The critics are wrong

> > 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. :)