malloc-Depressive Disorder

I am currently cycling through the same debate I have every, oh, 18 months. It goes something like this:

1. Have a piece of KDE software be aggravatingly inept/crashy/stupid.
2. Look for a replacement. This often involves looking first at the Gnome desktop, but can extend as far as looking at Haiku. It usually involves trying to find console applications for everything.
3. Find that all the alternatives are equivalently bad or worse.
4. Recurse and blame the state of the poor software on the state of the poor tooling and 30 year-old operating system design. Look for replacements.
5. Lament that it is impossible to remedy.
6. Imagine what it would be like to go back in time and be the Benevolent Dictator of Software and shape the future into something less terrible than it is now.
7. Lament some more.
8. Upgrade KDE thereby trading old KDE bugs for new and different KDE bugs.

I am fortunate that new versions of KDE are released frequently. Still, the lamentation. Sorbus was born of one of these lamentations─the foolish assumption being that I could make something less hideous. I cannot get past the questions: Is the current state of software the best we can really do? How much are legacy and inertia to blame? Can we develop a tool chain where things are better and easier for both the users and developers?

I suspect things will never be fixed in the way I hope in my lifetime. Sigh. Perhaps a new version of KDE will make things better for a while.

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