A nudge in the right direction
So, I know I'm not alone on this topic but I will represent these opinions as my own for the sake of taking the brunt of the fury upon myself alone. I recently wrote an article about the complex relationship that exists between various open source projects, especially when it comes to dealing with upstream projects.

Now, the reason I wrote this article in the first place is to compliment a few distributions on how they are (as a result of KDE 4.0) sending some of their better work upstream to KDE. Some examples include: Ark Linux's recent announcement that they'd be moving all of their hardware stuff into Solid (which is awesome and I hope all the other KDE distros follow suit), and Kubuntu's contribution of System Settings to fill the void of KControl being mostly decommissioned. We, as the KDE community really need to applaud these distros when they take steps in the right direction and keep the upstream happy, and I for one would be happy to give press to any distro making contributions to KDE *nudge nudge*. This is really the only positive reinforcement that I can offer to the distros to take this action as I am only an individual.

But the way that the distros deal with KDE is not always rosy, and there are a lot of examples in the past where a distro has done its own thing to KDE and their own detriment. I will provide a few example here, but what I'm really looking for is comments on what the KDE developers and users consider to be the worst examples.

Example #1: OpenSuse managed to make it so that KDE 3.5.x does not depend upon aRts for multimedia, which is nice. But instead of making a KDE 3.6.x branch or similar within KDE's sources, they did it in an internal fork of 3.5.x. Now I recognize that KDE is moving fast towards KDE 4.x and would not really want to deal with releasing a KDE 3.6 series at this point, but it would have at least been nice to have it live somewhere within KDE's source trees so that other distros can more easily take advantage of this rather useful improvement. But instead, we now have users joining #kde with multimedia problems on opensuse that we cannot help in any way, since they are using a fork. (On a side note: Phonon should put this problem to rest once-and-for-all in KDE 4, finally!)

Example #2: Kubuntu changes many of the menus in Konqueror, which is designed to simplify the whole interface. This is a noble objective, and is good for their users (as long as their users don't need any support from the KDE community, or don't want to file bugs against KDE). The problem is that they've broken a number of things as a result. For example: in the default Konqueror menu, there's a "Save View Changes per Folder" checkbox in the "Settings" menu - this menu item was removed, and set to True by default. Now the only way for Kubuntu users to change this setting is to edit the config file by hand. A better solution would have been to put this setting into Konq's config dialog, and removed it from the menu upstream, in KDE, so that all users could benefit from removing a seldom used menu item.

These are only two examples, and many distributions are guilty behaving in this fashion. With KDE 4.0 here, it is the perfect chance for these distros to cast aside their patches, or to get them into KDE proper, and I really want to encourage the distros to accomplish this goal.

So, as part of my gentle nudging, I am looking for comments. What do you find are the worst changes that distros have made to KDE in the past (as well as a note if the problem was resolved or not)? What are some of the best changes made by distributions that should have been merged into KDE proper?

And to the distributions, what are the prospects of getting this work moved into KDE? (Remember, I can give good press for these contributions, which makes your distro look more appealing to the general public - mindshare and so forth.) I don't really want to negatively reinforce the major failures so much as I want to positively reinforce good behaviour via press.

Cheers folks

Edit: Oh, by the way, the 'recent' article I refer to in the first paragraph is available at Ars Technica and is only like a day old. It's probably worth reading as I talk about KDE a lot in that one. Inge Wallin tells me I should blog here every time I have an article worth reading, just to draw attention to them - but I'm not sure if that's shameless self-promotion, or just allowing people to find my stuff easier :)