A few weeks ago, when the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative came to an end, KDE Community He told us not to worry, they would keep working to improve all of their software. They did not take long to mention some of their upcoming goals, like making Wayland the default session type. What you mentioned in passing has been made official today in an article called "The objectives of KDE" that They have published a few moments ago.
KDE Community explains that they are a community that works on hundreds of projects, but that the most important is Plasma, their graphical environment. Taking this into account, that they will continue to improve Plasma is taken for granted, so among the objectives they mention three other things: applications, Wayland and consistency, which means that everything is better integrated in terms of image and behavior.
KDE and Wayland applications
KDE has more than 200 applications and countless addons, plugins and plasmoids. The problem is that the support falls short at times, as shown by the fact that the web page of its applications has not been updated until very recently. The intention is to improve this support, something that is easier thanks to the new types of packages (Snap and Flatpak).
On the other hand, Wayland has aroused a lot of interest in the community for allowing the production of safe, light and good looking software. The goal of KDE is «prioritize tracking and fixing issues that prevent our software from achieving feature parity with the venerable X Window System«.
The consistency
"Consistency" refers to implementing the same type of user interface elements in the same way between all applications. For example, the sidebars in the settings windows should all have the same appearance and behavior. The benefits of this consistency include:
- Better software usability: users will recognize patterns in all KDE applications, making each one easier to learn and master. I open an umbrella to criticism, but something like this is one of the strongest points of Apple software: it is intuitive because everything "works the same."
- Using consistent visuals throughout KDE software enhances the KDE brand, and users will be able to quickly recognize KDE applications.
- Reduced code redundancy and ease of code base maintenance.
- Reduce the difficulty of writing new software because reusable components are available, high enough quality that no one will want to create their own implementations.
KDE does not mention any deadline (ETA) for when they plan to achieve all this, but the truth is that this is important news for all users of their software, especially for those of us who have seen the improvements achieved in recent years.