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by derengel 4280 days ago
I'm not a KDE user, but from reading on the internetz I have this feeling that KDE in general is evaded by users, users don't see it as much of a option or as the last option, this commit also doesn't mention KDE.

Some say the problem with KDE is that you have to drink the whole koolaid, but not sure if that is really the reason.

2 comments

KDE suffered in the beginning by being the C++ developers desktop, using a library with a license that many in the FOSS world didn't agree with.

This was sorted out eventually, but the distributions that had KDE as main desktop (Mandrake, SuSE,...) are mostly gone.

OpenSUSE still exists. It is a pretty beast KDE desktop. There is a lot of effort around Netrunner / Manjaro / Chakra to make some good KDE desktop based on Arch, but that has never come to fruition mostly in my mind due to NIH and no pooled effort.

And Kubuntu is still solid and stable. If I were pushing Linux in an office environment, 14.04 LTS Kubuntu would almost certainly be my pick for its stability.

OpenSUSE has lost its place among many GNU/Linux fans since their agreement with Microsoft.

In Germany, once the home of SuSE, nowadays you get to see very few installations.

KDE doesn't do a ton of stuff that many (most?) people care about like handle add/removing displays frequently. Accessibility is pretty good in GNOME (but not in KDE) which makes it a better default option too. Also most of the desktop plumbing (freedesktop.org stuff) seems to start in GNOME and works better there.
> KDE doesn't do a ton of stuff that many (most?) people care about like handle add/removing displays frequently.

KDE actually has very good display hotplugging/hotremove support. What problems are you having?

Definitely not true. It handles add/removing displays, applying different color profiles to each monitor, etc. Freedesktop is DE agnostic and many technologies there come or are inspired from KDE.
What software are you using for color management?

Last I checked, colord had been broken for at least six months, and the only mostly functional alternative [0] was some project called Oyranos that's signed with expired GPG keys and distributed from some OpenSuse server.

[0] It applies color profiles just fine, but fails to also color-correct full screen programs.

I use oyranos and kolor-manager (depends on oyranos). For color profile auto-loading you will also need xcalib. These work automatically. I only have to generate and install profiles with dispcalGUI.

Color correction works fine for full screen programs with two exceptions: [1] If you have set hardware accelerated (opengl) color correction then it doesn't work on full screen opengl apps. Normal color correction works there too. [2] Color correction never works on VDPAU. Today's CPUs though can decode anything with minimal effort (so no fans spinning uncontrollably), so no need for VDPAU.