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Topic: Dear Artix Devs, (Read 325 times) previous topic - next topic
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Dear Artix Devs,

Dear Artix Developers,

We are KDE developers and it came to our attention that you, as somewhat Arch derivative (albeit without certain systemd components), provide KDE for the users. We are happy that you do so, and we would like you to continue, so our community has a choice.

As KDE developers we are working very hard to provide the best experience for the user. With our long-hours and hard work, we are hoping to create the best desktop environment out of the box.
We do this by communicating our choices to our users and by listening to their feedback and squeezing many bugs they report. Without them we wouldn't even know they exist. We are not the separate entity and we work together. Without them we wouldn't be where we are today. We have been doing it for over 20 years.


While we make certain technical decisions, our primary goal is the user satisfaction of using our creation: KDE Desktop Environment. We are not forcing our users by making decisions that could harm them and their computing experience and we always give them the choice. Unlike our "competitors" (we have different approach and goals of what a DE should be), we do not hard-code anything (libadwaita) and we are always leave our users reasonable defaults and reasonable choice. We do this by not only leaving them the possibility to reprogram KDE, but also by creating friendly tools for the developers and easy to follow syntax. For example our users create many amazing themes following KDEs themming convention, but the users can always revert to the default state, if something goes wrong.

Unfortunately, due to the certain coding decisions made by Aritx developers, these are not the case, here. Not only our long and hard keyboard-punching hours seems to be destroyed, but far and foremost, Artix developers decisions are harmful to our user base and are the cause of sub-par KDE experience.

Our desktop environment experience is further improved by KDE Gears: our vast array of great, easy to use and advanced software. We strongly encourage you to bring such an amazing user experience, our hard-working developers created, also to Artix users. To name a few, we created KDE Personal Information Management (KDE PIM) that is far ahead and beyond any single GTK app. It is well integrated throughout KDE for the best possible user experience. We worked hard on it.

It would be great, if our hard work was recognized by users and was in the default installation. We also work hard on many other programs, (collectively named as KDE Gears), such as Elisa music player or KDE screenshot app- Spectacle. Spectacle is capable of not only making screenshots, but also allows easy annotating and editing them, which in turn can be used for both KDE and Artix bug reports. Unfortunately none of these are in the default Artix installation and the user may not discover them, or even know that they exist, thinking that the whole KDE is what you provided with some foreign GTK, out of place apps or something they found on the Internet, while there are much more advanced ready to be used and integrated into DE, KDE apps, that we work so hard to bring to our users.

As for other examples, that cripple user experience, is the Artix decision to only support JPEG and PNG photos by default. Our photo viewing software Gwenview (and Dolphin- file manager) is definitely capable of more than these two. It is capable of displaying multitude of graphics encodings. Unfortunately Artix has made the decision to hide this fact from the users, which will assume KDE is not modern and has very limited capabilities of supporting only ancient formats. It is quite contrary! We created and maintain kimageformats (and qt-imageformats) to support vast array of graphic files. Artix users may think otherwise and search for sub-par GTK alternatives while we at KDE had already provided the solution.

We support: JPEG, JPEG arithmetical coding, JPEG floating point, JXL, AVIF (8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit), HEIF, WEBp, their animated counterparts and even XCF from Gimp. Our software (both Gwenview and Dolphin) is fully capable of supporting those encodings. These high efficiency - high quality encodings are supported throughout the whole KDE. Small size, high quality photos/graphics can be used efficiently to greatly improve the SPEED and quality of KDE and thus enhancing the user experience (wallpaper rendering, lock screen rendering, login screen-SDDM). Unfortunately due to the Artix developers decisions, Artix users will never know.

We understand that you would like to create a unique experience and differentiate yourself from many distributions, but we think, that has already been achieved by Artix, by not using systemd components. This can also be achieved by following KDE themming capabilities and its conventions, which we encourage you to do so, if you wish to stand out from the crowd and create a coherent theme.

Unfortunately, though, the same cannot be said about the decision of forcefully castrating KDE. The prime example being the forceful and irreversible removal of KDE Global Shortcut. Such decision not only makes KDE look bad, but is also very harmful (and creates hardship) to the end user who cannot understand (and revert) such a decision. When a user sees that none of the KDE Global Shortcuts work, including, but not limited to ALT+TAB, (s)he will assume that there is a bug and, at best, will try to report "the bug" to KDE developers, not understanding that it has nothing to do with KDE, but rather un-understandable decision made by Artix developers to irreversible remove KDE Global Shortcuts. This definitely harms us, the community as a whole. I hope this was not the intention of Artix developers, when they made the decision to completely remove KDE Global shortcuts (where, among many others, not even alt+tab works).


Best regards,
KDE Dev Team.

P.S.: We also welcome you and Artix users to our bug tracking system. Please register and report bugs as you spot them.

Re: Dear Artix Devs,

Reply #1 –
I'm not an Artix dev, just an Artix user, this isn't an official response. But I doubt you are addressing the right people. Artix mostly provides a systemd free Arch Linux, and the KDE packaging issues appear to be inherited from the Arch packages:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293520
If you know how to properly set up KDE and you were to help out with the Arch KDE desktop packaging, that would result in not only Arch but all Arch derived distros being able to enjoy the optimum experience you describe.
 Often many Arch packages are maintained by a single person who is doing it only because no-one else will, not because they are especially knowledgeable about those particular packages, so I wouldn't imagine this is intentional - if you can do it better, they need your help. The cause of the problem lies in the relevant Arch KDE PKGBUILD files and that's what you need to change.

Re: Dear Artix Devs,

Reply #2 –
OP's the same person I said was trolling earlier (in a thread that seems to be deleted?), isn't he? Changed tone; still trolling. Gotta appreciate the effort, though.

Re: Dear Artix Devs,

Reply #3 –
Hard work, hard work......  :(