Stefan Mileschin

KDE's Mr Motivator Peter Penz has announced he is walking away from the open source project.

Penz is the main developer of the Dolphin file manager for the KDE desktop and a K Desktop user since KDE v1.2. He has been contributing to KDE for more than the past half decade.

Penz said that the release of KDE 4.9 in August will have a Dolphin 2.1 file manager but that will be the last release to be handled by Peter Penz.

He said he is handing control over to Frank Reininghaus and he will not even need to provide bug-fixes. In fact he is even uninstalling KDE as his main desktop environment.

Writing in his bog, Penz said that he had been using KDE since version 1.2 and he never cared about the small market share.

But he wanted to be sure that the desktop environment he was using and spending time on can compete with the environments from Microsoft and Apple. At the moment KDE is not cutting the mustard.

In the good old days he could do his regular tasks like reading e-mails, browsing, rarely writing a document, maintaining his contacts, adding calendar entries in a more efficient and comfortable way than on the other environments, he said. In the last couple of years that has not been the case.

He refused to give examples because that would mean pointing fingers to parts of KDE which are not competitive anymore.

Penz said that user interfaces were becoming simpler while the functionality of the applications are increasing without an effective UI, increasing complexity of the non-UI elements of applications.

He said that there were not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and no company is willing to invest fulltime developers to work on this.

Because he can work in a more efficient and comfortable way on other desktop environments, this made it hard to keep up the motivation for putting a lot of spare time into KDE.

http://news.techeye.net/software/kde...ay-of-the-dodo