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I’m not sure if you grasp how bad the license situation was. Debian wasn’t even able to ship KDE, like at all. Something had to be done, well beyond “just have a conversation”.

by mpol2 hours ago|

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Well, you need to start with a conversation to find a solution together.

I can understand it to start your own thing, but not even starting a discussion seems a bit immature.

by WD-422 hours ago|

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Trust me, there were plenty of discussions, and flames, and all kinds of nonsense. QT was the only game in town, so they thought they could use that as leverage on the license issue. Thus, GTK.

by F3nd01 hours ago|

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Concurrent to GTK, there were also Harmony and GNUstep, right?

by einpoklum4 hours ago|

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> the present would be very different I assume.

I frankly doubt it. GNOME has pushed many problematic choices which KDE hasn't, or at least hadn't initially. From the anti-usability bent of the UI (few buttons, monochrome over color, non-configurability), to the dependence on systemd, to dropping X in favor of Wayland etc. And this is in part motivated IMHO by the organizational backing for GNOME which is different than KDE.

by ahartmetz3 hours ago|

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Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer though not super active.

Regarding paid developers, it used to be a few people working for Suse on KDE vs a lot of people working for Red Hat on Gnome. That's not all there is to it because team Gnome also had to maintain GTK and team KDE didn't have to maintain Qt. Gnome had the advantage of having people paid to work on low-level services such as libxml, libdbus and such. AFAIK, today no desktop has many developers paid by distros. You can see it for example on GTK being maintained by like one guy.

Reportedly, external people and companies find KDE is easier to work with than Gnome, and that probably at least played into Valve selecting KDE. Valve's support led to (among other things) KDE having a really really good compositor / window manager. Highly reliable multi-screen support, fractional scaling, high dynamic range, variable refresh rate, frame scheduling for minimum latency (hell yeah), dimming with and without backlight control... a lot of good stuff.