On Tuesday 28 October 2008 17:45:12 Felix Miata wrote:
On 2008/10/28 09:47 (GMT) Anne Wilson composed:
I can only conclude that they are too lazy to learn another way of doing something.
Then try thinking again, outside the box, and come up with another conclusion. Lazy is not the word I would use. Some people have a life to get on with. Many of them have found KDE3 to be the best environment to keep that life nicely moving.
There is nothing to stop them deciding to stay with KDE3, if that is what they want to do. Yes, they may have to switch distros, but they can change to one which guarantees support for the next 5 years or so. If they change to KDE4 that is their decision, and should expect that it will need some new learning. The situation is exactly the same as for those who have used XP in Classic mode and then change to Vista.
Now picture yourself as someone from that group who has only used openSUSE for a couple of years, a graduate from WinXP, post-W2K, who has never seen Gnome or Fedora or Ubuntu or Mandriva. Here's a picture of what might happen if they were to "upgrade" to 11.1 were it like Fedora, Mandriva & Ubuntu in having dropped KDE3 entirely:
So?
Note I made that using Fedora 10 (release cutoff was last night, images made after updating to that state). I have purposely not installed KDE4 on any of my several Factory boxes.
What I see there, and it's only a sample of v3 vs. v4 differences, is a whole bunch of paradigm shifts. Little works the way I expect, if I can even figure out how to do what I want at all.
Then ask.
There are too many differences, too many things missing,
such as?
too many unfamiliar things, compared to KDE3.
That it is unfamiliar I do accept, yet it surprised me how quickly I settled to it.
KDE4 should be uniquely named to differentiate it better from its vastly different predecessor, and for the foreseeable future, full KDE3 development should be continued.
By whom? There are a limited number of people, most with day-jobs, working on KDE. They get to choose what they work on. Those that want to continue development are very welcome to join the team that is still working on KDE3. It's just too easy to say that 'someone should....'.
Yes, they are paradigm shifts. The whole point is that that was never in doubt. It was well-publicised long before KDE4 arrived on the desktop. My point is purely that you have a choice. You can use a distro that gives you KDE3 and will continue to do so for some considerable time, or you can change to KDE4. If you choose to change you must expect to learn some things anew. I do agree that the changes are big enough to feel quite daunting at first, but there are plenty of people around who are more than willing to help by explaining things. My objection is about whiners who make vague statements instead of asking for specific information. IMHO they have little intention of learning anything new, so should simply stay away, going with a KDE3 distro. Anne