Sune Vuorela raises a few interesting points about integration of various (meta)data storage frameworks on your KDE desktop (read the comments, too, as several of these issues have been or are being addressed.)
A huge, somewhat related, itch to me is that the end user of a Linux desktop still has to care if an application uses KDE, GNOME, XFCE, GNUstep, “old style” X11 or whatever. As an end user, I don't care that GIMP is a GTK application. Somebody told me that I can use fish:/ URLs to open remote files and I've duly noted down the syntax because I have no idea what this does, but it does open this file the webdude has told me I should edit with kolourpaint, and now I want to use GIMP because it's much nicer to use ... Similar issues with settings (I did set the web proxy in the system settings, now why do half of the application not respect this?) and all kinds of other stuff.
I believe it's issues like this that will hamper the Linux on the Desktop the most in future. Obviously, in a controlled (corporate) environment, this is not a big problem because it's a problem for the IT staff, but in the SOHO and home computer market, these are real, difficult problems, and since they don't know any of the technical problems behind it it's also very hard to explain why it's not easy for me to set up their system so it works like they feel it should (I already have problems explaining why there should be different Linux distributions at all ... )
Update: It occurs to me that this is the kind of stuff we (distribution developers) should be concentrating on, by putting pressure on upstream and doing some of the work. I guess we've concentrated too much on “just” packaging the stuff.
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