The critics are wrong

>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).

> > 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. :)