The most frustratingly inexplicable part of the dev team’s choice is that the resizable box is in what I consider the most benign category of interface options: passive options. That is, some “customizations” or evil (according to GNOME) “options” are features of the underlying toolkit and don’t require any additional programming on the part of the developer; such passive options include tear-off menus and resizing dividers. The irony for me is that the Pidgin team, in the name of simplifying, removed a basic pull-handle that is common to pretty much any laterally-divided box (on X, at least), and replaced it with a more complicated and surprising box that magically jumps around.

Developers, designers, artists, testers, users, marketers. We’re all a part of KDE. We’re global. We span every imaginable walk of life from the military to schools to churches to nuclear reactors to grandparents to corporate offices.

Making everyone happy will never happen. Making KDE be the best desktop experience over all others can.