[scrollaway]

Please, please don't take this the wrong way because, even if I personally don't like the direction KDE has taken, I have a lot of respect for the project...

But you're really talking about KDE here. Not linux. You have the context of a KDE developer. You're basically saying "The KDE project is doing great!", but that doesn't invalidate anything I said in my comment.

I've been dealing with the evangelism portion a ton more; what I've seen is that people no longer care.

Linux support for some of the newer tech is abysmal. Take for example hi-dpi and touch screen support; we're only now starting to get somewhere with both of those, and those don't even qualify as "newer tech". Things like UEFI have truly made Linux harder to install and deal with. We're going to catch up eventually but in the mean time, for users it's a terrible experience.

Desktop devs are so focused on their "experience" within the DE. Tell me, who's working on making GNOME/KDE apps look good on KDE/GNOME? Who's working on making them behave well? The rare times there's activity in XDG, it's "FYI" activity. "Hey, so, we're doing this in (gnome/kde) now. Comments welcome, whatever." - nobody ever replies. I worked for over a year on porting Android intents to XDG. Nobody helped. The GNOME project showed some interest in it; some good stuff came out of that, but intents are still not on Linux and, in 2016, it's still not possible to do something as simple as an "Edit this picture" action.

It's been a frustrating past few years. I saw a massive amount of new people interested in Linux, because "Windows 8 sucks". I also saw most of them go to macOS instead; the few that stayed went back to Windows when 10 was released. Linux really missed the boat there.

We are lacking a project that is actively working on the health of "Linux on the desktop". We need people to work on improving the experience of developing apps on Linux, improving the portability across desktops, creating clear specs, guidelines and documentation and we need all that not to suck. But who's going to do that? Mozilla doesn't seem interested. Valve, RH etc only have to care about the distro/DE they're shipping. Google's no longer looking at Linux as anything else than a kernel. Yeah, we're pretty screwed.

[sho_hn]

> Take for example hi-dpi and touch screen support; we're only now starting to get somewhere with both of those, and those don't even qualify as "newer tech".

Hi-dpi is something we were pretty much done with one-two years ago (modulo per-screen dpi, which we need Wayland for).

> Tell me, who's working on making GNOME/KDE apps look good on KDE/GNOME?

Well, we've developed GTK+ versions of both of our last default looks (Oxygen and Breeze) and tried pretty hard to get to an agreement with the GTK+ guys on the window decos issue - it's true we're a bit disappointed how the latter went. I share your concerns about lack of cooperation, actually!

> But who's going to do that?

The same people who've always done that: You and me. I prefer rolling up my sleeve vs. waiting for a savior ...

For me the metric is simple, really:

- Is the Linux desktop still needed? Today more than ever.

- Is the Linux desktop today still better than one year ago? Yes.

As long as I have positive answers to those, I'll just keep working.

[asoltesz]

A agree with your metrics and your conclusions as well.

The Linux desktop is now in a much better overall shape than it has ever been.

The desktops themselves have reached a fairly polished state. Much less annoyance than before (like multi-monitor settings and other basic stuff). I use Cinnamon on my Mint laptop and KDE Plasma on my Neon dev workstation and both are fairly polished and stable.

OSS applications like Kdenlive are also getting polished and adding more professional features. I also use a macOS laptop and I actually think that it is now as easy/quick to edit videos with Kdenlive on my Linux machines than with iMovie on the mac.

KDEConnect is another great example, it is just brilliant.

LibreOffice is also progressing rapidly with other productivity tools.

Using both macOS and Linux desktops for java/web development, I actually think that Linux is better, faster and more stable in most respect. E.g.: Finder is a joke, it is even worse than Explorer, none of them come close to proper Linux file managers like Krusader, Dolphin or Caja.

All in all, the Linux desktop space has seen great improvements and the hard work seems to be paying off now (see the latest upwards trend on Linux desktop market share)

Guys, keep up the good work on both KDE Plasma and LXQt!!! Your work is greatly appreciated by many-many of us, happy Linux users.