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Fifteen years of KDEFifteen years of KDEPosted Nov 3, 2011 0:54 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)In reply to: Fifteen years of KDE by nybble41 Parent article: Fifteen years of KDE
"none of them are offering to do the necessary work"? How can a user do the work of not breaking something! Only the developers can do that.
Your answer drips with disdain. If the development effort breaks a feature, then of course you will find few users of that feature when you look around for them later. If you allow konqueror to rot, then of course by the time chrome comes around people will switch out of necessity.
Me, I thought that konqueror was indeed one of the killer features of KDE back in the day. I switched to chrome, recently, only because the web itself has changed and konqueror didn't keep pace with it.
You suggest that users should sponsor developer time to keep a feature from being broken in the next release ... how would one even know this was necessary? Before it breaks, how are the users to know it will break? And even after something breaks, unless you publicize that developer resources are the limiting factor in that particular breakage, how would we know to offer, or lobby for, support? For instance, will we ever see Kprinter again? It was promised real soon now through the early versions of 4.x; now it seems to have dropped off the TODO list altogether. Would offers of developer support bring it back? Where can I sign up? If sufficient user-generated underwriting is promised, is there a promise of a working and supported KDE print interface in return?
Bitter? Me? Not really - I still prefer KDE to the alternatives. In fact version 4.recent is very nice, barring the lack of a print tool. But I sure wish the the developers in both the gnome and KDE camps would get a clue about the importance of not breaking things. There is a substantial group of users who would restate your prioritization to read: if the project has a limited budget to work with, paying someone to develop eye candy rather than to keep the core components working is a waste of scarce resources.
So here's to KDE - a toast to 15 years. May it continue to thrive. Like many teen-agers, it's family suffered a bit during a period of adolescent trauma, but we hope that's now behind us.
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Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 1:36 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> How can a user do the work of not breaking something! Only the developers can do that.
You do realize that KDE4 is a completely new platform, right? New ideas, new architecture, new APIs. It's not just some random modifications to KDE3.5. Everything in KDE4 was written for KDE4, either from scratch or as a port from KDE3.5. None of that happens by itself. They didn't "break" the X.509 certificate support; they wrote a new browser which happens to resemble the KDE3.5 browser superficially, and haven't gotten around to implementing that feature (since very few people need it).
> Me, I thought that konqueror was indeed one of the killer features of KDE back in the day.
Perhaps it was, once, but it's been declining ever since Firefox became popular as a free, cross-platform alternative, long before it was reimplemented for KDE4. It was never much more than a thin front-end for KHTML, compatible with the rare minority of pages which are actually standards-compliant, written in the days when it was considered cool to merge web browsers and file managers into the same package. Nowadays KHTML is called WebKit, and the primary open-source front-end is Chromium. Why bother maintaining a second one?
You're welcome to continue using KDE3.5. There's even a fork already started to continue development on the KDE3.5 desktop: Trinity Desktop <http://trinitydesktop.org/about.php>.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 2:24 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if you are going to take the tack of "KDE 4.0 is not an upgrade to KDE 3.x, it's a completely different product" then you should not call it KDE 4.0, you should call it something completely different.
For the same reason, Perl 6 should be called something else as it is not an upgrade of Perl 5
if you give it the same name, but with a higher version number, people are going to expect that the capabilities they had before would still be there, along with the new stuff. If you don't intend to provide a feature, you need to list is as a feature that's specifically being removed (and if you have a very long list of such things, expect to loose a lot of people, each one of these 'removed' or 'unimplemented in the new version' features is a regression)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 3:41 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
And the rewritten successor to Windows 3.11 shouldn't have been Windows 95 (and then Windows XP, Windows Vista/7, etc.). And the successor to Mac OS 9 shouldn't have been called Mac OS X. And so on.
Face it--this sort of thing happens all the time. The name is just a brand, not a reference to a specific codebase. KDE4 is not even the first all-up rewrite of KDE. KDE 2.0 was "almost completely re-engineered"[1] from KDE 1. This happens to most projects eventually; some things can be fixed as you go, but others are more integral and require a change in the fundamental design. Either you fix the design (and port/rewrite) or the project stagnates and is eventually replaced.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 4:41 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
And what functionality did microsoft drop between windows 3.11 and windows 95?
The issue isn't if they are modified or if the new version is written from scratch, the issue is what things that worked on the old version break on the new version.
If few things break (Windows 3.11 to Windows 95) you get nearly everyone to upgrade (unless the hardware can't run the new version at all, mearly running it poorly didn't stop a LOT of people from upgrading)
where it breaks things, including the user interface (Windows XP to Windows Vista for example) the uptake of the new version is much lower
the fact that KDE4 is a re-write vs KDE3 is a good thing, right up until you state that a feature is lost because the developers didn't care enough to make it part of the re-write, and that it's up to the users to fix this (if it was merely missed because nobody cared enough to notice during the re-write, then reports from users that they cared about the feature should get it on the list of things to fix, it may take a bit of time, but KDE 4.x has had time now)
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 3, 2011 9:42 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] And what functionality did microsoft drop between windows 3.11 and windows 95?Funny you should ask. One of the features they dropped (I'm sure there are more) was Windows Recorder, which allowed you to record and play back macros. A lot of people complained.
Fifteen years of KDE Posted Nov 6, 2011 1:52 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] It's not the same, but not even MSFT written software worked on Win95/98/Millenium and WinNT 4 (a game, in my case, "certified" to work in that environment, didn't even make it past the splash screen before hanging the machine). Ditto MSIE on the first x86_64 versions of Windows, they crashed the machine with utter reliability.
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