Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Being one of the ones who you might be claiming is still doing that, I'd say no, I'm not still complaining about kde-4.0. (This written as a user currently on 4.7.97 aka 4.8-rc2, having run both the 4.8 betas and both rcs and looking forward to 4.8 full release in a few days, plus I'm a regular on the kde lists, and have no other desktop installed, or even the backup xterm and twm that would normally be installed in case kde fails, if I didn't have them masked as I don't use them, so I'm certainly no kde basher just for the bashing!)

If 4.0 had been the only problem or even the major one, while it would have been a bit of an issue at the time, I think few /would/ still be talking about it now.

Rather, the bigger problem wasn't the mistake of releasing 4.0 as 4.0 before even the devs considered it ready for normal use, but instead, the dual problems of claiming 4.2 WAS ready for normal use when it was more like late alpha quality (and I routinely run prerelease software as noted above, so I know where of I speak!), many basic features still unimplemented, as the devs were still saying in bugs.kde.org at the same time it was claimed to be ready for normal use, *AND* dropping support for the only still actually working kde, 3.5.x (with x=9 or 10) after a very high profile claim that there'd be support as long as there were users.

4.3 was only beta quality, 4.4 rc quality, and 4.5, at least the later versions of it (4.5.4+), FINALLY release quality, what /should/ have been 4.0. Never-the-less, version numbers don't matter much as long as the software is working and a working version supported, and not hitting release quality until 4.5 would have been no big deal had they not claimed 4.2 was release quality, and worse yet, dropped support for the REAL release quality 3.x with 4.2, thus leaving a nearly three year support gap (twice yearly releases 4.2-4.5, plus monthly releases to 4.5.4) with NO properly working kde!

Of course the story is somewhat repeating now with kmail users due to its akonadification, but at least they skipped the 4.5 release series entirely and continued supporting kdepim 4.4.x with minor updates to 4.7, and 4.4.11 or whatever is still workable with 4.7 and according to testers still using it, 4.8-prereleases. (I'm running the 4.8 prereleases as mentioned above, but have switched to claws-mail here.)

If it had been ONLY 4.0, and they'd not have claimed 4.2 was ready for normal use and continued to support 3.x thru 4.5 or so, it would have been a MUCH smoother transition, and people /would/ have probably forgiven the minor mistakes, which after all, DO happen from time to time, by now. But the compounding and continuing to insist on it, putting their fingers in their ears and yelling nah nah nah when all the users were telling them no, even 4.3 (and to a lessor extent 4.4) wasn't ready, and that they really needed continued support for the 3.x versions that actually worked, THAT was the REAL problem, and it lasted YEARS beyond 4.0!

While I'm not a gnome user, it seems to me that while gnome 3.0 started out much the same way, devs and users apparently talking past each other, they actually admitted the problems and by 3.1, did the extensions thing (reversing the earlier purist positions to implement it as they did), and things were already clearing up. Plus, the community at least had learned something from the early kde4 fiasco, and when gnome3 started doing the same thing, the community was *MUCH* faster to respond with mate and cinnamon, etc as well as with users switching to other desktops faster. But the kde4 lessons combined with the faster community response got the message across faster to the gnome3 folks as well, and the two and a half year plus support gap that kde4 had simply didn't have a chance to occur with gnome3, as the response on ALL sides filled in that gap *MUCH* faster. It might be argued that it was six months or a year, but that's FAR smaller than the nearly three years with kde4, because after kde4, the community simply wasn't going to tolerate a 2.5+ year gap, and made that EXTREMELY clear MUCH quicker in the process than they had with kde4.

IMO...
Duncan