Weekly Edition
Return to the Front page
| |||||||||||||
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge softwareBuried deep inside a recent interview with Linus Torvalds was the revelation that he had moved away from KDE and back to GNOME—which he famously abandoned in 2005. The cause of that switch was the problems he had with KDE 4.0, which seems to be a popular reaction to that release. Various media outlets, Slashdot in particular, elevated Torvalds's switch to the headline of the interview. That led, of course, to some loud complaints from the KDE community, but also a much more thoughtful response from KDE project lead Aaron Seigo. While it is somewhat interesting to know Torvalds's choice for his desktop, there are other, more important issues that stem from the controversy. Never one to mince words, Torvalds is clear in his unhappiness: "I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster, I switched to GNOME." But, he does go on to acknowledge that he understands, perhaps even partially agrees with, the reasons behind it:
[...] but I think they did it
badly. They did so [many] changes, it was a half-baked release. It may turn
out to be the right decision in the end, and I will retry KDE, but I
suspect I'm not the only person they lost.
There has been a regular stream of reports of unhappy KDE users, with many folks switching to GNOME due to KDE 4.0 not living up to their expectations—or even being usable at all. Part of the problem stems from Fedora's decision to move to KDE 4 in Fedora 9, but not give users a way to fall back to KDE 3.5. When Torvalds upgraded to Fedora 9, he got a desktop that "was not as functional", leading him to go back to GNOME—though, he hates "the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do", which was one of the reasons he moved to KDE in the first place. One facet of the problem, as Seigo points out, is the race between distributions to incorporate the most leading—perhaps bleeding—edge software versions. It is clear that KDE did not do enough to communicate what it thought 4.0 was: "KDE 4.0.0 is our 'will eat your children' release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5" is how Seigo described it when it was released. That message, along with the idea that KDE 4 would not be ready to replace 3.5 until 4.1 was released, didn't really propagate though. It was hard for users, distributions, and the press to separate the KDE vision of the future from the actual reality of what was delivered. There clearly were users, perhaps less vocal or with fewer requirements, who stuck with KDE through the transition. The author notes that he went through the same upgrade path in Fedora without suffering any major problems. Reduced functionality and some annoyances were certainly present, but it was not enough to cause a switch to a different desktop environment. It is impossible to get any real numbers for users who switched, had a distribution that allowed them to stick with 3.5, or just muddled through until KDE 4 became more usable. But, without a doubt, the handling of the KDE 4.0 release gave the project a rather nasty black eye. Seigo also minces few words when pointing to the distributions to take a large part of that blame:
I have to admit that it's really hard to stay positive about the efforts of
downstreams when they wander around feeling they should be above reproach
while simultaneously hurting our (theirs and ours) users in a rush to be
more bad ass bleeding edge than any other cool dude distro in town. I hope
this time instead of handing out spankings, the distros can sit back and
think about things and try and figure out how they played an unfortunate
part in the 4.0 fiasco.
There is no real substitute to distributions and projects like KDE working together to determine what should be packaged up in the next distribution release. It is unclear where exactly that process broke down for Fedora 9, but it certainly led to much of the outcry about KDE 4. But, if they had it to do all over again, how would KDE have handled things differently? Projects want to make their latest releases available to users, so that testing, bug reporting, and fixing can happen. That is the service that distributions provide. But users rightly expect a certain base level of functionality in the tools that get released. To some extent, it is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. In his defense of the 4.0 release process, Seigo notes that releases, as opposed to alphas or betas, are the only way to get attention from users and testers:
Between the rc's and the tagging of 4.0.0 the number of reports from
testing skyrocketed. This is great, and shows that when I assert "people
don't test when it's alpha or even beta" I'm absolutely correct. This is
not about tricking people either: people seem to forget that the open
source method is based on participation not consumption. So testers look
for a cue to start testing; that is their form of participation. "alpha"
and even "beta" is often not enough of a cue, especially today when so many
of our testing users are not nearly as technically skilled with the
compiler, debuggers, etc as the typical Free software user was 10 years
ago.
It would be easy to just fault KDE for releasing too early, but Seigo does have a point about "participation". Likely due to their exuberance at what they had accomplished for KDE 4, the developers were blinded to the inadequacies of the release for day-to-day use—at least for some users. The project needed to clearly get the message out that it might not be usable by all and it failed to do that. It's a fine line, but for something as integral as a desktop environment, it would have been better to find a way to release with more things working. The flip side, of course, is that it takes testing to figure out what isn't working—which is part of the service users provide back to the projects. This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. Red Hat, and now Fedora, have always been rather—some would say overly—aggressive about including new software into releases. Some readers will likely remember the problems with the switch to glibc-2.0 in Red Hat 5. Others may fondly recall Red Hat 7, which shipped an unreleased GCC that didn't build the kernel correctly. We may be seeing something similar play out with the recently announced plans to include btrfs in Fedora 11. While it has been merged into the mainline kernel for 2.6.29 (due in March), it is most definitely not in its final form. There are likely to be stability issues as well as possible changes to the user-space API. There is even the possibility of an on-disk format change, though Chris Mason and the btrfs developers are hoping to avoid it. Much like with KDE 4, btrfs will likely benefit from more users, but there is the risk that some will either miss or ignore the warnings and lose critical data in a btrfs volume. Should that turn out to be some high-profile developer who declares the filesystem to be a "disaster", it could be a setback to the adoption of btrfs. KDE 4.2 has just been released, and early reports would indicate that it is very functional. With the problems from the KDE 4.0 release—now a year old—fading in the memory of many, a rekindling of those flames is probably less than completely welcomed by the project. But the lessons they learned, even if solutions are not obvious, are important for KDE as well as other projects. Because free software is developed and released in the open, much can be learned from other projects' mistakes. It is yet another benefit that openness provides. (Log in to post comments)
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 18:36 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] the open source method is based on participation not consumptionThis is probably very true - however, how is the "World Domination" expected to be reached, when (I guess) most users just want the damn thing work and not that keen on participating in the development effort?
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 18:54 UTC (Wed) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
Simple: Change the culture of computing in general such that participating in the development (at all levels, testing, bug reporting, artwork, translations, coding) of the software that one uses is common-place and expected as a part & parcel of using the software. This may sound like changing the gravitational constant of the universe, but it can be done, if little by little and user by user. There probably is a lot of room for improvement in the software itself, especially with regard to integrated bug reporting, translation and documentation writing.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 20:12 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
That's great, but it certainly doesn't mean that there's no room for people who want software that "just works" and don't WANT to participate at ANY level. Those people DO have an option with FOSS: they can pay for it! Then they can support FOSS with their money instead of their time... there are many people who would rather pay money than spend the time and that's perfectly legitimate IMO.
But, those people will not/should not be using Fedora. They should find some commercial distribution where they can pay for and receive supported, tested distributions.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 1:11 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] But, those people will not/should not be using Fedora. They should find some commercial distribution where they can pay for and receive supported, tested distributions.I respectfully disagree with this assertion. If one were to pay for a desktop system then the best bang-for-buck is buying a Mac, which has a much more polished and integrated interface. Alas, as we all know it's not open source. OSS projects like Fedora and KDE have the implied responsibility of not releasing less than half-baked goods, of which KDE 4.0 is a prime example. Continuing this free-wheeling super-bleeding-edge approach carries a high risk of dissuading users, be they new or experienced (ala Torvalds). Suggesting that we should all buy RHEL instead (due to more quality assurances) conveniently side-steps the fact that the people behind Fedora should think more about the trade-off between pain (in the form of unusable software) and newness (i.e. new features).
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 1:29 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there are _many_ distros between the bleeding edge of Fedora and the ultra conservative RHEL extremes.
most of them do not money (although many do offer paid support as an option), and many of them would be a better choice than Fedora.
Fedora very defiantly has a place, there will always be some distro that's on the bleeding edge and trying new things. but to say (or even strongly imply) that everyone should be using either it or RHEL is very wrong.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 18:56 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
First, as dlang said there are a LOT of options between Fedora and RHEL.
Second, you've changed the conversation to be "if I want to buy a new computer, what should I buy?", but I'm talking about choosing a Linux distribution. That may involve buying a new computer, but it might also just mean something to install on the computer you already have.
For the record I'm not sure I agree with your assertion about "bang for the buck"; Macs cost quite a few more bucks than you can get an equivalently-powered system running Linux for. Whether that justifies the extra bang you get depends on all sorts of factors which are wildly different for different people. Linux desktop technology has come far enough, now, that its "bang" is equivalent to, and even bigger than, Macs for at least some purposes.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 19:10 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
>implied responsibility of not releasing
Maybe you can point to where that discussion took place and everyone agreed.
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 21:18 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
To what end? "The desktop" is in constant development, mostly because people do new things with it.
I was perfectly happy with a working fvwm desktop, but over the last ten years I've had to suffer through two new "desktop environments" each with it's own idea of how cut-and-paste, configuration resources, and focus behaviour should work. Not to mention sound, which in some ways is a lot _more_ broken now than ten years ago.
When your computer is your tool you may not always appreciate development (i.e. change), so taking part in it is not always an option.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 22:32 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
But why did you do that to yourself? My 1996-vintage.fvwmrc still works
fine and gives me the same level of functionality it has always done -- and kde apps run just fine if I start them in that environment.
Of course, I only visit fvwm when feeling nostalgic, because, even though
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 8:39 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
That is not exactly correct. FVWM is pretty much a desktop writing framework. It provides you with directives to write your own desktop.
FVWM of today supports many things that 1996 FVWM didn't.
I personally find FVWM too low-level and dumb for my taste. I have to spend too much time configuring it to do what I actually want (as opposed to what I told it). E.g. I never managed to get it to do the proper desktop movement IceWM has (but I'm also a bit lazy).
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 22:21 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
What if they tried to do the same with accounting? Or human resource departments?
That throughout your day at work your going to get interrupted constantly to review applications, figure out tax loopholes, and mediate disputes between other co-workers. Then occasionally you'll have to get in the big-rig and start transporting manufacturing materials to the factories were your going to have to give your input on the metal smelting process.
Seriously. Leave the development and participation of software development to people that actually give a shit; ie: the professionals.
Everybody else has a life that is busy with their own pursuits.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 22:53 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] Simple: Change the culture of computing in general such that participating in the development (at all levels, testing, bug reporting, artwork, translations, coding) of the software that one uses is common-place and expected as a part & parcel of using the software. This may sound like changing the gravitational constant of the universe, but it can be done, if little by little and user by user. Simple? Riiiight. No, it cannot be done. It is head-in-the-clouds attitudes like yours that make a mess of things like KDE 4.0. You can wish all day for whatever you want, but if you put a wish in one hand and a turd in the other, you won't like the result.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:53 UTC (Wed) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
Won't the number of useful testers, only needs to go up with the logarithm, not linearly? You'll hit diminishing returns scaling teams otherwise, with the quality of error reporting getting worse and worse.
The complaint about lack of Alpha & Beta test, is something I've seen in relation to distro's to. The trouble is installing a recent 'real' release, finding it's broken, then waiting 2 months for updates, doesn't make you enthusiastic to try Alpha.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 21:58 UTC (Wed) by danielthaler (guest, #24764) [Link]
I'm quite happy to test software, if it has already been debugged to the point where it is somewhat usable. Testing before that point is the task of the developers who know their code.
I'm not interested in testing something like KDE 4.0, which I wasn't able to use sanely (I tried).
Another thing (which is mostly not a problem with KDE) is that I expect to receive feedback on bug reports if I make the effort to test some beta/rc. In other words I want to know that my putting up with verious annoying bugs isn't wasted effort.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 8:45 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
I am happy to test software too, but not such big bits as KDE 4. If a given piece of software doesn't work for me, I am happy to try the next version, even if it is more bleeding edge. But I don't want to switch my entire system (which I mainly use for working) to bleeding edge. Gentoo is good in this respect - you can combine a mainly stable, but still pretty up-to-date system with one or two very fresh packages. Unfortunately I had a couple of other issues with it, so I switched to Ubuntu :) (Actually to Kubuntu until they switched to KDE 4, when I dropped the "K"...)
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 14:59 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Pure consumer end users aren't part of the open source method. That's okay; they can just benefit from it. They're encouraged to, and everybody is a pure consumer of some part of the system or other. The issue is that distributions shouldn't be pure consumers, because their role involves being part of the method for the software that distribute.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:17 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
One of the volunteer Fedora KDE maintainers in Fedora, Kevin Kofler pointed out a few details in a response that is worth considering in this debate
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/01/choices-and-punishment...
Instead of finding out whom to blame, it would be much nicer to solve the communication break down as the article points out.
Btrfs support is clearly marked as experimental for the upcoming Fedora 11 Alpha release and has to be explicitly enabled via a option that you have to type out in the installer boot prompt. It is not something one does accidentally.
Also Fedora 11 Alpha release notes at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Alpha_release_notes
makes it abundantly clear what the risks are. Early feedback is useful on what is likely the next standard filesystem replacing Ext* and that is the goal.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 20:29 UTC (Wed) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link] Instead of finding out whom to blame, it would be much nicer to solve the communication break down as the article points out.Merely identifying where fault lies is not effective, that is true. But I think keeping these kinds of problems from happening in the future does depend on better work from the downstream distribution vendors. The problem as always is manpower, for development and testing. I just think if a distro couldn't handle such a large change that it should not be integrated, which is a wise lesson to learn no matter what software you're integrating.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 21:33 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
The problem is that, it isn't always predictable how a release would turn out ahead of time. Downstream distributions have to usually incorporate a development snapshot ahead of time and it be nice to have a clear and regular bi-lateral communication on that expectations for that particular release throughout development instead of just at the end where it is difficult to revert back and lose all the QA time and effort.
One of the things that could have been done better is for upstream to make it parallel installable and support that configuration. Some downstream distributions patched things heavily to provide KDE 3 and KDE 4 together and that was repeated duplication of effort without upstream support that could have been avoided.
From Fedora's standpoint:
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 21:41 UTC (Wed) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link]
I understand. We actually did quite a bit of work on making KDE 3 and KDE
4 able to coexist. For instance most of the executables that could conceivably end up in the same PATH got "4" tacked onto their name (so now kbuildsycoca is kbuildsycoca4 for instance). I only have ever really used the KDE 3 app from a KDE 4 desktop technique where it worked fine, so I apologize if the Fedora guys tried it and were not able to get KDE 3+4 working well enough.
I've noticed it's amazing at the number of issues I've seen over the years
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:40 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Merely identifying where fault lies is not effective, that is true. But I think keeping these kinds of problems from happening in the future does depend on better work from the downstream distribution vendors.
Sometimes it's nobody's fault.
Everybody operates on limited amount of information and given that set of information then their actions may be 100% correct. Given that they were probably correct with the limited amount of information that is available and bad things end up happening it means that they were wrong, but not wrong in a bad way. Just plain wrong. It's not their fault they were wrong it's just how it is. Could not of happened any other way.
Very very often bad things happen were everybody involved behaved properly and gave good sound decisions. However given their limited abilities to discern reality they were still wrong.
So very often trying to figure out who to blame is not just a waste of time, it's a aggressively bad move and totally counterproductive. Aka "a witch hunt".
People have this odd concept that everything around them is so tightly controlled that if something turns to shit then it _just_has_ to be somebody's fuck-up. Maybe their own, maybe somebody else's. Then there is a notion that if something is not under control and it spins out then it should be put under control. Both notions may or may not be correct given the circumstances.. but most often are just wrong.
---------------------
If it's a problem that is re-occuring then you can take steps to prevent it.
If it's not a problem that is reoccuring and is just random chance.. then quite often it's not really worth your time dwelling on it at all. Just pick up the pieces and move on.
In the case of the KDE 4.0 end-user-relations disaster, it may or may not be a misrepresentation or self-delusion on the parts of the KDE crew, or it may be a simple miscommunication and disconnect between the devs people and their extended user base... but either way it's pretty irrelevant and the action to correct the mistake is the same.
The corrective action is, from what I can tell, "Learn the lesson and otherwise ignore it, and move on. Lets try not to do that again!".
Seeing how there is no plans for KDE 5.0 we can be pretty safe to say that it's not likely to repeat itself any time soon.
-------------------------------
In the defense of 'release soon and release often' lets remember the fate of the 'Enlightenment' project.
As you all probably remember Enlightenment used to be a very high quality Window Manager from around the days of Gnome 1.x. It was nice, high quality, had a number of visual and usability enhancements that made it quite unique.
They took the approach of slow and careful development while doing a rewrite and at the same time shot for the moon. They essentially stagnated for years and years and now exist with a much much reduced user base and dramatically less attention from folks.
Linus is using the wrong distro Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:29 UTC (Wed) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]
Fedora these days is unabashedly bleeding edge. I wish it weren't so - it cost us a lot of time migrating systems that started with RH5 and had to abandon Fedora after FC3 - but there are lots of stable distros that Linus could use if he wants to spend his time working rather than bleeding.
Linus is using the wrong distro Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:40 UTC (Wed) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]
What business does Linus have running unstable software? Indeed he should be using well proven, stable software. Only software developers should touch alpha stuff.
Wait...
Linus is using the wrong distro Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:01 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
There is a special place in Hell for people who write "flawed" posts and then end them with "wait", thinking that people still find that humorous rather than just old and annoying.
Anyway, the entire basis of the KDE project's defense of their incredibly poor choice of version designation was that the distros would protect users from their false advertising. Clearly that didn't work out for Fedora users. Bad decisions all up and down the stream.
Linus is using the wrong distro Posted Jan 29, 2009 5:04 UTC (Thu) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]
"There is a special place in Hell for people who write "flawed" posts and then end them with 'wait', thinking that people still find that humorous rather than just old and annoying."
Whereas self-appointed humor arbiters all go straight to Heaven, I'm sure.
Linus is using the wrong distro Posted Feb 5, 2009 10:09 UTC (Thu) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]
By your own admission, if I'm a PHP developer writing websites, I should be running Linux-2.6.34-pre-alpha to debug it? Maybe I want to write a kernel module in my spare time, too?
Not all developers are born/bred/interested/working alike.
Of course, in this case things are reversed, you have a hardcore hacker trying a new DE. But just because he can write an operating system kernel, it doesn't mean he's interested in contributing to a DE...
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:41 UTC (Wed) by tjasper (subscriber, #4310) [Link]
This whole debate is sad really. From my point of view as a KDE user by choice (as opposed to having to use MS for work) I read about the release of KDE 4.0 and CLEARLY got the message that it was primarily a developer release and wouldn't suit my needs. I wouldn't have said that the KDE 4.0 release was half-baked. There appears to be such a fine line between release early and get flamed!!! Personally, I think the KDE devs and others did a good job of communicating to ME what to expect of 4.0.
Furthermore, Ubuntu got heavily criticised (I seem to recall) for not doing a Kubuntu 8.04 LTS release based on 4.0 - feeling that 3.5 would be too old to be maintained for three years yet 4.0 was too raw to support.
They clearly got the message about 4.0. I don't know why Fedora chose to switch to 4.0 without easy recourse to 3.5, but I know they have pushed other technologies and got angry responses from their users in the past.
However, I think there is a place for distros to push the envelope and make bleeding edge software default to give users the ability to test and develop. Perhaps Fedora didn't/haven't communicated to their users the implications of switching to their bleeding edge release well enough. It seems to me that Kubuntu/Mandriva and others knew enough to make KDE 4.0 optional.
My $0.02 worth!
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 20:50 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> I don't know why Fedora chose to switch to 4.0 without easy
> recourse to 3.5, but I know they have pushed other technologies > and got angry responses from their users in the past.
These are users who should not be using Fedora. In the Debian world you effectivly have four layers:
Sid - developers only
In the RH world it is similar:
Rawhide - developers only
Fedora shipped KDE 4 for two reasons. First it was a .0 release, not a beta. Second because eventually a KDE 4.x release would be shipping in a production release so let the Fedora users hammer it into shape.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 3:17 UTC (Fri) by mmcgrath (subscriber, #44906) [Link]
> I don't know why Fedora chose to switch to 4.0 without easy recourse to 3.5, but I know they have pushed other technologies and got angry responses from their users in the past.
What do you think Fedora is for?
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 19:46 UTC (Wed) by fandom (subscriber, #4028) [Link]
I tried 4.0 in Mandriva for about 15 minutes, before I decided to use 3.5
which was also included in the distro. After all, I thought, they did say to wait for 4.1 if you wanted to actually use the system.
And indeed, 4.0 was unusable as desktop system, I don't see why they
4.1 is much better, it is not a feature rich as 3.5 but it works,
Haven't tried 4.2 yet, let's hope they got some sense back.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 20:09 UTC (Wed) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
Having tried a pre-release version, I'd agree, it was very clear it was not going to be ready for a long time. There was a lot of info about nifty features and eye candy around, yet the difficulties of daily usage seemed to be ignored in reviews. Those reviews stoked the desire, but the inability of the DE to "put out" lead to much pent up frustration, which got vented out in blogs and forums.
Aaron did comment at the time, and it seems they really needed to get back to release discipline, to focus minds, and avoid prolonged blue sky development. It's worth using the Google feature "KDE4.0 site:lwn.net" to see some of the comments from January 2007.
At the end of the day, the version numbering system simply didn't give them a way to release early and often, KDE 4. openSUSE included changes to KDE 3.5 to make occasional running KDE 4 and then returning simpler. That should have been in the plan. Make 3.5 & 4 coexist, shipping broken 4.0.x, and then bump the version to signify "stable" at the 4.2 or 4.3 stage.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 20:52 UTC (Wed) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
>I don't see why they needed lots of testers to reach that conclusion
It wasn't end users that was required. It was the necessity of putting
I'm not certain how else that could have been done. People have limited
I think the real problem was people and distros believed what they were
My suggestion for a marketing campaign was "Software Sucks. Ours Sucks
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 13:02 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
If you need to release something half-finished in order to get the second half started, then more attention needs to be paid to the transition period. If KDE4 had been compatible with KDE3 in parallel then there wouldn't be a major problem; users could have had stuff replaced on an ongoing basis as the new stuff arrived and matured. Instead Fedora shipped two releases with a very bad KDE because they didn't have much choice about it and they were told the next release will fix everything.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 14:20 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
KDE3 and KDE4 _can_ be installed in parallel, in fact, there's been a lot
of effort expended on making it possible. And, if you look at OpenSUSE you can see it in action. If Fedora, for whatever reason, refuses to make it possible, it's their problem, not the KDE developers' problem.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 17:17 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
openSUSE and some other distributions have patched KDE 4 heavily to make this possible and it is not supported by upstream developers. Fedora tries to not deviate much from upstream much, especially KDE since folks complained loudly when it happened.
As I pointed out earlier,
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 15:49 UTC (Sun) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
I guess I don't just mean "in parallel" as in "you can install both", but rather a hybrid KDE made up of the old pieces of KDE3 that are working and the new pieces of KDE4 that replace the old. This way, as new pieces become usable and stable they can supplant their older versions.
However, for a variety of reasons KDE major releases (2, 3, 4) are not binary compatible with older releases and thus the KDE team makes no attempt to do this sort of staged release. However for a majorly disruptive change such as KDE4, a staged release is the best way to achieve your goals whithout alienating your users. It is significantly harder, however, from a programming standpoint. If KDE 4.2 doesn't resolve the problems KDE4 has I suspect KDE will lose a lot of market share.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 18:32 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"If KDE 4.2 doesn't resolve the problems KDE4 has I suspect KDE will lose a
lot of market share."
You know? KDE4.2 is a damn fine desktop environment offering functionality
In any case, in my KDE4.2 environment I can run all the KDE3 applications
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 2, 2009 5:08 UTC (Mon) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link] KDE4.2 is a damn fine desktop environment offering functionality that isn't available _anywhere_ else, in an attractive, stable and very usable package. I merely tell you this because the sentence quoted above seems to indicate you haven't tried it for yourself yet; otherwise you'd have known already, of course, and wouldn't have felt the need to play cassandra.You'll have to excuse me. My KDE 4.1 environment is so close to being totally unusuable that I didn't feel the need to rush out and download 4.2 on release day just to see if they finally fixed the problems they shouldn't have introduced in the first place. Call me cynical, or too pragmatic, or whatever, but I feel let down by the 4.0 and 4.1 releases: even after all this time the 4.1 release is still quite unpolished and is, in many ways, a severe regression from 3.x. Don't get me wrong: there are lots of good ideas and intentions in 4.x. But users expect more and in fact need more than what 4.1 delivered. You say 4.2 is awesome. I hope it is; I know the KDE team can deliver awesome. But after being burned I will wait until the updates come from my distro, because I already waste too much time administering my computer instead of getting stuff done with it. And if 4.2 doesn't deliver, I for one will switch, because I won't be able to take it anymore.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 2, 2009 7:41 UTC (Mon) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]
You fooled me once (KDE 4.0). And shame on me, you fooled me twice (KDE 4.1). Don't expect me to try KDE 4.2.
I too wasted inordinate amounts of time on KDE 4.x. Our laptops and desktops now run Debian Lenny which comes with KDE 3.5.10 - undoubtedly the best KDE release to date and supported by Debian for some years hence.
Kudos for all the experimental work that the KDE team is doing in 4.x. If they keep the good and throw out the bad then there is reason to hope that the KDE 4.x series will eventually surpass KDE 3.5.10.
But as a useful working environment, rather than as an interesting programming exercise, KDE 4.x still has a lot of catching up to do.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 6, 2009 2:03 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]
Huh. I don't consider myself to be tightly in any loop, but I got the message pretty loud and clear. I kept myself reasonably abreast of opinions and developments by reading occasional early reviews and feedback. I also tested the final beta, 4.0, and 4.1 using live CDs. All in all, not that much more investment of my time than I would spend tracking and testing a favorite piece of software like Amarok. I've tentatively decided that I might be ready to make the jump to KDE 4.2 -- of course, after I find the time to pop a live CD into a spare computer and take it for a test drive. As such, I don't expected to be surprised, disappointed, or fooled.
If the distribution I mainly use (Debian Testing, and still on KDE 3.5.x) had parachuted 4.0 on me without the option of staying with 3.5 for a while, yes, I would have been upset -- but not at the KDE team.
Peter Yellman
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 20:28 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
A few clarifications... some of which have already been made.
Fedora 9 and 10 had ext4... but I think in both, ext4 was optional, took extra work to enable in the installer... and were marked as devel/testing. The same will be true for btrfs.
KDE 4.0 in the initial release of Fedora 9 WAS challenging to use... but Fedora has updated over and over again... following each release of KDE 4 as it happened. Right now 4.1.4 is the latest KDE (except for 4.2 that was just released) and that's what Fedora released packages for about a week ago... for both Fedora 9 and Fedora 10. Will they make KDE 4.2 packages for both? I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
Here's my experience as a Fedora 9 user:
1) I tried the 4.0 initial release that was included with the install media. I noticed some bugs and everything I noticed had already been reported in bugzilla. At some point I got frustrated and switched to GNOME on one machine and XFCE on another.
2) With each release of KDE 4.0.x and 4.1.x I upgraded Fedora when they released updated packages (usually a couple of weeks after KDE released) and gave KDE a try. Each release had less and less bugs and more and more features.
3) By 4.1.0 I was happy enough to switch back... and I've been using each release of 4.1.x since then... typing this from 4.1.4.
4) While it was an experience perhaps I would have preferred to avoid, it wasn't that painful really... and it did help me become more knowledgeable on GNOME and XFCE. As a result I'd guess that Fedora 9 users may have more experience with multiple desktops and that's not a bad thing. I'd always wanted to give Gnome a try but always found it frustrating but with KDE 4.0's help, I got over that. :)
While people wanting 4.0 in Fedora 9 to be done... no it wasn't... but it did lead to a lot more testing, a lot more bug reports, and a lot more fixes faster as a result. At least I would assume so. It would be interesting if the KDE folks could sort through everything that was reported... sort it out as to where it came from... and figure out how much help Fedora's decision to go to KDE 4.0 only in Fedora 9 actually directly helped KDE. While I don't have any data to support an answer to the question, my guess would be that a significant amount of bug reporting (and probably some code patches/fixes as well from Fedora users and Fedora developers) came out of the Fedora 9 release decision. Was that a concious decision (to help out the KDE folks so much) on Fedora's part? I doubt it.
Did they decide to ship KDE 4.0 just to be cool? I doubt it. I think they were hoping that 4.0 would be completely done and really did not want to dedicate the resources on making two KDE releases in a single distro release (3.5.x and 4.0.x) so they had to make a decision.
Does Fedora pick bleeding edge stuff? In many cases yes, but not on everything. Do they do it to be cool? I don't think so. The Fedora Project has a few properties that people should become aware of if they aren't already... and I'm stating these from experience... and NOT making a statement as a member of the Fedora Project community:
1) Fedora produces a lot of updates. If something is broken, look for an existing bug report and participate. If you can't find one, file a new bug report. Provide information if asked... and become part of the process
2) Fedora likes bleeding edge stuff. What other distro lets you try out the bleeging edge stuff and help in the process as much as Fedora does? While it might not be the distro you give to Grandma (at least not the default install media the first month or two of release) if you want newer stuff, you know where to find it. Fedora is about participation.
3) Fedora moves too fast for most home users. Let's face it, a 6 month release cycle is sorta crazy... from both a developers stand point and from an end users stand point. Why does Fedora do it? Because it is fun... because it is rapid... and because it helps progress the technologies the Fedora Project and Red Hat care about... and that's good for everyone.
Is Fedora right for everyone? Certainly not. Is it right for those who accept the tenants I mention above? Yes, absolutely.
If you want an LTS release, go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux... and if you don't need paid support... feel free to go with CentOS.
Any questions?
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 21:42 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
No questions but since you were wondering, KDE 4.2 is available in rawhide already and is going to be available as an update for Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 shortly.
Fedora is on the forefront of new technologies such as these as it is part of its primary objectives to help showcase leading edge free and open source software and push it forward.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 22:32 UTC (Wed) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]
I found KDE in Fedora 9 unusable. And wound up sticking with Fedora 8.
I tried Fedora 10 when it was released, and ran into a lot of problems again. And wound up setting up dual-boot between Fedora 8 and Fedora 10... and spending all my time in Fedora 8... even after it has been end-of-lifed.
I run Fedora not so much for the bleeding edge, as for the Free Software
Wish I had a good solution.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 23:12 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
KDE 4.2 will be available as an update for Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 shortly. It might fix your issues. Otherwise a long life distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the free rebuilds might work out better for you. Since they are derived from Fedora, they are based on RPM and usually carry the same Free software ideals as well. Disk encryption was backported in RHEL 5.2 and improved in 5.3
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 16:15 UTC (Thu) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]
I'll be sure to boot into F10 and upgrade when KDE4.2 hits. Hopefully
that experience will be better.
As for RHEL; I hadn't considered that an option since I had mentally
Thanks for your suggestions!
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 17:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
RHEL tends to only backport fixes for selected hardware so support for suspend resume, power management etc tends to lag behind quite a bit compared to Fedora (having rock solid stability and the very latest software isn't really feasible) but RHEL 5.2 + does have some of the latest desktop software include OO.o 3.x, Firefox 3.x etc.
There are tends of thousands of customers using it on their desktop, workstations etc so it not just a server distribution. As a rule of thumb, if you are not using the very latest hardware, it would likely work just fine.
I would also recommend using the EPEL add-on repository for extra applications.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 23:32 UTC (Wed) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] This is not about tricking people either: people seem to forget that the open source method is based on participation not consumption.That's fine, but I need to know that ahead of time. If it's not ready, and they couldn't get enough testers, putting a 'ready' label on it to get testers WAS tricking them, no matter how loudly he may assert the contrary. He's forcing me to conform to his viewpoint of what my participation should be, without my knowledge or consent. Coercing participation by deception is antithetical to the spirit of voluntary cooperation that makes free software. I used KDE for many years, and switched after this fiasco, and it's unlikely that I'll ever switch back. I have no problem being asked to volunteer. I have a huge problem with being fooled into doing so. Unless and until they express remorse for this unethical approach to development, and a clear understanding of just how wrong it was, I'll have nothing further to do with their software. And, really, GNOME works fine. I'd prefer more configurability, but eh, it's good enough. At least I know I can trust it, and that the devs won't falsely label their releases to fool me into being a beta tester.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 28, 2009 23:51 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
They said, plainly, over and over again, that it was not suitable for
general desktop use and was a developer-only release.
If you chose to ignore that, it is not the fault of the KDE hackers.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:37 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] Of course it is. It's the fundamental social contract that a .0 release is "done", as much as possible. Obviously, there will be bugs, but .0 means "this is feature complete, and we think it's ready for general use".If it's not done, you don't make it a .0 release. You call it an RC, or, more honestly in this case, a beta. They knew that. Everyone knows that. But they deliberately called it 4.0 anyway to get testers. They've clearly and unambiguously admitted this: they thought calling it a beta wouldn't attract enough testers. Instead of being honest and asking for more help, they lied to get the help instead. A .0 release would be more broadly taken up, and too bad for the users. This is purposeful deception, no matter what they put in the README. They tried to force contribution via deception, rather than asking for voluntary participation. That's about as unethical as you get in free software, short of stealing code outright.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:55 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there is a repeated statement that they called it 4.0 to trick people into testing it when they knew it wasn't ready
if you read the article and the links in it, you will see that they made the release so that developers would have a stable platform to develop against (thus calling it a developers release)
they could have re-named everything from KDE 4.0 to KDE-infrastructure 4.0 and then make KDE depend on KDE-infrastructure, but however they did that split there would have been something one one side of the line that belonged on the other side.
x.0 == feature complete, end of story Posted Jan 29, 2009 21:59 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] if you read the article and the links in it, you will see that they made the release so that developers would have a stable platform to develop against (thus calling it a developers release) Yup. And such things have a name too: KDE 3.99.0 will be fine for such a release. Or they can use MySQL approach and called it KDE 4.0-alpha (with next revisions being KDE 4.1-beta and KDE 4.2-gamma). Instead they decided to use version number which clearly says: it's finished! It's not polished, it's not yet debugged enough - it's first rough release, but it's feature complete! KDE 4.0 was quite far from being feature complete, unfortunatelly...
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 19:09 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
Nonsense.
The fundamental social contract with free software is you can distribute it and change it. Some make it available for free as in beer.
There are no implied warranties, you own both pieces when they break.
That is the first part of the fundamental social contract.
The second part is that if you want something, you write it. If you can't, you support in some way those who can. If you can't or won't, you wait for them to do it.
Nothing more nothing less.
If you paid a distributor for a product, you can reasonably expect a bit more. Like a money back guarantee.
You can be upset or disappointed all you like, but I for one don't owe you anything unless you pay me for something. Neither does anyone who contributed to KDE.
Don't start attempting to impose your expectations as a 'fundamental social contract' unless you have a signed copy.
I'm serious. Developers don't owe you or anyone else anything at all. If you don't want to use what they write, that is your choice.
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 21:48 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
Equally, I owe you nothing as a user that I don't want to contribute. Misleading me into beta testing for you is theft of my time.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 6, 2009 2:17 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]
I think the "fundamental social contract" is about communication, not numbering systems, which, despite your assertion, are obviously still a point of significant disagreement and divergence. I thought the KDE team communicated the meaning and intent of the 4.0 release quite clearly. I might cut some slack to a novice user who was surprised when 4.0 was dumped on him/her, but it's just plain weird to hear those kind of comments from LWN readers, whom I expect to be better informed.
It's impossible to escape the conclusion that there was a cadre of people out there -- not novice users at all, but really, power/expert users -- who, despite knowing full well how the KDE team had characterized the 4.0 release, insisted as a matter of highlighting a "higher" principle (the ".0" principle) on installing it and treating it as what they insist a .0 release should be, and then using any negatives from that experience as ammunition and fodder to attack the KDE team -- all to grind into the face of the KDE team (and the rest of us) -- the consequences of messing with their beloved ".0" definition.
Peter Yellman
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 2:06 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
here are a few question for you. Are all forms of communication equal?
Was the developer only nature of the release mentioned in the release announcements on kde.org?
http://kde.org/announcements/4.0/
Does that read materially differently than the 4.2 announcement?
http://kde.org/announcements/4.2/
-jef
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 4:04 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] Again: there is an implied promise to a .0 release. If the implied promise didn't exist, there would have been no reason to release as .0. They knew there was a specific meaning, and they took advantage of that to get more testers.They called it something other than what it was to trick people into testing it that ordinarily would not. They have explicitly admitted this. The facts of the matter are not in question. The patch notes are irrelevant. Shipping .0 software and then putting in the README "oh, by the way, this isn't .0 software" doesn't change the implied promise, or the deception involved in releasing it that way. Arguing against this is a stupid waste of time. They've admitted guilt. They just haven't admitted that it was wrong and abusive of their user base. And until they do, I'll be pointing people at GNOME, because that's a dev team that, at least so far, can be trusted to do what's right for users. I don't like their over-simplification of things, but at least if I install a stable release, I know they thought it was actually stable when it went out the door.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 6:01 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I don't think you can hold GNOME up as a better example at how to handle this sort of shift. Now its been a long long long while...but when gnome 2.0 was introduced..in 2002...didn't that also have some regression-neering?
To quote:
"Hiding behind the 'this is a mostly a release for developers' excuse is not good enough for me. Gnome is around for years, and the GNU project was not able to deliver an outstanding version yet. Is this the best that the GNU project can offer to the Joe User who wants to switch away from the commercial option of OSX or Windows? Well, nice try
I usually start my reviews with the positive points of a product and then continue with whatever I found as 'bad'. In this case, I just can't hide my dissapointment about the new version of Gnome. As a user, I expected more, and I want more."
Ah yes, that takes me back. Good times...installing Ximian's GNOME 2.0 desktop over RHL 7.3 and watching it bleed.
The only thing that has changed since 2002 and the GNOME 2.0 release..is that there are more users now to complain. I don't think the KDE developers handled communicating 4.0 release significantly better or worse than the GNOME developers did their 2.0 release in 2002...they just happened to do it 6 years later.
-jef
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 6:29 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
KDE gained a number of users from the Gnome transition. Gnome is gaining
some disappointed KDE users now. When Gnome does their 3.0 switcheroo, KDE will gain some disgruntled Gnome users.
Something like the tides of the sea.
At least there is a choice.
Sometimes things have to be burnt to make it better. Xorg is doing
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 14:42 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Let's just hope they don't decide to make a major transition at the same time ;-)
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 13:54 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
Awww come on, you've been around! How many X.0 releases have been trouble?
How often have OS-es been shipped with huge problems that take a year to settle down? You really so surprised and feel "betrayed" because 4.0 was buggy and lacked desirable features?
You know, I just don't believe you!
The Developers weren't in the best spot, to take impartial decisions about the software. That was the distro's job,
There were Live CD's to try out, and it was clear many features weren't implemented. Those of whose who repsonded to the pre-release call for wider testing, have said, it was clear to us within an hour or two, that it'd not be ready for general use for a long time.
If KDE had been Fedora's main desktop, they'd have sorted the problems, so someone like Linus could have chosen to install the stable desktop, and play around with the new one when he felt like it.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 16:38 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] There is an enormous difference between getting software wrong -- all software has bugs -- and deliberately misrepresenting your product to get extra beta testing.They've admitted this. It's not in question. They called it .0 to trick people into testing a product that wasn't finished yet. They're even proud that it worked. THAT is what I object to. In some states in the US, they have statutes against 'theft by deception', and that's exactly what the KDE team is guilty of -- stealing time from people who trusted them, by misrepresenting the product. Painful .0 releases are nothing new, but lying to get beta testing is. Above all other things, for free software to differentiate itself, it has to work. If free software is claimed to be stable, it needs to be stable. The KDE team's lies hurt everyone in the community. Most high-profile free software teams do fantastic work, and as a result, open source as a whole prospers. When big projects like KDE deliberately ship garbage to get more testing, they don't just damage their own reputations, they damage everyone's. And what if other teams see their evinced pleasure at all the free testing they got, and decide to start emulating them? The more that idea spreads, the more the quality of free software suffers. This was a horrible idea, selfish and manipulative, and it should be condemned in the strongest of terms.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 9:08 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] The problem seems to be that there were two information flows. If you visit the KDE announcements site, you will find advertisement language about how everything is new and improved. But like in this 2006 LWN article and many others, the plans for KDE 4.0 were clearly outlined from the start: maturity and functionality would appear later in the 4 series.Like others have remarked, as a Free Software user you should be aware that you receive a product WITHOUT ANY warranty. Read the license, always a good idea. At the same time, it must be annoying to do a distribution upgrade and see your desktop stop functioning.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 14:18 UTC (Fri) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
"There is an enormous difference between getting software wrong -- all software has bugs -- and deliberately misrepresenting your product to get extra beta testing."
They didn't lie, they were very upfront about it. They didn't claim the release was "Stable" far from it, they announced a rapid development plan with frequent releases. They wanted the distro's to make KDE4 available, to encourage participation, and application porting.
Aaron Seigo, said clearly at the time, that making a 4.0 release was necessary to get this to happen, it was a very clear implication that quality was going to suffer. If you go back to Jan 2007 on this site, you'll see discussion on the very point. The PR train wreck was all too predictable, I think they could have handled it better, but it isn't their fault, the apparent blind enthusiasm with which the distro's pushed out the packages, without the stable KDE3 fallback, which received 2 updates in the past year.
Any body with any experience, knows re-writes of large projects tend to either never ship, or ship initially unstable and feature incomplete. This is one of the big reasons to prefer evolutionary, not revolutionary development.
There is a problem with version numbering. With a new project, releasing version 0.x.y signifies pre-production status. 1.0 is a milestone.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 15:51 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] They didn't lie, they were very upfront about it.No, they weren't. They called it 4.0 explicitly to manipulate people into testing it that otherwise wouldn't. It wasn't feature complete, it wasn't done, but they gave it a stable release number purposely, and admittedly, to get more testers. All they had to do was call it 4.0-alpha, and all would be well. No fuss, no muss, nobody would be upset. Once they got to feature complete, they could have called it beta. But they didn't. They've directly copped to this: they tricked people into testing for them. They loudly insist that they weren't deceptive, but of course they were. They've stated that they knew that calling it 4.0 would get them more testers. They knew what 4.0 meant. Putting that release number has a very strong implication of stability and feature-completeness. Then, they put in the fine print, "Oh, gee, this isn't actually any damn good yet, and you shouldn't use it." They did this to get people to test that otherwise would not. And, as you can see in the quote in the original article, they're proud that their lie worked. If everyone started doing that, free software would be very badly damaged.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 17:14 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
You really need to chill, dude. The past is the past and cannot be changed.
OK 4.0 should have been called "4.0 Developer Release/Foundations" or something, but other than that it was OK to release. That would have made the "KDE 4.0 is not KDE4" excuse more understandable.
So ..
Lessons learned:
1. Don't just call a release that mostly/only sets new foundations "$X+1.0" or people will whine for YEARS (like you do)
Did I miss something?
I hope people will read this post before KDE 5.0 based on Qt5 is released ;)
Yes, there are something else... Posted Jan 30, 2009 20:10 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Did I miss something? Yes: All distributions which shipped KDE3 and KDE4 in the same box were forced to heavily patch the thing. You can not just "./configure ; make ; make install" KDE3 and KDE4 on the same system (unlike GNOME 1.x/GNOME 2.x) - this makes all such talks hypocrisy. Even this "feature" was unfinished (granted - it was in the same state as everything else: mostly, but not 100% complete).
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 31, 2009 15:58 UTC (Sat) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
You're wrong. Though I don't expect you to change your perceptions.
There was an appeal for wide scale testing, before 4.0, giving
There was widely available info about the re-write, also the new Plasma
The clear implication was that there'd been insufficient testing
The problem for a project like KDE, is it's hard to download the source,
What KDE were, was naive about the process. Now I'm sure they see that
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 31, 2009 20:59 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Malor, you don't get it.
We didn't call KDE 4.0 that because it was stable. We did call it 4.0
The fact YOU think 4.0 was, in any way, telling you something about the
Fedora targets bleeding edge users - they considered 4.0 good enough, I
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 0:21 UTC (Sun) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] We didn't call KDE 4.0 that because it was stableYou're right. You called it 4.0 to get more testers. We've been doing this since 10 years I've been there the whole time, and I don't remember you guys ever before calling something 'done' that wasn't. Your .0 releases haven't always been that great, but to my memory, they've always been feature-complete. This time around, tou lied to us to get us to test your software before we normally would. That's new. And people are still pissed, a year later. This isn't coincidence. FOSS is about developers first, users next. The arrogance in this simple statement is breathtaking on two fronts. One is the fundamental belief that users are inferior. On Linux, do you know what a user actually is? Almost always, a user is a developer of another project. And your particular software is very central to the use of their computer, if they chose your flavor of desktop, and if you screw it up, you damage the progress of other projects. They're dependent on you to get it right. Time they have to spend fixing your problems is time they can't spend fixing their own. Further, it's worth pointing out that you lost Linus Torvalds, one of the most famous developers in the world, and yet here you're dismissively handwaving him away, lumping him in with the proletariat, the developers that aren't working on your project. Mere users. Scum. Secondly, if you hadn't noticed, you're writing a desktop. If your focus isn't first, foremost, and always about users, then you picked the wrong hobby. Go write webservers or something. Every day you write code without thinking about users, users, users, is a day that GNOME eats a little more of your lunch. They have come from essentially nowhere to gradually eclipsing you on the desktop. Eight years ago, only the diehard used GNOME. Today, you're in a substantial minority. This should be telling you something. And with 4.0, your focus on the needs of your own team, instead of the needs of your users, further accelerated your slide into irrelevance. Distributions are for users, source code on some developer site is not. This has never really been true. Remember: "users" are the people writing the kernel, too. Your entire comment is damage control, apologia for an enormous mistake. Just admit the damn mistake, apologize, and move on. And stop lying to us. Maybe you'll start regaining some of the ground you've lost.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 11:53 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
You're right in that users are important, but it is very annoying that you simply ignore most that I wrote. We didn't release 4.0 to get more testers nor users, we did it to get more developers.
Well, ok, some parts of KDE needed testers, some parts were ready for that, and benefited from testing. In many other area's (plasma) we knew what the issues were, but didn't want to let all of KDE wait and suffer because it wasn't finished yet.
Again, it was a long-term decision which did hurt users in the short term but benefit all in the long term. You focus on a 1 year period (or even shorter). Linus went away for now - and so did many. Is that bad? Well, it sucks, but when you factor in the increase in speed of development, it is reasonable to expect them to be back. After all, the free desktop has what, 1% of the whole desktop market? So we did hurt a portion of that 1% to be able to get to the point where we could aim for the other 99%.
We're simply more ambitious than you think, I guess.
We can say sorry to those users we've hurt (even though I still think the distributions are to blame as well). But shouldn't the users say thank you now KDE 42 has proven us to be right?
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 22:36 UTC (Sun) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] As soon as you start valuing 'the project' above 'the users of the project', then your development process has gone off the rails.but didn't want to let all of KDE wait and suffer because it wasn't finished yet. KDE is code. It can't suffer. Only your user community can experience pain. You inflicted a great deal of it on them, to benefit some abstract code. From other comments here, it sounds like your users got shut out of bugfixes and maintenance on 3.5 while you guys focused on 4.0. (I switched away when 4.0 shipped, so I haven't been watching that at all.) If that's true, you not only didn't provide a replacement, but also stopped improving the old stuff as well. Your focus shifted so completely to the project that you abandoned the actual users OF the project -- presumably, the original reason you started developing KDE at all. So we did hurt a portion of that 1% to be able to get to the point where we could aim for the other 99%. That is true, but it strikes me as shortsighted. You're punishing the people who trusted you, to go after the people who haven't. Your existing user base is your best advertising tool; their evangelism matters. When you screw them, you get people pissed off -- some of whom are annoyed enough to post screeds to LWN. And if you're willing to screw that 1%, and it works, will you be willing to screw your 5% six or seven years from now? Why would people adopt your desktop when you're focused on your project, and don't care about their benefit? I think you might want to collectively ask yourselves, "Why are we doing this project at all?" If that answer, and your ultimate focus, isn't on making the lives of your users better, every day, then you're probably in the wrong area for development. Users and developers would be well-served by avoiding dependency on your desktop and libraries. You're going up against an entrenched monolith, whose user-abusing mistakes are legion. But they can get away with it, because they're a monopoly. It's those user abuses that, in many ways, prompted the entire Free Software movement. But you're not a monopoly. If you abuse users for the benefit of your project, you ultimately harm it more than you help it. You and GNOME both are tiny players, goldfish among sharks. If you're not obsessively focused on user benefit, then the other teams who ARE will take them away from you. I'm sure you want your project to move faster, but no matter how good your program is, people won't take it up based on technical merit alone. Just look at Sony's decisions with Beta -- chasing off users they didn't like, porn-mongers, ended up being a huge blow to the format, eventually driving it off the market. If you continue doing this sort of thing, you'll end up with the best desktop that nobody uses. Growth rates are always off how many users you have already. If you double your annual growth rate from 12.5% to 25% by abusive development practices, but cut your community in half in so doing, it'll take three years just to get back to where you started, and it'll take seven years to get back to parity with where your project would have been at the 12.5% growth rate. The real numbers won't be that large, but carefully, carefully consider anything that makes a user switch away. Each and every one is a seed that can grow into more users -- and, if you get lucky, more developers. Failing to water seeds you already have because you want to hike to what looks a bigger field on yonder mesa is a good way to starve.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 14:36 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Theft? Good grief, man, take a chill pill or something. Really, there's no
reason to be blowing your top like this. You know what? KDE 4.0 was not _that_ bad, _actually_. It was perfectly usable for many people doing perfectly productive work. And there wasn't a single lie in the release announcement. What you are writing, on the other hand, is at least baseless hyperbole -- and feel free to pencil in rather stronger words.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 15:57 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
If all projects adopted this type of disinformation in their major releases, the usability and uptake of free software would take an enormous hit. People would learn that you can't trust software that's free.
This is worth being upset about. It's a very bad precedent.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 18:10 UTC (Fri) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
Perhaps you should use Vista instead.
Perhaps Posted Jan 30, 2009 20:13 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Vista is very resource-hungry, but it's usable. KDE 4.0 was resource hungry and unusable. Now Microsoft created Vista+ (named Windows 7) which is less resource-hungry and more usable - we'll see how KDE 4.x will compare with that...
Perhaps Posted Jan 31, 2009 21:01 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
the final Vista gold wasn't that much better than KDE 4.0 - it did work,
basically, for most people but did a horrible job for some. Same with 4.0, I suppose, even though 4.0 as a FOSS product doesn't have to be as stable as a product by a big company. After all - we have the 'release early and often' paradigm, they don't.
Perhaps Posted Feb 2, 2009 19:49 UTC (Mon) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
I think I was too subtle.
1. The prev poster was implying that free software will get some sort of reputation because of things like KDE4. As if non-free software doesn't already have that reputation.
2. When I did customer support back in late 80s, the corporate policy was that if a customer for our product called too often and was belligerent to very carefully and politely introduce him to the competitor's product. Sometimes even with phone numbers for their sales department. The reasoning was that a troublesome customer is going to be troublesome for everybody...so he might as well be troublesome for your competition.
Cry
Perhaps Posted Feb 2, 2009 20:48 UTC (Mon) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
No, you weren't being too subtle. Your insult was obvious.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 30, 2009 21:36 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
Heh, but I beg to differ, and I'm not a wilting flower when it comes to using bleeding edge stuff.
Some problems are bad, some problems are good.
KDE had(s) the problem where people want to use their stuff. They like the ideas, the applications, the way things work.
I suspect the distributions wouldn't have paid any attention to 'improved communication' with the 4.0 release. There was palpable demand for the offering. The moment anyone of them advertised that the new KDE 4.0 release was going to be on offer, all of them had to do the same. If I remember correctly, the developers had to make an effort to tone down the enthusiasm.
All in all, the only thing it has convinced me of is that releases are the spawn of the devil.
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 31, 2009 20:55 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Funny to see the two announcements next to each other. Esp the screenshots
- our look & feel has improved a lot :D
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 29, 2009 8:48 UTC (Thu) by omez (guest, #6904) [Link]
"GNOME is fine... At least I know I can trust it..."
to break useful functionality without even waiting for a major release.
For example, session management was deliberately broken in 2.24. There was no plan to replace the feature. The antique code was simply deemed too ugly to exist.
Fedora happily includes this less-featureful version because, just like KDE 4.0, it's the latest.
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 29, 2009 17:29 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+...
Fedora just happened to get there first...but other distributors are making the same choice to ship the newer gnome-session even with this regression in place. Maybe because other pieces of gnome are starting to make use of features in the new gnome-session design and simply keeping an older gnome-session with have other impacts on the overall integrated desktop.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+...
These comments really speak to the competing expectations projected onto the people working at the distribution level.
Very few distributors promise a feature regression free experience across the distribution release boundary. Why? Because very few of the upstream projects themselves promise a regression free experience across their release boundaries, even minor releases.
But as users that seem to be what we expect from distributors. We try a distribution, we like how the pieces work together and stick with it, and we want it to work that way..forever...regardless of what design decisions are being made in the upstream projects to support backwards compatibility or legacy behaviour. I think its a logic fallacy to expect distributors to do a better job at being upstream developers than the upstream developers themselves.
Fedora certainly does not come anywhere close to even hinting at an implied promise of a feature regression free experience across the Fedora release boundary. Fedora self-describes itself as leading edge, and each release is focused on integrating the current upstream project offerings.
-jef
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 29, 2009 22:06 UTC (Thu) by omez (guest, #6904) [Link]
I was explicitly addressing malor's assumption that GNOME on Fedora would provide a better experience than KDE on Fedora. However, the situation is no different. The amateur release strategies evident in the latest GNOME can be as unwelcome as the latest KDE. As you note, Ubuntu likes to point upstream and say, "But... but...", also. I think you'll agree, Jef, that just because Ubuntu does it does not mean it's okay. Debian and Gentoo are generously resisting on behalf of their users.
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 29, 2009 22:38 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
It's it okay? It's honest. I think user expectations on what distributions can accomplish with resources at hand are not calibrated to reality that the open desktop related software is going under heavy development. Distributions have to make choices as to what sort of experience they want to provide.
You want a regression proof experience in the distribution you use, then your distribution will stagnate relative to upstream development. Upstream moves so damn fast in some areas...especially the desktop arena. But the integration effort you are putting in at the distribution level to keep that regression free environment doesn't pay forward in time as it doesn't add manpower to the upstream effort to address regressions in the current upstream codebase. Distributions will not be better upstreams than upstream projects themselves. If upstream projects don't recognize the need for backwards compatibility in an area, trying to establish backwards compatibility at the distribution level can take significantly more work.
You are free to call it upstream development models amateur release strategies, but its not going to change how they do releases. A massive injection of additional contributing manpower into upstream projects could have an impact however.
Fedora says the same sort of thing being said in those Ubuntu tickets, except we try to put the stress on contributing manpower to upstream as much as possible. Manpower is limited at every level.
-jef
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 30, 2009 21:49 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
>I think user expectations on what distributions can accomplish with resources at hand are not calibrated to reality that the open desktop related software is going under heavy development.
Insert upstream projects into that statement.
This highlights a fundamental problem with the desktop.
If you look at server applications, for the most part when they are stable, they cover the use patterns of many, and people are content to stick with what works. New feature requirements are there, but the pace of implementation is slower. The software usage corresponds more to how a desktop application uses a library. Stability stability stability.
The desktop is much different. If I run across some new gizmo, I may be the one informing the developer of the need. And I want it right now. Or I am anxiously awaiting the ability to do something that another platform does with ease. I will use code written yesterday for that reason.
A stable LTS release is useless for the desktop unless there is a very limited usage pattern.
Of course, when I am that close to the edge, things will break.
It isn't a management issue. It is simply that the desktop isn't done, and every improvement is important. Reality forces developers to throw stuff away from time to time to get to the next level of capability.
And the very odd thing is that for a number of years, I've been running KDE from svn. Build every few days. Other than the very early KDE4 time, it works very well.
Derek
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 30, 2009 22:23 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Indeed, I think you've hit the heart of the matter... the desktop isn't done.
I know that, you know that... and I know I know what the implications of that are. And I now know that you know as well. Or I think I do.
Anyways.... having the two of us understand what the reality of the desktop development landscape is lets us set our expectations on progress/regressions accordingly. But that doesn't automatically translate into a widespread understanding. I think the expectation mismatch between the user culture and the developer culture is real and if there's someone with some ideas on how to close that expectation gap in the future... I'm all ears.
-jef
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 31, 2009 0:46 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
I have sold big ticket items in one of my iterations, and found it in my
interest to pop the emotional high that comes in these instances and replace it by some caution and realistic expectations of what was going to occur. Otherwise we would have ended up with the same level of satisfaction as the KDE 4.0 release engendered.
Derek
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 31, 2009 5:53 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
All they had to do was call it "4.0 alpha", and about 90% of the potential problems would have instantly disappeared. The remaining anger at the flawed release would have been directed at the distros that packaged an alpha. And the whole thing would have blown over long ago.
It's really that simple. Call a product what it actually is, and it's amazing how much better consumers will like it.
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 31, 2009 14:08 UTC (Sat) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
OK, for sake of argument:
4.0 = 4.0 alpha
I will betcha that if they went down that road the 4.0 we would get in 6 months would have more unfinished blue sky features and frameworks and would have been less usable than the real 4.1. (again look at E17)
Release EARLY release OFTEN.
4.0 did work and was OK to release .. the "mostly erects the pillars of KDE for developers and upcoming releases" part is the only thing that should have been in big letters in every announcement and blog post and Fedora should have been more conservative.
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Jan 31, 2009 21:08 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Kragil already makes a good point, but there were more reasons why a delay
of 4.0 would've been bad.
For example. NVidia would've continued to ignore our complaints about the
Another reason to release was to get more developers. Because as you might
There are more reasons for releasing 4.0 when we did, but I hope I managed
The only thing we imho could've done better is the release announcement
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Feb 1, 2009 0:30 UTC (Sun) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] End users were simply not the target for this releaseYou have explicitly said you called it 4.0 to get more testing; I'd say that users were exactly the target for the release. You wanted them to start yelling at other teams to fix the bugs you wanted fixed. You deliberately inflicted pain on your userbase so that they would browbeat other teams into doing things the way you wanted. But, guess what? You're writing a desktop. If you're not completely focused on users, you're doing it wrong. You deliberately inflicted pain on people to make your own lives easier, and you did it through deception. And you seem to believe that it was even worth it, while GNOME keeps eating you. You're losing, and you are losing because the people who vote, the users, aren't the people you're really trying to help. Remember: Linux users are generally developers of other projects. Their time is worth at least as much as yours. we did it for other,equally (if not more) important reasons. You're focused on your own team's needs intead of the needs of the broader public. This is damaging you, badly. If you don't want to focus on users first, then pick a different type of project.
Fedora with GNOME is no better Posted Feb 1, 2009 11:47 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Sure the final goal for what we do is for users. You are right in that. At the same time, what would benefit the users most? Having a good, stable KDE in 2009 or making them wait for 2010? We wanted to move as fast as possible. If we wouldn't have released 4.0 in 2008, we would have slowed development (or, not accelerated it) and KDE 4.x would still be a lot less mature.
You can look at it either way - the short term annoyances were worth the trouble. I honestly believe time will prove us right.
Thanks for KDE 3.5.10! Posted Feb 1, 2009 13:44 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]
"what would benefit the users most? Having a good, stable KDE in 2009"
Fortunately there is a good, stable KDE in 2009. It's 3.5.10.
Many thanks to the subset of KDE developers who are still supporting their stable 3.x series, even while experimenting with new ideas (some good some bad) in the 4.x development series.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 0:45 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]
I've so far stuck to KDE 3.5.9, but 4.1 seemed quite usable when I got to
test it (4.0 was just horrible).
Really the biggest incentive I had to move away from KDE (which I didn't
Well, if Gnome hasn't become much better since I last tested it, I still
I'll argue a slightly different take. Posted Jan 29, 2009 1:32 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]
Yes, users do tend to only use releases, which is why Andrew Morton, et al, are forever having problems getting anyone to test kernel patches before they get into the mainstream kernel.
However, users are not the only test vehicle. They're the most important, because frankly who gives a damn what an automated test script thinks beyond whether the tests pass or not, but users should not be relied upon so much as the first line of defense.
The number of static and dynamic code checkers for Linux isn't huge, and they all have problems, but I'm sure projects aren't using them nearly as much as they could. Same goes for profilers, malloc debuggers, memory leak detectors, unit testers, integrated test harnesses, invariant detectors, and the like.
This isn't just a developer issue. In fact, I'd argue it isn't even primarily a developer issue. Developers, as a rule, aren't the greatest QA guys, and vice versa. There are some who work well in both camps, but it is a minority. That means QA is going to fall heavily on the shoulders of "mainstream" distributions.
It would probably be a good thing if such mainstream distributions got together with some of the truly critical app developers and thrashed out an accepted protocol for software validation. This could be something trivial, such as libraries supplying standardized hooks for test harnesses, or a nominal agreement that new interfaces will be written with such-and-such a piece of QA software in mind.
This wouldn't require anyone to actually do the testing, it would merely ensure that code could eventually be efficiently tested when you've distributions of thousands - or tens of thousands - of packages. When that happens is less important than getting some sort of agreement that would allow even the possibility of it happening.
Once some standards are agreed-on for the automatable parts of testing, testing ceases to be quite such a laborious, boring activity and becomes a project no different from any of the other projects.
To some extent, Linux has headed in that direction for some time. There are all kinds of projects for testing compliance with various standards (POSIX, IPv6 and the desktop are the main three I know of, and there are innumerable minor projects such as scanners for identifying common host and network vulnerabilities), and there are numerous projects which supply key capabilities for a comprehensive validation framework.
Even if QA-safe code is limited to new stuff, that might prevent a repeat of the KDE 4 fiasco, because it was the new stuff that had problems. If the developers had better information to work with, prior to it going mainstream, I'm sure they'd have produced a better KDE. In that case, the only question worth asking is how to make sure developers get the very best information, short of stuffing the new code down the userbase?
I think that's going to involve some sort of agreement between distros and developers so that there's a common idea of how to get from here to there. I don't see that, really, there's any realistic alternative.
I'll argue a slightly different take. Posted Jan 29, 2009 6:12 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
The problem with KDE 4.0 wasn't bugs. It was not finished. The internals of
Plasma were reworked after the 4.0 release. The config system wasn't done, etc.
Derek
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 2:58 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>"KDE 4.0.0 is our 'will eat your children' release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5" is how Seigo described it. [...] Seigo also minces few words when pointing to the distributions to take a large part of that blame.
KDE needs to rethink the way it tags version numbers onto its tarballs. However you roll it, x.0 should be a release that does not eat .. whatever, and if that means you have to subtract the number 2 from every release you make (4.0 -> think of something like 3.98 or 4.0-beta1; 4.2 -> 4.0).
Some packagers working for a given distro will even avoid putting "-alpha", "-beta" or even -RCs into the official large repository (the thing that becomes "$DISTRO $VERSION" in its usual turnaround cycle), probably because they have been bitten again and again. Experimentophile users can still download it through 2nd/3rd-party repos like in $SUSE_OBS.
And maybe one should take Linus's words if you're not/can't do X, you're not worth using and apply it to $DISTRO. So if $MAJOR_DISTRO $NEW_VERSION does not provide a fallback to $DE $VERSION.x when knowing that $DE $(X+1).0 is not ready, maybe it is time (for the user) to consider to s/// their $DISTRO.
Hooray for variables.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 31, 2009 21:12 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
please read the comments before posting. Your proposal might sound sane to
you, but would've been bad for KDE and the Free Desktop.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 9:03 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
So maybe next time Linus makes a fuss about something he does not like in GNOME and moves to KDE, KDE people won't be so eager to point to it in every possible news outlet?
Linus' switch is only "news" now because KDE supporters made his previous switch "news". He was not "just another user" then.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 12:16 UTC (Thu) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]
Lessons learned (for myself):
* .0 releases are usually buggy, no surprise there
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 13:12 UTC (Thu) by apokryphos (guest, #42130) [Link]
Aseigo is not the KDE project lead, there isn't a single leader.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 29, 2009 16:38 UTC (Thu) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]
Well, that much is obvious. But then again, I didn't say there was a single lead, or that aseigo was
the leader. Having said that, he is the de-facto leading visionaire of today's KDE project and the main driving force of many of the very good and some bad things that happened to KDE and its users. I don't blame him personally, though. I am just pointing out that there are important lessons to be learned, as in all previous similar happenings.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Jan 31, 2009 21:14 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
KDE will indeed probably be more popular with people who use a computer
regularly (for example those working in offices) and Gnome is more for the casual grandma who checks mail once a month.
Then again, that might change. Gnome really needs to change stuff to get
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 2, 2009 12:18 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] In the desktop world there are 11 kinds of people.There are those who think that having multiple desktop environment projects is counterproductive: a waste of valuable developer resources, and therefore a suboptimal user experience. There are those who think that having multiple desktop environments means healthy competition between groups of developers competing for (one or two of) speed, features and stability, and therefore, ultimately, a better user experience. And there are those who think that grandma should partake in the peeing contest.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 7:49 UTC (Sun) by GregMartyn (subscriber, #52300) [Link]
I think it's time that we acknowledged that the biggest reason that "people don't test when it's alpha or even beta" is because it is too hard to try out betas.
Our package managers have ingrained the idea of "latest is greatest," but that breaks down when trying out beta software. Sure, I can try out the latest from rawhide (or unstable, or its distro-specific equivalent), but then my current version is removed, and multiple beta dependencies are installed. My system is either permanently unstable (from constantly fetching the latest betas), or frozen in time with no updates until all the betas become full stable releases.
Switching between beta and the release version is very difficult -- having multiple versions of the same software is rarely well supported. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of downgrading software.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 18:25 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
But it is not hard at all to try out betas. There have been KDE4 vm's
available for download that are updated regularly: http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html. People didn't use that. There have been regular binary snapshot packages for many distributions, easy to install on a vm or any old box you might have had lying around. People didn't do that. There has been kde-svn build (http://kdesvn-build.kde.org/) which makes it easy to keep up to date to the minute. All these options have been widely advertised.
Saying "it's too hard to try out betas" is pure poppycock.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 1, 2009 19:27 UTC (Sun) by GregMartyn (subscriber, #52300) [Link]
I can't help but notice that you were unable to address the package manager issues raised by my post.
Compiling software from source (kdesvn-build) is not easy. This happens to be the route I chose through the KDE4 release cycle, and can confidently say that it is not something most end users would do.
Running beta software in a VM (kde4daily) is not convenient. Do you copy all the files you want to work on to the VM? Do you set up a shared directory? Ugh. It also doesn't help spot problems like what we saw with KDE4 and the Nvidia binary driver.
Finally, binary snapshot packages have the problems detailed in my previous post.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 3, 2009 0:32 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
Gentoo gets this right fairly well. You can co-install different versions of kde, and there are live ebuilds that download, compile and install packages from svn that are just as integrated as the standard releases. I've followed the development of kde from about October of 2007 on with this method without a whole lot of pain.
KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software Posted Feb 5, 2009 17:30 UTC (Thu) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
If they needed beta testers to find bugs in KDE 4.0.0 then something is very, very wrong in the KDE QC department.
KDE 4 is a huge step back in design! Posted Feb 8, 2009 19:16 UTC (Sun) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link]
there are capricious changes to make things worse in kde4 than before.
my two favorite examples: akregator and kmail. akregator used to display a list of feed names,
kmail used to have a nice set of columns to show messages, with columns for things like subject,
so to summarize, akregator gained columns where they weren't needed, and kmail lost columns
and the kde devs wonder why people want to try something else??
capricious changes... Posted Feb 10, 2009 19:52 UTC (Tue) by cjcoats (guest, #9833) [Link] Disclaimer: Like Linus, I'm a developer -- of environmental modeling applications, which means high performance computing in a mix of Fortran and C. I've a quarter of a million lines of code out there in operational use -- half of it Open Source. It also means I don't have enough spare time to re-invent the entire universe.
One of the thing I've come to expect with X window managers is some degree of menu-configurability for mouse clicks in the root window -- and I've been at it since at least OLWM on SPARC2s in the early Nineties. For the sort of work I do, it is
One good thing about KDE3 has been the best such configurability I've ever run into: you do
And in at least Mandriva's KDE4.1.3, mouse button menus are completely broken. From what I hear, it may be gone forever. I had no conception that such universal functionality would be abandoned, and evidently (from the attitudes I see displayed here) my input would have been completely ignored if I knew it would be needed. Such arrogance is not encouraging.
fwiw
|
|||||||||||||