Mike Chalmers wrote:
What do y'all think of KDE 4? It doesn't seem to be as technical as KDE 3 to me, I don't like that. The system configuration lacks options, I can't figure out how to get things the way that I want them, etc. I am not saying that it is not good, though. That maybe it just needs more options. Just wondering what y'all thought.
KDE 4 isn't really finished yet. The stuff that *is* there generally works, but a lot of stuff from KDE 3 just hasn't been ported yet. The overhaul to the infrastructure was quite extensive, with the goal of improving long-term maintainability and future development, but this created a lot of boring porting work that nobody was very motivated to do as long as it was in beta and distributions were still shipping KDE 3 by default. The KDE developers pushed KDE 4 out the door with the intent that fast-moving distributions like Fedora pick it up, in the hope that developers would be annoyed enough by the deficiencies to put the eye candy work aside and finish the usability work, so that KDE 4.1 will be as complete as KDE 3.5 is now.
It's certainly a risky way to handle a major version change, but if you do it right, it's a lot more efficient than long, drawn-out migrations such as the Apache 1->2 change. For Apache, the gradual approach was necessary given all the production web servers out there, but the desktop world has a greater tolerance for behavior changes, and a lot fewer people getting paid to maintain old versions for many years.
So far, I've found that the parts of KDE 4 that have been released work quite well, so I'm inclined to believe that this strategy was a good move in this case. It's a sharp contrast to releasing F8 with pulseaudio, where a feature-complete but severely buggy package was thrust upon unsuspecting users in the hope that this would encourage more development. I'm interested in putting some of my Copious Free Time into converting some of my favorite KDE 3 features to KDE 4, but I won't touch pulseaudio with a 10 foot pole.
-- Chris -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
