KDE has a lot of applications. A few have some overlap in functionality like Dragon Player and Haruna and Merkuro and KOrganizer.
This is great! But do all the apps have the same amount of love and effort from the KDE project/organization? Is there a “core” set of applications like in the GNOME world? I’m not trying to compare, just providing an example.
Forgive me if I’m not thinking about it correctly at all and the KDE way is different. As a user I just want to know how to choose in a case like this where there is more than one app that has the features I want and I just want to be using the best from the KDE devs. Best maybe means the one that is going to see the most investment of time and energy moving forward.
Nate’s post about this probably says it best: The structure of KDE, or how anarchy sometimes works – Adventures in Linux and KDE
It’s a bottom-up structure rather than top-down. Most large open source projects work like this, including GNOME.
No, each project is as loved and maintained as the people working on them want to. Sometimes a project is more popular than another for some reason, but that’s still no reason to stop working on a similar less popular project, as long as it’s what the person wants to work on. There’s no management controlling this whatsoever, there’s people wanting to fix something they use and find it worth spending their time on.
This applies even for the few people who get paid to fix things: they’re still prioritizing what they deem best.
There’s KDE Gear, which is a set of KDE applications that are collectively agreed to be maintained with a specific release schedule and such (as opposed to having each an individual release schedule).
But when it comes to the matter of duplicate apps, GNOME Circle actually has no restrictions about this either. In fact, a few of them conflict with GNOME Core. It just so happens that this is minimal because Circle itself is rather small. About 70 apps I think?
Maybe Core is more like what you’re thinking of, it has the specific requirement of “avoid significantly overlapping with the functionality of other Core apps”. There’s no KDE equivalent I don’t think, the closest thing to this would probably be “software that is in the Plasma group”, which includes things like Spectacle and Discover (but not Dolphin, Okular etc).
A good criterion for this IMO is how well maintained (how often it gets human commits) or how much attention it gets (how many different contributors work on it). Preferring kjournald over systemdGenie, Elisa over Juk, etc. Cases like Skanpage vs Skanlite are trickier, you’d have to use them and check which one fits you best.
Thanks for the blog post, this is a really cool system!