Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
Then make a better alternative. You obviously “haven’t drunk the koolaid”.
Not every Linux user casually writes init systems. Not every Linux user is a programmer, even. Even less have competence at promoting their project so that it would be meaningfully adopted.
“Be the change you want to see” is cool and all, but Linux userbase can have opinions.
“Write the code I want, free of charge, in your own time. I demand it. Recognition for your efforts? Nah, I won’t even know of you, but if anything ever goes wrong, I will find your repo and complain about how Microslop did it better with hundreds of engineers!”
That’s what you sound like. If you don’t contribute code, money, documentation, detailed bug reports, community guidance, moderating, etc., then IMO, that opinion is worthless.
Devs aren’t your code monkeys, shackled to computers to do your bidding. A lot of thankless, unpaid time went into writing most of opensource code out there. To sit there and demand options is, to me, appallingly ignorant behaviour.
I contributed money, translations and properly filed bug reports to various open-source projects. But I don’t think people who don’t shouldn’t speak out. Being unhappy with a certain change signals the direction for the devs to make their code better.
Besides, KDE is no hobby project; it’s a nonprofit with full-time workers on a wage. Nonprofits are always kept to a high standard of accountability, and are resilient enough to turn negative feedback into directions for growth. It is in part this feedback that led it to develop the best DE out there.