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Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
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Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 1:55 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
""" Today’s new audience might have different expectations, and it is unlikely the majority has the patience to deal with a major rewrite like this one. """ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 3:02 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
I'm not sure it really applies. Firstly, I don't think KDE 3.x is considered a mess. Secondly, Netscape 6.0 wasn't such a disaster as Joel thinks. It gave birth to Mozilla Firefox, in which I'm typing these words.
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 3:29 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
""" Firstly, I don't think KDE 3.x is considered a mess. """ Then why rewrite? """ Secondly, Netscape 6.0 wasn't such a disaster as Joel thinks. It gave birth to Mozilla Firefox, in which I'm typing these words. """ Ten years later. Mozilla, in retrospect, was stillborn. It was some 6.5 years before Firefox came along and the healing began. Netscape had 70% market share in 1998 when the source was opened up. We cheer about 10% and 15% today. Joel was right.
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 7:57 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Then why rewrite?
It is not a rewrite, for the most part. It is a port to Qt4. Some things were re-written/rethought: kicker (the old panel) was a mess, arts (the old sound system) was unmaintained, and so on. But they have added on a whole bunch of new "technologies" that simply didn't exist in KDE3. Plasma, phonon, solid, etc. One can view some of these as the desktop equivalents of low-level components -- hal, dbus, udev -- that, also, were invented anew. (Why did they write udev from scratch rather than re-use devfs? Some of the same answers apply here.)
I don't agree with their decision to release an alpha-quality system as KDE 4.0. But they have made it very clear what to expect in that release, so nobody can really complain. They also say KDE3 will be supported for many years.
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 6:06 UTC (Thu) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]
KDE4 so far is an absolute mess large parts of it do not work or are so far hidden it turning into another Gnome this is how it works like it or lump it . When and IF they get KDE4 to the Level of KDE3.5.* then i may well be worth revisiting but so far every time i have tried it i have canned it twice as fast it reminds me of windBloWs 3.11 right now NAFF ..
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 6:16 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
Think of KDE 4.0.x more like a public beta, 4.1 will be the first "real" KDE4 release (which makes me wonder a bit that some distros include 4.0.x). Alex
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 15, 2008 13:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
If it is a beta, it should have been called just that. I have seen many weasel wordings around this fact but there is clearly some disconnect. Users and distributions needs more hints and guidance from major upstream projects within the official documents on what to expect. Some projects do this very well. Others not quite and that depends on the occasions too. The focus of the distributions also need to considered when discussions decisions.
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 (Red Hat Magazine)
Posted May 16, 2008 6:40 UTC (Fri) by superstoned (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
It was a final release, in the sense of a .0.0 release. Just like other .0.0 releases like kernel 2.6.0.0, gnome 2.0.0, KDE 2.0.0/3.0.0 etcetera. Nothing weird about that. Sure, it had issues, some parts were better than other parts (Plasma wasn't very well fleshed out, but eg KDE Edu, KDE Graphics, KDE Base and KDE Games were pretty ready). We needed to do a release because there were many issues in underlying systems like X.org, drivers and even GTK. As long as we didn't release, they were not going to be fixed (we had the Alpha's, Beta's and RC's - but no fixes). Actually that's just one of the reasons, but you probably get the point: we thought about it. And I must say I find it insulting to hear many ppl suggest otherwise. Either way, Suse is going to release with KDE 4.0.4 (with many of their fixes) and, like fedora, will probably offer 4.1 as soon as possible. 4.1 re-introduces much which was lost, if not most, and imho represents the bright future for the Free Desktop! (have a look: nowwhatthe.blogspot.com)