On Friday 05 December 2008 12:33, Will Stephenson wrote:
To those who rationalise the difference between KDE 4 and KDE 3 as the replacement of a team of sober getting-things-done engineers with a bunch of bling-happy kids. It hasn't happened. We're still the same guys and frankly we have the reputation in KDE as being the boring ones who make stuff work, sometimes at the cost of annoying the bling-happy kids.
So let's look at what's going on upstream: The 'KDE wants to be Vista' mindset stems from the replacement of kdesktop and kicker with Plasma. Plasma is being successful in making desktop development accessible to a larger set of hackers and these may have priorities different to your own (more eye candy). KDE is, more than ever, a big and rapidly growing project. These new faces blog and videocast vocally, unlike the old guard who have been doing this since the 90s. But this expansion doesn't mean that the project has shifted its overall goals of producing a usable and complete Free desktop. The Plasma project as a whole has had the short term (KDE 4.1 and especially 4.2) goal of reaching parity with the old feature set of the KDE 3 desktop, and has explicitly postponed some of its $insert_buzzword_here innovations until this is done. Away from the desktop shell, we continue refining the productivity apps, rolling out Akonadi so Kontact is robust and efficient, making Dolphin the best Free file manager, and filling in missing utilities like NetworkManager clients.
When I read the rest of this thread, I saw unfounded conjecture and a tendency to assume that KDE and openSUSE don't care about long term, loyal users' needs. I don't really understand why. We are aware of KDE 4's current shortcomings, and we've tried harder than any other distro to make sure that KDE 3 remains a viable alternative while we work to resolve them. The sky isn't falling!
Will, Thanks for the first reasonable explanation as to what is going on. As one of those that was vocal about the "bling", it's nice to actually hear from someone that is working on the underlying problems. I guess I'll have to experiment now. I'll figure out a way to get rid of the bling to start with, and build from there. Time to go and start playing around.. Mike -- Powered by SuSE 10.0 Kernel 2.6.13 X86_64 KDE 3.4 Kmail 1.8 2:09pm up 57 days 18:18, 4 users, load average: 2.34, 2.33, 2.29 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org