question that would be nice to have some insight into. I also wonder if anyone knows if KDE has done anything else before like what the OP originally referenced?