Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness?

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Penz has been a user of KDE since version 1.2, and he led the development of the Dolphin file manager for the past six years. Now, he's quitting KDE development and handing off Dolphin. His reasons for quitting KDE development are described in a blog post. Penz speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons. 'Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging, and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for. But if there are not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and if no company is willing to invest fulltime-developers to work on this... well then we are losing ground.' Are open-source desktops losing?"

Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !!

[Anonymous Coward]

YES!!!

Re:Are open-source desktops losing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's going to be the year of Linux on the desktop... any year now!

Not a chance

[dyingtolive]

Rest assured anonymous writer, Open-Source Desktops are staying just as competitive in their constant fight to make your favorite GUI just as unusable and obtuse as those produced by Microsoft or Apple. I am confident that, be it KDE or GNOME, you'll have just as frustrating of a time using the latest versions as you would using Metro or OSX.

Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !!

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Fill in the blanks:

"Don't feed the ________".
Obvious ______ is obvious".

Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !!

[Anonymous Coward]

screw off, Steve.

Re:I was a skeptic on Ubuntu's Unity...

[vlm]

No more hunting through menus looking for files or software functions. One hot key, followed by a few letters in the name, and up it pops.

There's this crazy thing on my Debian box that works the same way, but its even faster and marginally cooler. The UI is a little different though, you type a couple letters THEN hit the "hot key" which happens to be the tab key and then the enter key if the tab guessed right (kind of like Siri, sometimes it gets it wrong). So its like oct-TAB-ENTER and in instants you're running octave. I believe they call this desktop environment "bash" although theres 80 million clones like csh tcsh dash and even this weird operating system called "emacs" or maybe it was "vi" I don't remember.

Speaking of octave, it has a fascinating user interface too, where you use that row of digits on that old fashioned keyboard thingy to enter numbers, instead of clicking colorized, styled, fonted, widgeted "buttons" on the screen.

Its an interesting change of pace, but I do warn that this "CLI" user interface thing is way too new and experimental for all but the newest, most 'leet, early adopter hipsters, like if you only own a iphone 3gs instead of a 4, don't bother with this trendy new fangled CLI fad.

Re:No problem here

[Jesus_C_of_Nazareth]

And so in 2012 began another chain of "you use x? I only need y!" discussion that, after being derailed by a man with little to add but grammar and spelling critiques, ended with some guy who controls his computer by making electrical contacts with a paper clip he found in a dumpster, getting feedback from the inbuilt speaker of his 386SX, and cannot fathom why anyone could justify the bloat of a keyboard and a monitor? Of course I always upstage him by pointing out that I had to create the universe before I built my first PC.

Re:Partially a lack of interest by users

[Alex Belits]

That's not a console or shell, that's what Microsoft programmers think, console and shell should be like. In other words, complete idiosyncratic shit.