Why the hell anyone will want THIS?

Posted Oct 26, 2008 18:09 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: re: Kubuntu - KDE3 dropped by Richard_J_Neill
Parent article: Ubuntu 8.10 release candidate available

I cannot understand why KDE4 wasn't made by first porting KDE3 to QT4, before dramatically breaking everything!

It's not so hard to port KDE3 to QT4 (oh, it's still one or two man- years, but nothing compared to KDE4 creation), but... what are the benefits? If you just port KDE3 to QT4 then you are getting version which has worst properties from two worlds: it's not binary-compatible with KDE3 and it does not have any new properties.

Time will tell if this rewrite was needed or not, but if this rewrite was to happen then MUST have been done in parallel to QT3=>QT4 transition. There are just not enough developers to develop two versions of KDE...

KDE4 is actually pretty nice if you are looking at it from POV of newbie and don't expect it to have all the bells and whistles from KDE3. Thus I think KDE4 is ALREADY mature enough - it's just most old users expect to have KDE3 forever, but they are getting something different instead...