Can we please have an official merge of KDE plasma and gnome?
I just installed fedora with the KDE plasma spin and kind of like it, but kind of don’t. I like that it is so much more feature rich, all the little things like easily accessible clipboard history and nice overview of everything. On the other hand I like the feel of gnome, it feels snappier. But plasma seems like a more developed os compared to gnome. But gnome feels more fluid and is just so much more pretty compared to plasma! And it’s more intuitive to me (still partial windows user though)
Am I the only one here? It would boost the Linux community so much if more projects would be merged and more people would work on it together. I totally get that not everyone has the same vision and has different ideas and wishes for software, and competition and alternatives are good. But on the other hand more people would work together on one goal :D And I think that a lot about open source projects. Due to the beautiful nature of being open, no one really leads projects or can merge and manage workforce on projects. So it feels to me like there is a certain limit, what open source reached yet and so many things feel a little unpolished because its not their goal to get many people to use it and earn a lot of money?
How do you feel about that?
It escalated a little, I’m sorry but I had those thoughts for a while now and would really appreciate some opinions on it :)
Lmao gnome and kde can never merge. They have entirely different design philosophy. If every open source project merged into a single project we wouldn’t have the competitive and diverse app eco system we have today.
GNOME and Plasma are so far separated that a merger would be impossible, without either eliminating one of the two or completely rewriting both, and I think they cover different niches. GNOME is for people who want a tightly integrated experience, and KDE is for people who want to customize their system. (I would also argue that it’s not possible for there to be only one distro or DE, so long as all the components are open-source. Savvy users will always make their own stuff if they’re allowed to.)
There’s already plenty of cooperation between GNOME and KDE devs on common standards, support for each other’s apps, etc. I hope this continues, and makes both desktops better. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like Wayland extensions, could definitely become shared between the two desktops.
If they were to attempt a merge, I think it could single-handedly get rid of any chance of the Year of the Linux Desktop.
Someone would fork something and continue on the old path (probably with a lot of the old user and devs).
Posts like this always ignore that people do things because they’re interested in it.
There are already some great answers so I just want to add that merging projects to get synergy effects doesn’t work in the open source world.
Many smaller softwares are heart projects of single developers or a very tiny team. Forcing them to merge with a comparable project (btw who should be even able to do this?) would discourage and alienated them. They would reduce efforts or stop complety.It’s all open source. You can merge them yourself. It is a massive technical challenge and pretty much impossible, it’d be like merging minecraft and fallout together.
People do make money off of open source projects, not just from donations, but sometimes providing prenium features, or providing their own servers instead of you maintaining your own.
There are project leaders, Linus has the final say in what does and does not make it into the Linux kernel.
