[sangnoir]

> This was before the UX people took over the web and desktop. I blame the introduction of smartphones, which was when the public at large finally came online.

I doubt the plausibility of that timeline - the original iPhone was announced in January 2007, KDE 4.0Alpha1 was released in May 2007[1].

KDE 4.0 was a terrible release (missing functionality, lots of regressions). IMO, they should have kept it as a develop branch and only released 4.1 as 4.0.

1. https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php

[Grishnakh]

No, they should have kept it a development branch until 4.3 or 4.4. It wasn't until then that it was really usable.

What's really funny and sad is that the GNOME team made the exact same mistake with Gnome3.

[digi_owl]

With the additional issue of too much Gnome-isms creeping into GTK3. The one benefit Qt has is that it is being maintained by a independent entity from KDE. One that intends for Qt to be its own product, and properly cross platform.

[flukus]

4.0 was meant to be a development branch, various distros pushed it out anyway.