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The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica)The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica)Posted Jul 2, 2008 19:06 UTC (Wed) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022)Parent article: The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica)
I hear the complaints here that I hear everywhere. "It's new and different." "It's not like the old version." "It doesn't work like I have been trained to work." This is why 3.x is still around. It's called weaning. As though KDE 3 were the optimal, intuitive UI, and didn't have its own operational problems. Make people think that they're thinking, and they'll love you. Make people really think, and they'll hate you. Nobody wants to learn -- learning is for other people. There is a common social conception that applies very well to the desktop -- the apex of development is reached when no further learning is required.
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The critics are right Posted Jul 2, 2008 19:19 UTC (Wed) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] KDE 4 problems go way beyond natural resistance to change. I've used more than a dozen different desktops. KDE 4 is an unhelpful lump sitting between me and my work.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 2, 2008 21:22 UTC (Wed) by hconnellan (subscriber, #231) [Link] I think I must have used at least as many desktops as you and I like KDE4. I never tried 4.0 because of the general opinion that it was not ready for prime time but I have compiled and tried 4.1 beta 2 and think it is comming along nicely. There were major changes to a number of the underlying technologies in KDE and it needs time to mature. This "user frustration" was an expected but necessary evil. There are still a few rough edges but there is enough there that is better so I will be switching when 4.1 is released.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 2, 2008 21:49 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link] Necessary? Hardly. They took the microsoft stance and released a product that wasn't ready for prime time because they had set a deadline and weren't done. The deadline and schedule then became more important than the release and the rest is history. 4.0 should have never been. Depending on your perspective 4.1 might be far enough along to have been the first beta of 4 with 4.2 probably as the release candidate. The KDE team should have never done what they did, they released incomplete software and everyone tried it and got a bad taste. That bad taste is going to linger, probably for years in the users who were the most disappointed. In fact most users will still experience the same taste when using improved versions. This is the reason they say you need to make a good first impression. Human's tend to hold onto their first reaction for a LONG time.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 2, 2008 22:22 UTC (Wed) by DancingProg (subscriber, #4816) [Link] KDE 4.0 was never intended for end users, more for developers and for testing. In essence it was a planned public beta. And it was heavily publicized as a developer/testing release. It was not released because they had a deadline and were unwilling to change it. You may think that, but you are wrong.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 2, 2008 23:47 UTC (Wed) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] KDE 4.0 was never intended for end users, more for developers and for testing. In essence it was a planned public beta. Let's not revise history. The .0 in x.0 (for x >= 1) implies a product that has been mostly tested and feature complete. While in general .0 releases of software may have a few quirks that need ironing out, KDE 4.0 should have never been released as such. If it was called 3.99.0 it would have been more indicative that this was an alpha release (where alpha = feature non-complete, not tested).
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 3, 2008 0:20 UTC (Thu) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] Thats not revising history, thats what the KDE developers were saying themselves before the release. "4.0" is just a number after all, and x.0 releases are generally very buggy and having many missing features (hardly 'mostly tested'). As has also been said a lot, the .0 release was more about the libraries than what sat above them. KDElibs was ready for the initial release and for application developers to start working with it, and by releasing 4.0 it became much easier to get your hands on a copy of kdelibs (without spending quite a while manually compiling it from SVN every couple days), as well as it being easier for users of applications that used the kdelibs 4 (it certainly is FAR easier for me to use the normal packages for my distro and just develop my browser against that rather than having to spend *hours* compiling everything needed so I can just get annoyed and by missing dependencies and give up before I even have 'hello world' working). But really, if thats your biggest complaint about KDE 4 (notice the no '.0' for the specific release), then you must not have that much to complain about. People also seem to have forgotten about the 'release early, release often' mantra that many OSS projects follow. Also don't forget they're not charging anything for 4.0, and the day 4.0 was released they didn't kill the 3.5 branch.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 3, 2008 0:43 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] x.0 releases are generally very buggy and having many missing features I'm sorry, but I do not buy the above reasoning. Only unfinished and untested software is buggy and has many missing features. If we all ascribe x.0 software as being a waste of time, nobody would use it (by that reasoning, a fine piece of work, like RHEL 5.0, would be labelled as "junk"). Should we all skip x.0 and go directly to x.1 ? In time, all x.1 software would be considered as not worthy, so should we release everything new as x.2 ? This slippery slope has to stop somewhere. Let's call a spade a spade, and call an alpha release an alpha release. If the new KDE had to be called 4.0, at the very least it should have been tested internally much more -- on the day the 4.0 release, significant stability bugs made themselves known within 2 minutes of usage.
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 3, 2008 0:59 UTC (Thu) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] >Only unfinished and untested software is buggy and has many missing features. Any change as big as 3.5->4.0 is bound to have lots of missing features and bugs. How about a similar large change... KDE 2.0 was quite similar, and people were saying the same thing about it! >If we all ascribe x.0 software as being a waste of time, nobody would use it A lot of people don't. x.0 releases DO have a reputation of being of lower quality than normal because: >at the very least it should have been tested internally much more It's very hard to do lots of internal testing with a small team (you can often over look a bug staring you right in the face if it's been there for a while but been low priority due to fixing other things... or just your usage patterns, or any number of things). And again, 4.0 was supposed to be more about the libraries which were rather good at that point (there were already a good amount of users of them).
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 3, 2008 4:09 UTC (Thu) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link] > > x.0 releases are generally very buggy and having many missing features > I'm sorry, but I do not buy the above reasoning. Only unfinished and > untested software is buggy and has many missing features. If we all > ascribe x.0 software as being a waste of time, nobody would use it (by > that reasoning, a fine piece of work, like RHEL 5.0, would be labelled as > "junk"). Should we all skip x.0 and go directly to x.1 ? In time, all x.1 > software would be considered as not worthy, so should we release > everything new as x.2 ? This slippery slope has to stop somewhere. Let's > call a spade a spade, and call an alpha release an alpha release. If you had been around kde-devel or kde-core-devel before the 4.0 release you would know that we wrestled with this exact same issue ourselves. The problem is *exactly* what you said; no one tests alpha releases and beta releases and RC releases. KDE is not the only project to deal with this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/3/2/383 is a glimpse into the reasoning behind the change in Linux 2.6 versioning that occurred a couple of years ago. "I want to have people test things out, but it doesn't matter how many -rc kernels I'd do, it just won't happen. It's not a 'real release' " 4.0.0 was actually delayed (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nj...) to get more bugfixing, we didn't just shit out what we had and call it a day. And how in the crap did you end up using it then anyways? :) It was not included by default with any distribution (OpenSUSE 11 is the first to make KDE 4 default IIRC, and that with a much more polished KDE 4 than the 4.0.0 release). So presumably you built it yourself to test it, or you used a LiveCD, or somehow else went out of your way to test it out and gave us no feedback? :( Either way others have been doing a better job at responding point by point so I won't duplicate the effort. But someday real users have to use the software for it to get the testing it needs (unless you'd like to help with KDE Q/A, we could use volunteers. :)
The critics are wrong Posted Jul 3, 2008 9:50 UTC (Thu) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] "They took the microsoft stance and released a product that wasn't ready for prime time because they had set a deadline and weren't done." Um, one of the mantras of open source is "release early, release often"....
The critics are right Posted Jul 6, 2008 7:52 UTC (Sun) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] You're probably so annoyed by KDE 4 because you like KDE 3. If you are so unsatisfied with KDE 4 then I would suggest to not bother with KDE 4 and just keep using KDE 3 as it will continue to be available for long time yet. No one is forcing you to use KDE 4 and it's not like you're paying a lot of money for it either. Based on the number of people flaming and complaining about KDE 4 and how broken it is in every way, I think you guys should just get together and continue to develop KDE 3. You could of course also fork KDE4 and work from there to make a desktop environment that better fits you. Whatever you choose, it would be a much better use of your time (IMHO) than simply keep saying what boils down to "KDE4 sucks - I prefer KDE 3". A lot of people seems to forget that code speaks louder than words.
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