Fedora with GNOME is no better [LWN.net]

Fedora with GNOME is no better

Posted Jan 31, 2009 5:53 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973)
In reply to: Fedora with GNOME is no better by dkite
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

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.

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Fedora with GNOME is no better

Posted Jan 31, 2009 14:08 UTC (Sat) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

OK, for sake of argument:

4.0 = 4.0 alpha
4.1 = 4.0 beta
4.2 = 4.0 RC
4.3 = 4.0

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)
And I won't even talk about the number of ported apps.
Net result: 1 year+ wasted.

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
lack of proper XRENDER acceleration. The "better 4.0 release" would
therefor still have had horrible performance and corrupted systemtray
icons. Even 4.2 suffers, on some installs, from those issues - X.org and
the driver developers haven't been able to fix that in the last year. The
same goes for more pieces of technology, major functionality in Qt being
one of them.

Another reason to release was to get more developers. Because as you might
know, a FOSS project depends on developers, and doesn't really care about
users. Users only eat time away from the actually useful stuff:
development. The 4.0 release succeeded in this regard: over 300 new
developers in the last 12 months.

There are more reasons for releasing 4.0 when we did, but I hope I managed
to make clear that there was more than "the end users will love this". End
users were simply not the target for this release, we did it for other,
equally (if not more) important reasons.

The only thing we imho could've done better is the release announcement
itself (compare it with the 4.1 announcement and see that we DO learn).
Pretty much every other piece of communication was handled well.

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 release

You 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.