Qt licensing has continuously became less restrictive over the years. That fact alone surely has to have had some impact on where KDE libraries went. As I understand it there has always been this top down limitation where Qt changes (while they may have gotten their inspiration from KDE) always came from the Trolltech/Nokia side. The inability to mingle in the upstream (which wasn't helped any by the controversy and confusion in licensing) is what brought about the duplication of effort.

One of the interesting bullet points:

Reduction of duplication with Qt by removing classes and using their Qt alternatives

A lot of classes were rewritten way back in the day when the licensing of Qt was under fire. Once those issues went away there really wasn't much point in continuing the duplication of effort. Bringing the two back together is long overdue. In the long run it could bring greater stability to KDE applications since more developers will be working on improving the same framework instead of two independent but close frameworks. This is good for both Qt and KDE.

K Desktop Environment. Servers really aren't their primary target. Also what can't you do for your server via a Bash login or other remote management protocol for a minuscule fraction of resources? What really requires a full on GUI desktop environment on your server? There might be some niche need for it, sure, but mostly I tend to think you're doing something wrong.

Because everyone cares what "drinkypoo" has to say.

Unless you are an expert programmer, with commit access to the codebase, open source is meaningless.

Thanks. I keep trying to tell everyone that open source software is written by experts. It's nice to finally get some affirmation.

You go right on running that itsy bitsy percentile of .Net applications that actually work with Mono and I'll go right on ignoring the technology that's yet to make itself worthwhile on anything but Windows.

Microsoft platform -> Microsoft platform... looks vendor locked to me. I'm not going to bother trying to understand much beyond that point because it's the reason the language is going nowhere.

You probably can't understand this, but when every vendor besides Microsoft uses the words "cross platform" or "portable" they mean something far more reaching than Microsoft's definition. For example we don't consider Firefox portable because it on Ubuntu 11 and Ubuntu 12. We consider it portable because it runs on many Linux OS's, BSDs, Macs, many flavors of Windows even if some of those OSes happen to be running on ARM instead of x86. Only in the Microsoft camp is "cross platform" used to describe a program that runs on more than one revision of the same OS.

And no, Mono doesn't really count since it can't do shit with most of that "platform independent" object code generated by Microsoft compilers. The compile once use everywhere dream often doesn't work even for the mighty Java. How can we expect a technology from a vendor bent on locking software to its OS to do any better?

Yeah I might not know much about your wonderful CLR but I know what matters: it limits you to OSes made by Microsoft which makes it not portable by most standards.

It's hard to take a vendor and OS locked language seriously. When so much is going cloud and so much of cloud is on Linux... Microsoft only languages just can't compete. There doesn't seem to be much hope for them in the mobile world either because WP isn't doing much but being laughed out of the market. (Is there even a VB for WP? Bah; it doesn't even matter.)

While there may be some some killer features to VB, there's also some killer draw backs. There's no such thing as portable VB. If it's not a desktop application VB is kinda off in no man's land. If only Microsoft were a software company instead of a Windows company.

This is the funny part. MS wants everyone to use its services so bad that it's ranting and screaming about Google's "monopoly." However when Google actually stops users from using a Google service (thus forcing users to use MS's offerings) they call foul. Come on Mr. Balmer. Make up your mind!

Actually it's a struggle to think of any significant Microsoft product that hasn't won out by being more attractive to customers than the alternatives.

Xbox is probably the closest they've ever been to being genuinely competitive. Beyond that it's all monopoly or failure.

Clearly "free" means diddly squat to customers.

How can it? They buy a PC it comes with Windows. It's already factored in and can't be factored out. Not without a significant amount of effort anyway. It's simpler and usually no more expensive to just pay the fucking Windows Tax, wipe, and reload with your OS of choice. MS still gets the sale in most cases even if you don't use their OS.

That's the point of a Monopoly. The consumer doesn't have a choice. They practically can't chose free even if it does mean something to them.

Kernel drivers are not userspace.

That's true of any decent compiler targeting x86-64 since all x86-64 processors include SSE2 support. One of the nice things about targeting x86-64 is that you get a nice feature set that you don't have to detect support for at runtime and maintain a multiplicity of code paths to take advantage of features. If you know a feature will be there, it reduces complexity both in source and the compiled output.

I'd like to hear more here, I mean.

I read somewhere a while back that KDE was going to try to reduce the duplication of effort between KDE and Qt and rely more on Qt. I don't know where they're at with this but I'd like to here more.

That's true of any product release by any company. The releaser is always going to make the claim that it's better than before. It's up to you, the consumer, to look at the product and make a decision. If you want to make an informed decision you'll probably need to look at both what its promoters and its detractors have to say about it. This article is obviously about the promotion side of the product. You may find some detractors in the comments but so far they're doing a piss poor job. You'll have to try Google.

You should probably not click on articles that are obviously (from the subject line even) intended to promote a new version. They're going to upset you because they are by nature somewhat one sided. For the rest of us, that's not a major point of contention because we know who's point of view it's from and that we'll have to do some more looking if we want to be wholly informed.

Now sit down and shut up. People will think you're more intelligent that way.