As already hinted at in the article about KDE's Vision, the next step in setting our path into the future is defining KDE's Mission statement. Right after our Vision was published, a group of people started drafting a Mission statement and discussing it on the kde-community mailing list.
While we agreed on most aspects of the Mission, it became obvious that on some key issues, we just had quite different individual opinions. Even if an individual opinion prevailed in our discussion, we would not know whether that opinion was shared by the majority of the KDE community. This is a problem, because especially in a volunteer-driven community where a Mission cannot be enforced from the top down, it can only have a practical effect if the majority of those doing the work agree with it. However it became obvious that not that many KDE contributors both had the time and were comfortable with contributing to the discussion on the mailing list.
Therefore, in order to still be able to find out what the majority of the community considers the right approach towards our Vision, we set up an online survey, hoping that this would make it easier for people to voice their opinion in an easy, anonymous way. Since we always focus on our users, we are also interested in the opinion of interested users, so we opened up the survey for everyone.
So, regardless of whether you consider yourself a KDE contributor or "just" an interested user, please
Participate in our survey
It should not take more than 5-10 minutes and providing your input on what KDE should do will help us move towards our Vision!
Comments:
Focus on Windows ports? - thomas - 2016-06-23
<p>While I think it is perfectly fine, if there're developers coming from the Windows world to port kf5 apps to their platform, I don't like the idea to officially focus the general development efforts on porting to windows.</p><p>My POV: focus on getting the core apps and basics done right. My priority list:</p><p>- Things like plasma desktop with krunner / email Kube or Kontact / calendar / firefox and chromium integration are essential.</p><p>- getting the print dialog / printing functionality kf5/qt-wise right</p><p>- A fast and reliable desktop search functionality is important.</p><p>- While "desktop instant messaging" is getting irrelevant for private use, in the corporate world it is used extensively to share files and to communicate across departments... but KDE telepathy is unmaintained now :-(.</p><p>If the core functionality works slick, reliably and fast, the ecosystem will florish.... Apps like Digikam, Kdenlive, Krita have been able to grow because there was a good "basis". If these apps reach out to windows and OSX later on, it's perfect. It just should not be the primary goal.</p>
Good information is essential for decision-making - AGui - 2016-06-18
<p>The idea of a survey is very interesting. However, I think prioritizing the different objectives is very difficult, especially when not knowing what are the stakes of each ones. I think you would obtain more reprensentative results by presenting better the different point of views, pros and cons.</p><p>For instance, about supporting all plateform whether proprietary or not:</p><ul><li>supporters of this orientation think that it would enable to reach a broader audience. By providing quality software, easy for them to test without having to switch operating system, they could be sensitised to software freedom and privacy issues, which would convince some of them to switch to a full KDE experience by installing a linux distribution. It would also attract new contributors to the KDE community.</li><li>On the opposite, some people would argue that providing KDE software on Windows would reinforce Microsoft monopoly, as the best of both worlds would be available on Windows, while it is not possible to run Windows applications under Plasma. This would therefore result in the opposite of what KDE is trying to achieve. The time of contributors would be wasted on porting existing software to other platforms while it could have been used to improve this software on Linux, which will remain the primary platform for KDE software.</li></ul><p>I am not sure that everyone is able to understand all the implications of all possible choices in the survey. For the future surveys, I would advise to provide more explanations about the various options. For sure it is difficult to make an objective assessment of the implications of each choice, but I think </p><p>Anyway, this is an excellent initiative nevertheless.</p>
Please don't waste time for windows/mac - Oli - 2016-06-20
<p>+1 AGui.</p><p>I'm sad/frustrated to see that Randa was used mainly to port KDE Applications on Windows or Mac and that in general it is the direction KDE is taking. As Agui stated, i'm sure it will only reinforce Microsoft monopoly and waste time/ressources that could have been a better use to improve quality and features of KDE Applications, or even better, support the development of Plasma Mobile...</p>
What? - ulmman - 2016-06-22
<p>I remember years ago when there was no MSN Messenger for Linux and aMSN and emesene people wasted their time to give us a way to have AV support, no MS-Office for Linux and OpenOffice fought with all forces to be compatible with MS documents, no .NET things for Linux and Mono almost dying, no Steam and a lot people hacking wine and fixing bugs to be able to run Steam games.</p><p>Now the Linux community get all of those things from Microsoft and others Windows market players, Linux is everywhere. Now there are people losing interest in other operating systems because Linux fills the purpose, people stopping to study alternatives because Linux fills the gap, people thinking Linux has no problem because it's opensource and "opensource development is the beatiful way to go to a perfect world", so actualy Linux has a monopoly. And the same community that suffered a Microsoft neglect previously is asking for drop support of "Linux apps" (I mean open source apps like KDE) from other operating systems. (I have seen the same attitude for platform not having any kind of monopoly like other Unix-like systems...this is ridiculous)</p><p>So should we report a critical bug of Linux community called hipocrisy?</p><p>I thought free and open source community was about to be inclusive, not segregative. Accepting any kind of users than segragating. I see your comment as an absurd nonsense and hypocritical, I usually get indignant with this kind of attitude, so sorry if I look like angry, but I can't accept it.</p><p>KDE is a lot of apps for Linux and Unix like said in KDE About page. OS X is Unix, FreeBSD is Unix. So, we hope at least upstream work for OS X and FreeBSD rather than Linux only. Windows is a plus.</p><p>Congratulations KDE, keep doing this great work on portability! There are more platforms out there than just Linux, and we use them even for studies purpose or family. Thanks.</p>
Yeah, maybe you were too much - Oli - 2016-07-04
<p>Yeah, maybe you were too much angry when you posted this because you are out of the subject in what you're saying and you make me say things I did not.</p><p>I'm not saying drop support of Linux app, but Like Thomas (#comment-118928) I'm saying let other people do it if they want to but we (KDE) should focus on improving our software quality and start offering an alternative to ios and android with Plasma Mobile !</p><p><br />You know why my girlfriend isn't moving to linux ? Because of Photoshop and Lightroom features. Why my best friend isn't considering linux ? Because everything (passwords, files etc) is synchronized between his smartphone and his laptop. Why non-linux users won't use amarok ? Because it's outdated and has no maintainer. Why people still use Facebook Messanger ? Because KDE Telepathy is stuck and has no maintainer. Do you know that most people nowadays mostly use smartphones ? Where is plasma mobile ? We don't even have a proper modern browser.</p><p>I'm not using KDE because it's better but because it's free software, has a lot of potential and I believe in it. Making those app available on windows won't make free software more used because, for now, we can't compete as we don't have the features the users want ! Please don't get me wrong again, I don't want to discourage KDE Developers, yes they are doing an amazing job and I'm grateful for that, we have something to offer but we have to be more demanding with what we produce.</p><p><br />Currently with all the concerns about private life etc. people WANT to switch to linux but we don't have the right applications for them. It's a great occasion to get more people on linux, but we are wasting it because instead of saying to them "Yeah don't worry, come, you won't miss any features" we are saying "We are bringing to you our applications on windows because not enough people use them on Linux".</p>
