On a side note, it is interesting how many incredible projects started from KDE (and how few survived or at least gained major traction): KMail, KDevelop, KOffice, not to mention Konqueror - KHTML / Webkit lives on, but Konqueror users are very rare. Does anyone know why this is happening?
There is still FUD about the licensing, decades on. And a lot of Linux vendors make Gnome the default - perhaps partly because it's less configurable and so easier to support, but partly it does seem to be this weird prejudice. I wonder whether it's a US/EU thing - most of KDE seems to be developed in the EU and the major European distros (which is only really SuSE these days now that Mandriva doesn't exist any more) seem to have it as default, whereas the American distros seem to prefer Gnome.
I think it's because Qt has traditionally had a pretty weird dual- or tri-licensing model: https://www.qt.io/faq/#_Toc453700684 which resulted in less adoption by developers because of the viral nature of the GPL.
IIRC, it used to be that even the core Qt libs were GPL (unless you paid for a commercial license), while now most (but still not all) libs are also available under the LGPL.
Don't want to diminish KDE, but how is that incredible considering that for each of these there is a much more popular GTK or even Gnome project software?
KHTML/WebKit: I don't think the GTK/Gnome folks ever wrote a browser engine.
KDevelop: Did the GTK/Gnome folks ever write a significant IDE with a code model?
Krita: It's focused on painting/illustration and doesn't directly complete with Gimp. Among artists doing this Krita is likely more popular than Gimp now, since the latter isn't even in the running. (Support for MyPaint brushes is progress on that front, though painters want many other features.)
For KMail/Kontact there's Evolution, but arguably neither ever became really popular if you compare them to, say, Thunderbird.
A relative was using MS Paint to draw some simple floor plan diagrams and asked whether there's any better tool available.
Gimp is actually overfeatured for what they need, but that was the only thing I found which I could install with a good enough certainty that I won't infect their computer with malware.
I strongly advise against Paint.NET. Besides the lack of download security they have huge "download" ads leading who knows where on the front page and a tiny download link.
They are knowingly using this dark pattern to make ad money which is too bad, because as you say the app is really good.
When I need to install something on Windows (be it drivers or apps), I keep marvelling: the process has remained identically crude for two decades, all the way since Win95: download some executable from any old website, no verification possible (yeah, there's a MD5 hash - on that same website), and hope it won't screw up the system (or at least not too much; btw there's no clean way to uninstall). Repeat step for step for every package, manually clicking through ten steps in the executable (where the only one that actually matters is the license - when was the last time you wanted to install somewhere else than C:\Program Files?).
Don't even think about "give me this, this, this, and this; check that it is the right version from a trusted source; make it so!" (PortableApps can do that, so it's demonstrably possible, even on Windows)
Progress? We don't need no steenking progress! Package managers are for lusers who prefer clicky GUIs over Glorious Hard Work and spelunking in the dark corners of the net! (How that ever got pushed as user-friendly?)
How is installing on linux any different when your One True Package Manager does not provide what you need? Usually it is "here use this third-party repository which is just some guy providing executables" or "build from source".
What's worse is when your One True Package Manager creates a broken package because the packager has no clue what they are doing. Debian and SSH ring any bells? Would using an exe provided by the developers have that problem?
Ah, the "but Linux sucks too" tactic! Of course it does, so does everything. In the past 10 years, I had to build from source about 50 times, and had 2 broken packages - while installing thousands (plus dependencies, not counting that). Not perfect - but way better than hunting for each and every single one.
Out of the box PackageManager should support anything that can be packaged as an .msi file and it lets you write plug-ins to handle just about any other type of method for packaging and distributing apps.
At the moment it's however largely a case of Microsoft quietly developing a quite powerful tool and then going out of their way to not tell anybody about it. Microsoft has also not shown any interest in developing and supporting their own general software repo (I guess they don't want to compete with their app store). So we've basically got to wait for third party developers to fill the cap. Fortunately the people behind chocolaty are working on this and have said they'll have something ready by Summer 2016.
Thanks, but I don't understand why they would put them in the release announcement instead of the download page. Everyone wanting to download this software will head straight to the download link and won't jave time to hunt for blog posts.
Also sha1 should be avoided nowadays, but at least it's not md5...
Well, the reason is that I went crazy from people mailing me "what are those numbers? what should I do with them? They are scary!!!" We had to make the download page as simple as possible -- and I still get mails from people who cannot figure out how to download Krita. Several, per week.
If you're the site maintainer please consider adding a link to the KDE https downloads or a link to the checksums somewhere on the download page, in the source code tab or even at the bottom.
Good enough for verifying integrity in transit ("the line didn't mangle any bits"). Without a side channel, that's all the hashes are good for (if someone can get a rogue version on a site, they can also change the hashes displayed on the same site).