KDE 4...

[Chris Snook]

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