Peter Robinson wrote:
> It was decided years ago that all desktops would have some Fedora
> similarities, backgrounds, browser etc.
If and when that was decided, that was without involving the maintainers of
the Spins. I know because I was directly involved with maintaining the KDE
Spin at the time.
And it is already the case that some Spins use a non-Firefox default browser
that fits better into that Spin's environment (and IMHO that is a good
thing).
> But there's also 2 other web engines other than firefox and
> QtWebEngine (qt5-qtwebkit and webkit2gtk3)
I want those off the Spin as well. They should stay in the repos for the
users who need applications using them, but qt5-qtwebkit is a legacy
compatibility library that should not be installed by default on any Spin,
and webkit2gtk3 is a GTK-based library that should not be installed by
default on a Qt-based Spin.
> as well as a DB server
Blame Akonadi for that. It can theoretically work without MariaDB, but the
performance of the SQLite backend is poor (due mainly to locking/concurrency
issues inherent to file-based databases), so it is not recommended. I think
the way Akonadi is designed is broken and needs to be fixed (and the above
is one of the reasons), but KDE has been sticking to that design since 4.x
days and is not interested in a major redesign.
Dropping Akonadi would probably be possible, but it would mean losing some
Plasma features, and it is not clear what mail program would be shipped
then. At least as long as Trojitá depends on the legacy QtWebKit, see above.
Shipping Akonadi with SQLite could be a compromise, but that too would IMHO
need at least a replacement for KMail (which is the most performance-
critical Akonadi user) to be viable. And that is just my view as a Trojitá
user who heavily dislikes Akonadi due to past awful experiences with KMail.
The current KDE SIG members will probably be even less interested than me in
replacing or nerfing (by using SQLite instead of MariaDB) Akonadi.
> and the gcc toolchain
Huh? The KDE Spin now installs the GCC toolchain by default? Since when? It
did not back when I helped maintain the Spin, nor more recently when I based
the Kannolo Fedora Remix on it. Is that for akmod/DKMS/… kernel modules? KDE
Plasma definitely does not (mandatorily) require a toolchain at runtime.
> which I would bet the average user either don't use
> or don't need to have installed from the outset.
For the database server, see above: users of Akonadi are using a per-user
instance of it behind the scenes, often without knowing it. For the GCC
toolchain, you may be right, though users of kernel modules from RPM Fusion
are forced to use it these days because they (sadly) no longer ship binary
kmod packages. (Even for blobs like the NVidia driver, the glue code is
always recompiled from an akmod and no completely binary kmod is shipped.)
> I bet there's a lot of low hanging fruit that could slim down KDE
> rather than just moaning about Firefox which I suspect a lot more
> people use by default that a lot of the other components.
I agree that there are other components that should not be on the Spin (only
in the repository), but the redundant browser as a leaf application surely
is the lowest-hanging fruit.
Kevin Kofler
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