On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Anders Johansson <ajohansson@suse.de> wrote:
Not at all. It's just that the KDE3 users refused to answer simple questions like "what is it that you use in kde3 that isn't there in kde4". They insisted on giving non-answers like "everything", or "the devels should know already".
Let me see - 80% of the users use 20% of the features. So, I, as well as the dozens of other KDE3 users, are expected to list what we personally use? Well, that would take a lot of time and effort on our part. And, when we did list things that we expect, we have been repeatedly told to wait it out or to use the build service(but evidently that's not supported, so if something gets borked, it's our fault for using an "unsupported" service.
There have been lots of clear bug reports about specific pieces of missing functionality in kde4, and lots of it has been fixed already, and a lot of it is being worked on (e.g. separate wallpapers for different virtual desktops).
What about the accessibility complaints? Have those been taken care of? What about the stability problems? What about the speed issues on older hardware?
The KDE3 users who are calm and reasonable, and provide real answers aren't ignored. Only the ones who fling insults and scream names and generally behave like five year olds. The rest get their bugs fixed (though it may take some time, in some cases)
Oh, so I'm a 5 year old now? I ask for KPersonalizer to be ported so I don't have turn waste hours trying to figure out how to turn off that glitz and I'm ignored. I ask that we be able to remove unneeded crap like avahi and pulseaudio and I'm looked at like I'm crazy. Why do we need all this crap as dependencies? What's so much better than alsa and is pulseaudio a stable replacement for alsa? Oh wait, no, that's why there's been such an uproar. An unproven piece of code has been forced onto people who just prefer things to actually work. And why do I NEED a search tool? What's that new thing that's integrated into KDE4 - neopunk or something. Last time I checked, I removed all that garabage. Now I HAVE to have it?
About maintaining KDE3 for the future, note that it has been dropped upstream. kde.org is not maintaining kde3 anymore. That means that a distribution shipping kde3 will have to take on all maintenance work alone, and kde3 is just too big for any one distribution to do that. All current distributions[1] have dropped kde3 now, for precisely this reason. It's just not reasonable to invest huge amounts of resources in maintaining a massive code base that no one else is working on.
PCLinuxOS2009 and Debian still have it. Fedora lost a lot of users when they forced KDE4 on their base with Fedora 9. However, with a 6 month release cycle, they can get away with that because a lot of people skip the other release anyway.
Both here and at kde.org, users have been offered the chance to maintain kde3. At kde.org, people have been offered svn access to the kde3 tree, and here there is the OBS where people can maintain it. If there really is this massive interest in it, there should be some takers. So far I'm not aware of any.
Yep. No one who can code is interested. Since I can't code, I'm stuck. Too many programmers are too busy adding new whiz bang features to KDE4 to work on KDE3. Why don't you tell me what is in KDE4 that I NEED to have? Show me one feature that makes it compelling for ME to use it. Show me how it's rock solid and stable and doesn't need a new video card. Tell me I don't have to constantly update it to make it usable. Don't include any glitz - that's not something I care about. The ball's in your court now. Tell ME how much I NEED KDE4. I'm willing to listen.
[1] Except, apparently, PCLinuxOS. It will be very interesting to see how they manage the work load, with security patches and other bug fixes, without an upstream to help them
Evidently it was a big enough concern for them to decide that their time shouldn't be wasted on pushing out the huge amount of patches needed to make it usable for their user base. Seems like an easy decision to me. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org