David, Nate, Josh, Marco, Carl, and Niccolò are here ready to answer all your questions on Plasma (all versions), Gear, Frameworks, Wayland (and how it affects KDE’s software), and everything in between.
Fire away, Lemmy!
We were expecting to be done in an hour and we have past the 2-hour mark already! Time flies when you are having fun.
Thank you for all the questions and the welcoming and friendly atmosphere, but the devs must get back to making Plasma 6 great.
Please keep the conversation going and KDE contributors will continue to answer over the next days as time permits.
Thank you all!!
Actually Plasma is generally more popular than GNOME every time surveys are conducted. However we have to keep in mind that the direct consumers of a DE is actually not the end users, but rather the distributors who package and distribute it. There are a number of historical reasons why distributors ended up picking GNOME over Plasma including accessibility, corporate sponsorship, and an easier packaging experience. So what you end up with is the vendors shipping GNOME despite pent-up desire for Plasma.
And I think that pent-up desire is being unleashed these days due to various changes in our ecosystem. You see an increasing number of hardware vendors who have a strong financial incentive to listen to their customers picking Plasma over GNOME. In addition, KDE’s accessibility game is ramping up hugely, and we have more robust corporate sponsorship than we used to with Valve and Blue Systems putting tons of resources into KDE. Finally, GNOME seems to be becoming more hostile to their downstreams, causing them to need to do more of their own development or else migrate to be a fork or skin of Plasma. Interesting developments.