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Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News)
KDE.news wraps up its coverage of the KDE 4.0 release event with a summary of the talks and demos from the final day. Some of the topics covered were KDE on Windows and Mac, KStars, KNetworkManager, Open Document Format, and more. "There were also big name visitors from the Linux community including Andrew
Morton and developers with NVidia and AMD, as well as many from within our
hosts, Google. This event has not only been a successful celebration of the
start of our KDE 4 series, it has also been an excellent opportunity to meet
and talk with a section of our community who have been unable to get to our
European conferences."
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Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 22, 2008 16:40 UTC (Tue) by wblk9x (guest, #50070) [Link] After trying out the new KDE one can be diplomatic and say "it provides good groundwork for future developments", ala the Ars Technica review. I am grateful for the amount of work put it. However, the rather disgusting practise of mislabelling software that's plainly unready for wide use seems to be a growing trend in our community. Who are we trying to kid with these cheap psychological naming tricks? Calling this release of KDE a "4.0" is akin to having a half-built plane and saying it's ready to fly tomorrow. Another example (though nowhere near as bad) is the recent kernel -rc series, which aren't "RC" at all! RC is supposed to mean Release Candidate (i.e. feature set is frozen and most bugs are already squashed), not a semi-beta release! Are we sinking to the level of Microsoft?
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 22, 2008 18:22 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I haven't tried KDE 4.0, but I think you are unfair to the Linux kernel. From my experience, Linux release candidates are as stable as the released kernels, except maybe for the newly introduced functionality. And the feature set is mostly frozen, although there are exceptions.In fact, many problems I find in -rc kernels are not regressions, but either it's pre-existing limitations, or some other software needs to be upgraded (it's an important role of -rc kernels to discover what else should be updated), or even it's a hardware problem that just happened to manifest itself at that particular time.
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 22, 2008 21:55 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] For the Linux kernel, only rc5 or later is ever released, so rc1...rc4 are not candidates for release.
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 22, 2008 20:35 UTC (Tue) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] Unless you're Firefox or maybe the Linux kernel, release candidates don't get any testing by actual users.
But ready for whose use? Posted Jan 23, 2008 0:16 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (Disclaimer: I work as an editor) Most magazine authors' "final version" isn't ready to read in a magazine. Give it a content edit to find the explanations that were obvious to the author but that the reader doesn't get, and a copy edit to check the language, and then it's ready to print. In the Linux ecosystem, we have some important intermediaries that fill the role of an editor: companies that bundle free software on devices, or offer access to it on an ASP basis, or package and support a distribution. Let the intermediary decide when it's ready to go. "Bl33ding Ed6e GNU/Linux" might be ready to run with it, while "Enterprise Network Desktop for the Enterprise" might want to stick with a previous release. (If you're one of the authors who has written for me reading this, ignore it. I never have to touch your stuff--it's great. Let me take you to lunch.)
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 23, 2008 2:03 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] > Are we sinking to the level of Microsoft? Well, unless I'm missing some moral equivalence between on the one hand illegally using monopoly power in an attempt to control the production and distribution of information and culture, and on the other using release numbers -- which are socially constructed to start with -- in a slightly unconventional but well-explained way... I'm going to go with "no".
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 23, 2008 5:02 UTC (Wed) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] The problem with the above reasoning is that we're on a slipperly slope with the meaning of version numbers / "release candidates" / etc. Should we now assume that every open-source X.0 release is really alpha quality software? Is every "release candidate" not really a candidate but still unfinished? How many times can a versioning trick like "KDE 4.0" be used to lure in unsuspecting users to test the software, before people get jaded?I do expect annoying bugs and half-implemented features from Microsoft, but as as a communit we should strive towards a higher standard. PS. I do congratulate the mplayer team for sticking to the real meanings of X.0 and release candidates.
Closing Day at the Release Event (KDE.News) Posted Jan 24, 2008 7:24 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] I've tried it as well and was surprised by how unusable the main K menu is (KickOff) - it's stateful so every time you click the K button you may get whatever sub-menu you got to last time... meaning more clicks to get back to the 'top' part of the K menu. I hope the KDE team will do more usability testing on such basic issues, and I question why they 'innovated' in this area and made the system less usable and familiar than Windows XP/Vista, Mac, GNOME, XFCE, etc, none of which use stateful menus. In fact I've never seen a system use them before, and for good reason. In any case, with such basic usability errors this should never have been a .0 release. For those who want to try KDE 4.0, see the Kubuntu Live CD which works pretty well - there's a KDE 4.0 feedback page at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+4.0+Feedback
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