conclusion: F15 / systemd / user-experience

[Kevin Kofler]

Reindl Harald wrote:
> Fedora should consider a not so invasive way like KDE4, GNOME3, systemd in
> an early release especially for updated systems because what sometimes
> happens here is that features are included at a time some people are
> hoping they are ready and on the other hand kernel-updates like for
> F6/F7/F8 are stopped in the latest releases -> 2.6.38 would support new
> intel-network cards

I also miss those kernel upgrades. I think we've become much too 
conservative.

> and so it was the wrong decision ship KDE4.0 which was really unusable
> and upstream declared only for developers! before 4.2 KDE4 was buggy
> like hell and missing a lot of options

All this "4.0 is only for developers" messaging came way too late. We had 
already worked hard on making everything work with 4.0 in pre-F9 Rawhide at 
that point. In addition, the messaging back then was that 4.1 would be the 
general public release. So our plan was, we'd push 4.1 as an update ASAP; 
until then, Fedora 8 stayed supported (and as you wrote above, it did get 
kernel upgrades for hardware support). What we couldn't know is that:
* 4.1 would also get redefined as "only for developers". This only happened 
several weeks after Fedora 9 was released. That was well past the point of 
no return.
* 4.1 would trigger several showstopper regressions we had to fix before 
pushing it as a stable update.
* There would be a major Fedora infrastructure outage due to a security 
breach which ended up delaying the 4.1 update for 2-3 more weeks when our 
regression tracker was finally clear.

We also worked really hard to make 4.0 work as well as possible. I made 
several (completely unpaid!) 30+ hour days to build bugfix releases, fix 
showstoppers etc. The other KDE SIG developers also worked for many hours on 
that stuff. We were able to ship Fedora 9 with no true showstopper and we 
fixed the most annoying bugs in updates before or within days of the 
release.

In addition, a big part of the complaints about 4.0 was about missing 
applications. We made sure the KDE 3 versions of those applications stayed 
available and worked fine in a KDE 4 environment (also with some patching 
where needed to provide proper integration, e.g. we patched Kile to use 
Okular for PDF/PS/DVI previews, something that wouldn't have been possible 
if we had been supporting the KDE 3 workspace as well), or in some cases got 
a KDE 4 version in ASAP (e.g. I imported alpha/beta versions of Okteta, the 
hex editor, as soon as it became available; I also ported Kompare to kdelibs 
4 in time for 4.0.0, which got it resurrected upstream with me as the 
maintainer).

We really did what we could to make KDE 4.0 not suck.

        Kevin Kofler