Richard wrote:
This 'new' product is simply mis-named. It is not KDE v4.x, it is v0.x of a 'new' product and should have been advertised as such and when v1.0 of this as yet unnamed 'new' product is released, people may accept it as willingly as many now accept Firefox vs Netscape. Shoot, Firefox runs on Windoze, maybe this 'new' desktop can replace Vista on that platform....but I digress.
You're getting it a bit wrongly. When Netscape redid their main "Netscape Communicator 4" product through the Mozilla project created for that purpose, they called the result "Netscape 6" (which due to marketing decisions was released in a rather unfinished state). When Mozilla crated a new product on the same base as the suite, but without all the mail, HTML creation, chat and web development parts, a trimmed-down browser targeted at the (dumb) masses, they called it "Firefox". It was a product that does something different and has a different target audience, and so it deserved a new name, esp. as the suite continued to exist (and was rebranded to "SeaMonkey" when a different development team took over and revived development of it). When the KDE team created a completely new product to follow their aging "KDE 1" product, they named it "KDE 2". KDE 3 was a smaller step based on that, but another rewrite that is aimed to do the same things for the same target audience should continue the same name, and that's KDE 4. As with Netscape 6, it probably was released as final in a premature state for mostly marketing-related reasons, and such premature releases always come with their own share of problems - just like those we're seeing right now. KDE 4 is promising technology, and I'm sure I'll convert to it once all the stuff I'm relying on for daily work, like full themability of all elements, very fast access to viewing current time in in a few selected world time zones and to viewing a calendar to determine e.g. what date "Tuesday in two weeks" is or what day of the week the upcoming 12th is. It's been a while since I tried it last, but I'll do so from time to time and switch to it once I can use it for production. I don't know yet if that'll be before or after openSUSE 11.2 final. I'm pretty sure that a KDE 3.5 will be available for openSUSE users for some time, the only big question is if they need to download it somewhere or have it on the installation media. The latter might be nice if 3.5 still has enough in-production-use advantage, but I understand if it's not possible. I hope others do as well. Robert Kaiser --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org