Fedora - time to blink

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:27:12 +0800
> Ian Chapman wrote:
>
>> Thanks to Gnome 3 I may well be heading back.
>
> Don't worry, in the current climate it is only a matter
> of time before the KDE developers are seized with the
> same "all the world's a tablet" disease and come out
> with a KDE5 where they try to win the contest and
> make it even worse than Unity :-).

You do not have to worry about this, unless someone kidnaps all of the
core KDE developers between now and mid-2012. As the guy working on
KDE's rendition of a tablet interface, Plasma Active, says: [1]

"...we do not believe in the 'one interface that runs on both your
desktop and your tablet'. We believe in code reuse, in component-reuse
(and, where beneficial, drop-in-replacement), compatibility and
interoperability; but we also believe that a tablet interface and a
desktop interface are not, and should not, be the same thing. The use
cases and form factors are just too different.

"We have no plans of bastardizing Plasma Desktop into a watered-down
attempt at a tablet interface that also sort-of-makes-sense on a
laptop. We feel this only produces interfaces that perform OK but not
great on either kind of device. We want interfaces that work great on
each sort of device."

Furthermore, KDE 5 is just going to be an incremental release, moving
some stuff from kdelibs to Qt 5 (which is also planned to be a minor
incremental release) where it makes sense, and cleaning up the
libraries to make them more useful for non-KDE applications.  The
current plans call for "recompile and test" to be the only thing
necessary for porting to KDE 5.

-T.C.

[1] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-on-active-strategy.html