"David C. Rankin"
Stefan, NO. SuSE 8.0 was great, worthy of production machine service at the time of release. SuSE 9.0 was great, worthy of production machine service at the time of release. SuSE 10.0 was great, worthy of production machine service at the time of release.
Why would we not expect openSuSE 11.0 to be just as polished and ready for production use as its last three .0 predecessors? If it isn't, that would signal a fundamental change in SuSE culture showing that the rush to push release number next out the door to generate revenue has replaced dedication to putting out the best, and fully polished Linux distribution going.
We do not spend more time on a .0 release than on a .3 release. Ignore numbers, they are marketing ;-).
Stefan, you are a great help to us all and you do quality work with KDirStat. But why should anyone "expect" to have problems with an openSuSE release regardless of whether it is .0, .1, .2, or .3?
Also, why does it appear that Novell is trying to "lower expectations" about the release? All this talk about a ".0" being something we should watch out for with "all the new things in it." .0 does not mean beta. Why isn't Novell proud of the upcoming release telling everyone, "The openSuSE 11.0 release will be the best openSuSE ever"?
Stefan is not speaking for Novell, so you should not ask him this ;-) Speaking for openSUSE: I'm proud of 11.0, it will be a great realease. BUT ;-) the engineers at Novell are not marketing experts and instead of giving great marketing statements, they give a complete picture which sometimes sounds a bit pessimistic ;-)
I have said this elsewhere, 11.0 is little different to 10.3
This couldn't be farther removed from reality.
Apart from the new KDE4 which you mentioned:
The installation workflow is brand new.
The look & feel of the installation workflow is brand new, and ALL of the underlying subsystems are significantly changed (Qt4, mod-UI, UI now really separate from yast2-core).
Package management has gotten another major overhaul: New dependency solver (a.k.a. "sat-solver"), major changes in libzypp, much better performance.
And those are just a few points that immediately came to my mind. There are more changes, of course.
This is fantastic stuff! I look forward to it. As long as all of this is fully QA'ed, tested and working, then "bravo Novell!", "Great Job!" However, if it isn't working just right, and Novell has knowledge of problems that need to be worked .. and .. releases 11.0 anyway, then "shame on you Novell, you know better."
There is no in between..
You cannot fully QA a distribution of this size inside a company without the help of the community. If we would want to fully QA this internally we would need to make significant change, e.g downsize the distro in a major way. We're not at the goldmaster, so it's to early to give any clear statements. Look yourself in bugzilla to see what needs to be worked on.
You may or may not like the new KDE4, and you are right in that it is still far from complete or polished in a way most KDE users wish it was.
But this is a chicken-and-egg problem: Without a significant user base out there using KDE4, it won't ever get complete or even polished. Many issues will go unnoticed, and developers of non-core KDE applications will feel a lot less compelled to port their apps to KDE4 (including myself with KDirStat).
Huh? KDE 4 is "alpha" software that is just "released for brave users". See www.kde.org! Surely Novell has more sense than to dump this on ordinary users as the default install. Provide it, but provide it as an option. Make 3.XX the default. Heaven forbid an ordinary user, much less a novice user is forced to deal with KDE 4 as their first look at openSuSE. From KDE's own rss feed:
Did you install Beta3? Where did it install KDE4 as default? You have the choice between GNOME, KDE3 and KDE4 with proper wording. There were a lot of requests to add KDE4 and it should be an install option as it is.
[...]
Yet, I think that KDE4 is more than a big public beta. There are a lot of users out there eager to get it, and we should deliver something for them, too.
Why do you contradict what KDE says about its own product?
His personal opinion, "I think".
Doesn't KDE know best if KDE 4 is ready for the mainstream desktop?
But KDE3 is still there. I am not sure in which way you feel that KDE3 is affected by KDE4; but we may all find this version of KDE3 to be the most stable ever, because most development efforts in the KDE project went to KDE4, so KDE3 received little more than bug fixes.
For people that need to get something done, KDE 3 is great! For people who want to sort out why their desktop crashed and help file bug reports, then KDE 4 is fine. In a year or so, KDE 4 may be ready, but obviously it isn't yet.
I continue to have faith that Novell will do the right thing with the 11.0 release and put out a quality product. However, it scares the hell out of me when I see company men intentionally trying to lower expectations about a release when they should be proud to shout that "this will be the best release ever." It frightening similar to the climate immediately before the Mandake collapse with 8.0 that took 6 more releases to almost recover from.
Now 11.0 hasn't been released yet, so no one can knock it. But after Novell has been provided with all the input, bug reports and warnings, if 11.0 is released as a cripple, the fallout may just be devastating. I don't want to live through it again...
If the 11.0 release date arrives and 11.0 still isn't ready, history tells us it would be far better to slip the release 60-90 days and get it ready, than to dump it on the public crippled.
I'm running beta3 and do not expect that 11.0 will be a cripple. It will be another great openSUSE distribution with a nice and shiny installer, the fastest package management, several great desktops environments etc! Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126