--- On Fri, 2/19/10, Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
From: Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> Subject: Re: [opensuse] 11.2 a big step backwards? To: opensuse@opensuse.org Date: Friday, February 19, 2010, 8:04 PM On 2010/02/19 11:39 (GMT-0800) Charles Obler composed:
And there's no excuse for eliminating functionality!
Technically, that's not what happens in a new distro, even though it often seems so. As time passes and development continues, new/"better" ways of doing things get implemented here and there, and as a byproduct of this, testing the new stuff on old hardware traverses a range from easy, to harder, to impossible, as that hardware ages and fewer and fewer developers have working bits they can test on. Eventually support for some old hardware and features necessarily falls away. It can't be helped, unless you have the hardware and knowledge to do it yourself. At some point, if you can't, you'll have to either give up using the old hardware, or give up "upgrades".
With KDE3 there was no functionality removed. What happened was the KDE devs decided KDE3 was too complex and difficult to maintain, and so abandoned it _entirely_. Instead of starting a new project that was neither difficult nor too complex to maintain, they started a new project from scratch, the equivalent of 100% being removed by just discarding KDE3 and all its features _entirely_.
Since the new project was done from scratch, with plans to change and/or exclude functionality from KDE3, it should have taken an _entirely_ new name. Instead, the new project was cloaked with the KDE name, ensuring that distros and users would be minimally likely not to adopt it when upgrade the distro time came along. Not only was it cloaked with the familiar name, its alpha and beta releases were cloaked with version numbers that disguised its character as alpha (4.0, 4.1) and beta (4.2, 4.3) software, which speeded its uptake, and KDE3's discard, by the distro packagers.
It seems 4.4 has been designated substantially complete, meaning most of what was originally planned, and approximate equivalence to the abandoned or competing products, has been achieved. This is a description of the characteristics most would normally consider to constitute a 1.0 release.
Since 11.2 doesn't include 4.4, it does constitute somewhat of a regression for at least some significant portion of KDE3 users. I deal with it by not upgrading from 11.0, which I know is not a good option for those using hardware it doesn't support. -- "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, 2nd US President
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Thank you, Felix, for the KDE 4 history. Now that I know more about the history, I'm reconciled to KDE 4. In fact, I say some nice things about it, in my next post. Would it have been better for the KDE team to put the new product under a whole new name? Then we could have had three highly developed DE's to choose from, along with Xfce, EDE and Étoilé -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_desktop_environme... If these other DE's can survive a while longer, why not KDE 3.5? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org