A bit like Nate’s “5 minutes bugs” initiative, I’m announcing a new initiative to
improve our applications ecosystem. The goal is to improve the quality and
quantity of KDE applications and the number of application contributors. For
anybody who knows me, it is not that surprising. Inside KDE, I have been mainly
involved in apps for many years. I worked on all areas, from development
(maintaining or co-maintaining many apps like NeoChat, Kontrast, MarkNote,
Tokodon, and Arianna, and contributing to numerous other apps, but also design,
promotion, websites (e.g., apps.kde.org) and even a bit of packaging (Flatpak
and to a lesser extent Windows). Hopefully, making this a bit more public and
making this an initiative with a bit more coordination will encourage more
people to help :)
It’s very understandable why this initiative is important. Appreciate this initiative .
However I would like to get some clarity on some things, please clarify if u find that as a misunderstanding.
My doubt:
Why does Kwave like apps developed when u could use much more developed apps like Audacity. I’m not talking about the one who wrote Kwave or consider it to be unnecessary effort. But the efforts and potential could be better used in improving other existing FOSS apps. What I’m trying to say is reinventing the wheel too much have their own disadvantages like devs fatigue especially on FOSS development.
I started loving KDE because instead of reinventing the wheel again , KDE is inventing something modular and customisable to meet all needs.
I feel that KDE already moves the DE world, but reinventing the wheels are dragging it’s potential and I feel that it shouldn’t be overlooked.
Also I want know whether other cross frameworks are allowed to be as KDE apps or it’s just Qt-framework-only. Coz other cross platform frameworks like flutter, flet etc etc are CODE(code once deploy everywhere) types of frameworks enabling cross platform apps easier to build too.
Why does Kwave like apps developed when u could use much more developed apps like Audacity. I’m not talking about the one who wrote Kwave or consider it to be unnecessary effort. But the efforts and potential could be better used in improving other existing FOSS apps.
KDE is mostly volunteers, and people use their free time to work on whatever they’re passionate about, you can’t dictate them to work something deemed more useful. So if someone wants to work on KWave instead of, I don’t know, improving Akonadi or writing a new document converter app with Kirigami, it’s their right to do that.
But I agree in principle that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every high profile productivity app like an Audio Workstation or an office suite (ehem, Calligra). I never understood those people saying things like
“KDE should make a Qt/KF clone of [well established very complex FOSS app that you can just use on Plasma anyways]”.
Still, if someone wants to work on that and nothing else, you can’t stop them
Personally, I think duplicating apps makes sense where integration into a given platform (i.e. Plasma) is similarly important as the actual functionality on offer. Like, for small tools and generally “casual user software”, it’s all about presenting relatively simple functionality in a way that fits in with existing patterns and UI paradigms.
Professional creator software usually breaks out of this category by de-emphasizing platform integration & instead inventing its own flows that optimize for their specialized audience instead of the average user. I’d argue that KDE gains less from duplicating this kind of software on Qt than it would gain from providing more “consumer-level” software that’s all about convenience and integration.
So can we come up with ideas for KDE applications? Something like the gnome circle but in this case it would be the Plasma Skuare (square) ?, small joke.
Makes sense👍. But still I feel that some group of people(atleast 2) if have a common interest they’ll be either creating or improving on same things. That’ll both reduce the workload and involve and bring people together a lot. Like a separate room open for people to collaborate and explain stuffs about that project. More managing of the resource(volunteers) will help improve things etc ig
Yesh Got it. Couldn’t disagree with u completely on this point. So as long as someone is improving the UX somehow even a bit these new projects are great to have. But would like to know more about the collaboration initiatives KDE is taking as I said in this.
Also would like to get someone to answer this too:
I don’t think that other GUI frameworks are acceptable as they do not share the same look and feel, and follow the same user interface paradigms. Even if you have a custom theme that looks like Breeze, it won’t perfectly fit and there will be paper cuts. Furthermore, they add additional dependencies instead of sharing already existing one and spread out even more development ressources.
Maui Apps (https://mauikit.org/apps/) are part of KDE and use their own UI framework (https://mauikit.org/ ). So it is possible to use other frameworks that use free software licences.
However, talking about efficiency, it is of course way better if as much code as possible can be reused between software.
And I totally agree that collaboration is way more valuable than making ones own new software, but as was pointed out, one can’t force people to collaborate instead of doing seemingly duplicate work at times.
Makes sense.
I wish KDE manages to bring people to collaborate more by a collaborative initiative maybe. Like 2 people doing 2 projects for 6 months could be reduced by 3 months if both of them work together. (Just approx estimates). Point is it’ll be effective on certain cases. So maybe an initiative where people show their project regularly and invite people to spend some very low fixed time on the collaborative project. Thus people won’t be forced but will have exposure and then they may choose to show interest and help each other’s projects.
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oh ok. Then I wish KDE gets more modernized and allow these someday in future. That’ll bring much more people into these projects.