blackbelt_jones wrote:I can't take it any more. I've been obsessed with KDE4 for about a year. This is a very worthwhile project, but you don't push an immature default as the default, much less the only approved version because you're "confident that the problems will be worked out in time". You make it the default when the problems have been worked out.

It seems a bit unfair to criticize the KDE developers for that, KDE 3 is still around and Debian will be using it for a while. The problem was some distro developers that decided their users were moving to KDE 4, whether they liked it or not. Canonical are the big one to me, since I use Kubuntu here. They only supported KDE 3 up to Kubuntu 8.04, with 8.10 using KDE 4.1 (which really wasn't ready at all) and 9.04 using KDE 4.2 (which is still not quite there). I think they should've supported KDE 3 up to at least now, only discontinuing support with 9.10 or 10.04, but they decided to kill support with 8.04 instead.

Serenity wrote:

blackbelt_jones wrote:I can't take it any more. I've been obsessed with KDE4 for about a year. This is a very worthwhile project, but you don't push an immature default as the default, much less the only approved version because you're "confident that the problems will be worked out in time". You make it the default when the problems have been worked out.

It seems a bit unfair to criticize the KDE developers for that, KDE 3 is still around and Debian will be using it for a while. The problem was some distro developers that decided their users were moving to KDE 4, whether they liked it or not. Canonical are the big one to me, since I use Kubuntu here. They only supported KDE 3 up to Kubuntu 8.04, with 8.10 using KDE 4.1 (which really wasn't ready at all) and 9.04 using KDE 4.2 (which is still not quite there). I think they should've supported KDE 3 up to at least now, only discontinuing support with 9.10 or 10.04, but they decided to kill support with 8.04 instead.

I agree to a point, but I remember back when 4.0 was out, and the KDE website was plastered with KDE4 propaganda, any mention of KDE3 was off in the footnotes. I remember clicking on a link that said "stable version" and there was a whole page of KDE4.0 before you got to KDE3.5. Anybody who didn't understand how KDE development worked -- anyone who isn't a KDE developer -- could easily get the impression that KDE3 was already history. I briefly joined the KDE promotion mailing list to address this, and when I did, the response I got back was stubborn, implacable cluelessness. "But we're proud of KDE4". Pride has never been the issue, and making it the issue is a big mistake.

I've always felt that pride was justified. Please put my critical comments in the context of my positive comments. I've said many times that I would prefer professional wrestlers over software developers to handle my PR for me, but they're handling the development part just fine. If KDE3 didn't seem to be slipping away from me, I'd have nothing but praise for the KDE4 project. If I could occasionally use KDE4 without losing KDE3, I absolutely would.

The argument against a fork of KDE has been that it would divide the KDE community. But a divided KDE community is exactly what we have now. It's like Christians wanting to live in a united community, so they burn all the synagogues. Not all at once, of course. That would be unnecessarily harsh. A synagogue every six months, to give everyone a chance to get used to their new faith. And what are you complaining about? There's still that lovely synagogue on the other side of town; we won't get around to burning that down for at least another year!

A united community is where you support me and I support you. There is no other way to have a united community. Just as some of us like to pretend that the KDE community isn't divided, when the inevitable fork happens, we're going to call it something else.

Serenity wrote:

blackbelt_jones wrote:I can't take it any more. I've been obsessed with KDE4 for about a year. This is a very worthwhile project, but you don't push an immature default as the default, much less the only approved version because you're "confident that the problems will be worked out in time". You make it the default when the problems have been worked out.

It seems a bit unfair to criticize the KDE developers for that, KDE 3 is still around and Debian will be using it for a while. The problem was some distro developers that decided their users were moving to KDE 4, whether they liked it or not. Canonical are the big one to me, since I use Kubuntu here. They only supported KDE 3 up to Kubuntu 8.04, with 8.10 using KDE 4.1 (which really wasn't ready at all) and 9.04 using KDE 4.2 (which is still not quite there). I think they should've supported KDE 3 up to at least now, only discontinuing support with 9.10 or 10.04, but they decided to kill support with 8.04 instead.

I'm going to hold a grudge against Kubuntu for a long time over that. Angry users were told things like "we're a KDE distro, we need to follow KDE", or "we're have an identity as a cutting edge distro". All sorts of reasons were given, and apparently they were all more important than the users, and what the users wanted and needed didn't count for much at all. So it turns out that "Linux for Human Beings" is just another slogan, like "I'd like to buy the world a coke", and "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."

Just about every day now, someone assures me that very soon, the KDE of today will be running at a level comparable to the KDE of three or four years ago. When they say that "the problems are going to be fixed", that's always what they're saying. Don't worry, the software that we're all running, and that we're going to make it increasing difficult for you to avoid running, will one day be as reliable as the software that we've all trashed. How is that not insane?

What appears to have happened was that a very vital, important and exciting project got hyped by its developers, who were understandably excited, and then a certain American-based software corporation, and a certain South African Billionaire, decided that if they didn't get out in front of this, they might miss their chance to be the next microsoft. And then everybody else just followed like lemmings. It could wind up as a black eye, but KDE development will continue, and probably triumph.

It was a huge shock for me seeing KDE 4.0. It was all ****, being visually fat (remember the thick glass-like borders around plasmoids?), slow, lacking features et cetera. So I got back to KDE 3.5 for a while (fortunately, sidux kept it for a while). Thing began to improve with 4.1, but it still wasn't ready for me. I used 3.5 for another while but couldn't hold from discovering that KDE 3.5 was slowly getting less usable, simply because stuff began to be outdated. This was most noticeable in Konqueror with the bad flash integration.

KDE 4.2 totally changed things for me. I couldn't await it being in sid so I could use it without fetching stuff from experimental, and today I'm happily using Mandriva 2009.1 as my main distro. Many things are better than in KDE 3, there are still some rough edges (especially programs like Kaffeine that haven't been fully ported yet), but other Programs are much better than before, for instance digiKam.

The only thing i didn't like with the KDE4 transition was that because of the bugs i was constantly switching from svn and stable, started using svn march 2008, then kde3 from september 2008 (kde 4.2 was slow on my GPU), then with kde 4.2.1 the problem was fixed, now i use kde 4.3 svn and it's really cool