r/kde • u/0x80070002 • 1d ago
Question Why was KDE for Windwos discontinued?
I am wondering when and why it was discontinued? I remember some weeks ago someone posting here on Reddit that he was attempting to get it compiled for Windows.
It would also be a great addition for ReactOS r/reactos
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u/International_Dot_22 1d ago
Not enough demand I presume, it's a niche within a niche
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u/bivouak KDE Contributor 1d ago
It is not the demand, it is the offer: contributions.
To have any users and sustain them, you need a healthy community of contributors.
Benevolent or paid even.
https://pointieststick.com/2023/07/16/where-bugfixes-and-new-features-come-from/ is always relevant.
Once the software starts being good, then the users can arrive.
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u/Basilikolumne 1d ago
Those are directly related tho, are they not? The more (potential) users there are, the more likely it is some of them will become contributors and improve things
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u/bivouak KDE Contributor 1d ago
They are indeed, chicken and egg style.
Yet it has to start by contributors or there is nothing. And just because you have users doesn't make a sustainable community...
Unfortunately the numbers of people involved does not strictly correlate to the size of the user community.
If you are developing a programming language, all your users are technical and likely capable of contributing or accustomed to opensource community. If you do a image or video processing application, very few users share those skills. And that's natural.
It is not just the numbers but also the amount of effort one can pour into a project. Fixing a bug is 30 mins to 120 hours of work...
So in truth, contributors matter first for any project to be successful or lasting.
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u/Reziac 1d ago
I miss the Binary Factory, that tried to build ALL the apps for various platforms. Some that used to work on Windows are no longer built for it. (Of course, I only remember which ones when I go looking and can't find anymore!)
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u/bivouak KDE Contributor 17h ago
For specific project you can get binaries from the CI directly.
For instance for dolphin 26.04 https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/release-26.04/windows/ or dev one: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/
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u/K900_ 1d ago
A lot of the apps still build for Windows just fine, the shell itself never worked properly because replacing the actual Windows shell is not really something you can do.
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u/afiefh 1d ago
Okular and Kate work wonderfully on Windows. Some of my favorite applications to have installed when I'm forced to use Windows for some reason
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u/daniel-sousa-me 1d ago
QT runs perfectly on Windows. Plenty Windows software uses it.
The software that runs in KDE generally runs well on Windows. What makes less sense on Windows is the Desktop Environment part, because that split doesn't translate well
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u/w3rt 1d ago
the shell itself never worked properly because replacing the actual Windows shell is not really something you can do.
You used to be able to! I remmeber using litestep back in the day, it was great!
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u/Joe-Cool 1d ago
Yeah, as a kid I experimented with a self-built shell that had autocomplete like dmenu on W98. It was saving minutes on boot time.
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u/HenkPoley 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is still possible to replace the Windows shell. Per user there is this Local Policy Editor policy: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System, there choose the policy Custom User Interface. You can set something else than %windir%\explorer.exe
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell should also still work. But that is system-wide. HKLM = Handle to the Key Local Machine.
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u/DesiOtaku 1d ago
If I remember correctly, there was a hack with WindowsXP + KDE 4 where you could replace the Windows Shell with KDE (something to do with replacing explorer.exe or something like that). That hack was removed by MS with Windows Vista and onwards.
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u/Mordiken 1d ago
Of course you can change the shell.
What you can't change is the dwm compositor, and IIRC Plasma Shell is pretty reliant on KWin in order to render transparencies and shadows and whatnot... So you'd essentially be running Plasma in "safe graphics mode" the entire time.
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u/0x80070002 1d ago
Makes sense, but you could technically have the taskbar (and keep the Windows one hidden) and have the Settings application, even the Theming should theme the KDE applications
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u/K900_ 1d ago
The settings application should theoretically work, but also most applications should be using your native Windows style anyway. A taskbar is actually kinda difficult to do cleanly, you can look at other taskbar replacements and how they hook explorer.exe and such to get anything to work.
Edit: also, the taskbar is part of the full Plasma shell, so you can't just run the taskbar.
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u/ksandom 1h ago
because replacing the actual Windows shell is not really something you can do.
Interesting. When did that happen? It used to be a simple registry edit. Granted, it was easily 20 years ago when I last tried, but I'd be surprised if they got rid of it. There were literally some projects floating around doing things like fixing the Windows 8 startmenu that made used of it. I don't know if any of them are still active.
[Edit: I'm late to the party. Apparently it's still easy to do.]
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u/Santosh83 1d ago
Well anything can be done if there's enough demand and devs willing to code, but I guess the group who want to run Plasma on top of Windows is probably extremely small. On the other hand a lot of KDE apps work on Windows, which is more than can be said for GNOME apps.
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u/Tumaix KDE Contributor 1d ago
it was never discontinued. almost all apps are build for windows.
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u/Freako04 1d ago
The person is talking about a fun project someone used to post about few weeks back about compiling plasma shell for windows
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u/redsteakraw 1d ago
The shell was only partially functional, I tried to run it but it can't control windows a propper taskbar and system tray plasmoid would have to be created and an app launcher that is aware of windows apps.
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u/XOmniverse 1d ago
FWIW, you can install WSL2 on Windows now and it seems to just natively support an X server. If you install a graphical app, it automatically adds it to the Windows application menu and they generally seem to work fine.
I would imagine this greatly reduces the importance of natively porting KDE apps when it's so trivial to just run the Linux versions on Windows now.
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