Ah, but it isn't. If you just confine yourself to the US, you may think so. But if you look around globally, you will find that KDE is actually used more. For instance, see the 24 Million(!) school kids in Brazil using the KDE desktop.

* KDE was rebranded a year ago. It's now the name of the community, not the desktop.
* KDE, the community, is stronger than ever with more contributors than ever and more commits than ever.
* Calligra does not switch focus to mobile, but it *extends* the focus to mobile... and tablets... and so on.

Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas. Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.

This makes no sense. An office suite like OpenOffice.org can't be replaced with an online service. They should put some effort into KOffice instead and then use that. That's what Nokia is doing for their N900 Linux phone and it's the best choice for this situation. I know that many are going to say now that KOffice will bring in many megs of dependencies, but that's not strictly true. There are ways to cut out what you need from Qt and kdelibs, and that is what the developers did on the N900.

> Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.

First they ignore you
Then they ridicule you
Then they fight you
They you win.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which step we are at now. :-)

The KOffice developers don't package KOffice binaries. That's done by either the distros in the Linux case or the KDE-on-Windows team for Windows. I'm sure they will package KOffice 2.0.0 soon.

Then, on the other hand, it may take some time because the KDE windows installer is not 100% ready yet. We'll see.

> KOffice is for KDE

Sorry, this is wrong. KOffice is *from* KDE (i.e. the KDE community). It's for all major desktops, including Gnome.

But yes, it is a different code base than the others.

Yeah, sure I'm a marketer. Or rather: I'm a developer doing some marketing work. I am of the opinion that if we don't tell the world about our great work, then sure as hell nobody else will do it for us. And if we happen to be the best at something, then that's what I will say.

There are so many great open source projects that nobody is using just because nobody knows about it. I'm not going to let that happen to KOffice.