KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk.
That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now.
First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died.
Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists.
I sometimes test new Wayland features in KDE since they tend to be more on the bleeding edge when it comes to Wayland protocol support, but visuals and UX are stuck in Windows XP times and I don't enjoy it at all.
Some 15 years ago Gnome rewrote things from scratch and that made people angry, but looking back at it now, it seems like it was worth it.
I use both MacOS and Gnome, and I can easily say that Linux with Gnome is years ahead of MacOS. Nothing beats the polish of Gnome and it's extensions. It is less cluttered, snappy and doesn't get in the way.
The only thing keeping Gnome back is it's developer documentation. It is hard to find good detailed information about available APIs, everything is hidden somewhere deep in C code which is not searchable without Gnome Gitea account. If they want to see the year of the Linux desktop having Gnome at the center of it, they have to improve in the developer documentation area a lot.
Digia actually spun it off and Qt again is an independent publicly traded company. I suppose KDE community is the place to start looking for Qt open source resources.
> Qt again is an independent publicly traded company.
Qt was never an independent publicly traded company before. Independent maybe, but not publicly traded. It was technically publicly traded while being a Nokia asset, but not independent :)
Regardless of the name (a Meta by any other name would still stink of Facebook, an Alphabet by any other name would still stink of Google), does their site still look like you'd better hire a lawyer before you touch their intellectual property?
No offense, but Nokia was dying long before Elop joined. He just made sure to burry it in Microsoft's back yard. By 2008 it was clear iOS and Android will be the dominant platforms, and Elop joined Nokia towards the end of 2010 when it was already a sinking ship.
Even if Elop were to be the most competent CEO in the world he could not save Nokia from its inevitable downfall at the hands of Apple and Google, no matter what he did with Symbian or MeeGo or whatever Linux based touch OS they had in their toybox.
The world had already standardized on iOS and Android so Nokia coming to the market with a new touch OS platform after 2011 and convincing users and developers to jump ship from Android and iOS, would have failed to get traction either way, same how Windows Mobile failed.
KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk.
That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now.
First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died.
Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists.
Agree that gnome still looks like Apple envy.