Interesting that KDE appears to be going through what GNOME went through back in the 1.4 > 2.0 transition. There’s all sorts of bitching and moaning going on about the recent KDE 4.1 release. Some writers have even employed the hyperbolic description of a civil war.

I still remember those days when criticisms like these would immediately get blasted by “write code or STFU!” Which is probably appropriate. KDE is not some Microsoftian abomination with a ton of awful legacy crap attached to it that you’re plunking down several hundred dollars to license. It’s free. No one is forcing you to use it. Keep using KDE 3 if you like.

In an open source environment, the idea that the users don’t matter as much as the developers really comes to fore. This is sort-of true even in proprietary environments. It’s more important to keep the developers happy, because the people who write the actual code are the people who will keep the platform alive. It’s the apps that matter. If developers don’t write apps for the platform, the platform will die. Notice that no one writes GNOME 1.4/GTK 1.2 apps anymore. Someday, KDE 4.x-only apps are likely to appear.

When I started using Linux exclusively in 1999, KDE had the larger installed base. It seemed more featureful and more stable than GNOME at the time. But it had the bugaboo of a non-GPL’ed license attached to it, and so I stuck with GNOME, which was quite an awful piece of crap at the time. (Although it was still less frustrating than Windows 98!) Trolltech eventually saw the light and released Qt as GPL, allowing KDE to shed the non-GPL stigma. Even when GNOME 2.0 came out, KDE still seemed to have the lead. They also had a much better file manager (Konqueror vs. Nautilus, which always, always crashed for me) But inertia is strong, and I stayed faithful to GNOME. For one thing, there were a lot of neat GTK apps, especially on the mail client and web browser front. And, as a testament to the awesomeness of Open Source, there was nothing to stop me from running KDE apps on GNOME.

Eventually, though, I was seduced by the candyliciousness of Mac OS X. But don’t get me wrong. Remember that Apple is a hardware company, and I bought a Mac because I like the hardware. Most of the apps I use are still Open Source (Safari/Webkit, Camino, Firefox, Seashore, Transmission, Abiword, Smultron, Aquamacs, just to name the ones sitting in my dock) But the GNOME vs KDE saga receded to the background. I still keep X.org sitting around my hard drive, although I don’t launch it very often.

Still it’ll be interesting to see if GNOME will ever be considered the more user-friendly, more stable desktop environment. I’m sure that they got a boost when Sun decided to adopt it as their CDE replacement (JDS, the Java Desktop System, is basically a rebranded and customized version of GNOME.) And GNOME 2.22 sounds like it’s pretty solid.

While there have been talks about forking KDE, it’s probably not going to happen if the main proponents are non-coding users.