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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 3, 2008 13:22 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)Parent article: The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica)
What I don't understand is, if KDE 4.0 was such a piece of crap, then why did they release it as KDE 4.0? Why couldn't they have released it as KDE 3.99 or KDE 4.0 alpha? It seems pointless to release an x.0 product and then say "It's not finished." x.0 implies fiished (though likely will be somewhat buggy until x.1"). Doing that is just inviting criticism. I mean isn't that what Microsoft does?
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The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica) Posted Jul 3, 2008 13:40 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Because it wasn't such a piece of crap. That's just negative hype that people are repeating after each other, probably because it makes them feel better about themselves. Plasma in 4.0 wasn't all that stable. (Although by 4.0.4 it was good enough for daily usage, unless your daily usage consists of futzing with your desktop settings). Many parts of KDE 4.0.0 were excellent. For instance, the core libraries that people use to build applications against, and some of those applications themselves. Okular, Marble, Dolphin. The release of 4.0 meant that people working on applications outside the immediate KDE release cycle could finally really get to work. For instance, it was really, really difficult to develop against the shifting libraries before the release. The release fixed the libraries and made application development actually a lot easier to do. Releasing a 4.0.0 was totally appropriate and a good decision. If 4.0 hadn't been released, we'd have been unable to make as much progress with KOffice as we have, for instance. KOffice 2.0 still builds against 4.0 -- a stable and usable set of libraries.
The critics are wrong: KDE 4 doesn't need a fork (ars technica) Posted Jul 3, 2008 16:46 UTC (Thu) by Sutoka (guest, #43890) [Link] >What I don't understand is, if KDE 4.0 was such a piece of >crap, then why did they release it as KDE 4.0? Why couldn't >they have released it as KDE 3.99 or KDE 4.0 alpha? As boudewijn said, KDE 4.0 wasn't such a piece of crap. Plasma was still quite immature, and there were lots of bugs, but many of the applications already kicked ass (KDE Edu is my favorite example). KDE's monolithic release model might be partly to blame (for something that pretty much only amounts to a temporary PR problem), it might have been better to make '4.0' only include kdelibs (to make it easier for third party developers to work against), and have a sort of preview release of the other modules at the same time... then again thats kinda what they did, though with words instead of packages. >It seems pointless to release an x.0 product and then >say "It's not finished." x.0 implies fiished (though >likely will be somewhat buggy until x.1"). Doing that >is just inviting criticism. I mean isn't that what >Microsoft does? Funny how the KDE team was criticized for the long release cycle for 4.0, and then when it's finally released it's criticized for not being long enough.
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