F9alpha and KDE4

[Kevin Kofler]

John Summerfield <debian <at> herakles.homelinux.org> writes:
> It's widely held that parents deplore their children's taste in music; I 
> suggest that the same's somewhat true wrt aesthetics. I think it's 
> important that the themes aren't all targeted at people in their mid-20s 
> to mid-30s, and that they make allowance for people who don't really 
> want all that eye candy.

If you think of me as an eye candy addict, you got the entirely wrong picture 
of me. ;-) I have most eye candy stuff turned off, am still using Bluecurve 
etc. The reason I want KDE 4 in Fedora is because that's the current version, 
where all new development is going to focus, many apps are already getting 
great new features etc. Unfortunately, there's also some migration pain 
involved. Redoing all the desktop was an upstream decision and I'm still not 
convinced it was a good one, but with the decision being what it is, it is 
clear we will have to migrate to the new version sooner or later, we can't ship 
KDE 3.5 forever (and a KDE 4 port of Kicker would be suicidal, there would be 
essentially zero third-party applets for it, as all the old ones would still 
only run on the KDE 3 Kicker and all the new ones target Plasma, not to mention 
the huge maintenance overhead for the port itself). So, Fedora being about 
current technologies, why not now? Fedora 8 will stay on KDE 3 and still get 
updates until 1 month after the Fedora 10 release, so if you're not ready to 
move to KDE 4 yet, that's your option. If you're scared by KDE 4, chances are 
the many other huge changes coming up in Fedora 9 (GCC 4.3, Perl 5.10, Tcl 8.5, 
Upstart replacing SysVInit, TeXLive replacing teTeX, Hunspell replacing Aspell, 
gio/gvfs replacing gnome-vfs etc.) are also going to scare you anyway. :-) I 
also think the libraries could have used less incompatible changes, but there 
again it's an upstream decision, and relying on old software isn't going to be 
a solution in the long run. But kdelibs3 is still available so you don't lose 
your many third-party KDE 3 apps.

        Kevin Kofler