KDE 4...
Chris Snook
csnook at redhat.com
Thu May 15 07:39:36 UTC 2008
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
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