It seems our polls remain active for about 3 days before getting no new votes or comments, so maybe we'll move to two polls a week: one on Monday and a second one mid-week after the first one quiets down. Could use some suggestions and contributions - what shall we poll? Typical categories involve polls about user preferences, opinion about the site, and polls about something that's just happened in the news. But let's be creative.

Your suggestions here - and we'll run them over the next coming weeks, starting Monday.

KDE has always been full of tons of configuration options. And the KDE team has remained somewhat stalwart in defending that approach even as the Gnome3 project decided their mantra would be "simplify, simplify, simplify."

Suddenly, at least one journal is reporting the KDE developers are reconsidering that approach and deciding they'll simplify too.

KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer posted on the future roadmap of the KDE user interface and user experience on his blog. While he acknowledges that the great power and flexibility that comes with KDE Plasma and associated applications is the main reason behind its huge fanbase, in his opinion these are also the reasons why newbies get intimidated by the overwhelming number of features exposed at one place.

Developer Thomas Pfeiffer is behind the statement, having posted on his blog: "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion." In the design vision and principles section of the KDE HIG, we condensed and evolved this goal into a simple guiding principle: Simple by default, powerful when needed."

[Ed. note: I've got a bad feeling about this.]

A fork of systemd has recently emerged, calling itself "uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint)".

They describe the project as such:

uselessd is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it's systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.

uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.

They then go on to list features such as support for musl libc and uClibc, decoupling from journald and udevd, removal of superfluous unit types and daemons unrelated to process management, as well as the preliminary foundation for potential future ports to non-Linux systems.

This is certainly an interesting development in the entire systemd saga.