KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

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.