KDE seems to be losing the plot here-- how does this help build the best possible DE for the community? I feel like they are fragmenting developer attention and time by futzing around with this.

Meanwhile there are issues that haven't been solved for months; the latest Plasma version has barely any decent themes (the online community theme submissions seem to be wrought with spam), Discover is not really useful, needs curation, settings and configuration is everywhere to be found which is great for the average power-user, but hard to know what you can tweak without being overwhelmed. Flatpak is great, but really needs improving, more TLC and work towards cleaning up. It's looking more and more like the Android App Store every day.

KDE needs to stop trying to be everything to everyone and start getting a little more opinionated. I'd rather have a few well maintained components of a DE than many components that are no better than barely polished turds.

In any case, it's my favorite DE and each/every KDE developers are absolute legends in my mind.

> KDE seems to be losing the plot here-- how does this help build the best possible DE for the community? I feel like they are fragmenting developer attention and time by futzing around with this.

A lot of the manpower working on this previously worked on KDE Neon, so it's perhaps better to think of it as a lessons-learned project that doesn't in fact do what you worry about (but it has already attracted new contribitors that also improve things elsewhere).

KDE also does serve users (and hardware partners) with Neon that deserve improvement.

There's also the fact that increasingly new users experience KDE software e.g. as Flatpaks on new distros that ship Plaama by default, e.g. Bazzite and CachyOS, and it makes sense to get more developer eyeballs on this to make sure it's a good experience.