On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 11:15 AM, John Andersen
The KDE developers are apparently feeling the displeasure of users and their fellow Developers over the direction of and current state of KDE4
http://troy-at-kde.livejournal.com/16734.html
There is also this famous "Pick up my marbles and go home" quote:
"KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn't really need users at all"
I can't agree with that. Without users, there wouldn't be a compelling need to work on a project. Too many open source projects have disappeared because there wasn't enough interest in using it. Then, when the devs decided to move on, there was no one to continue the work
in this story which speaks of dissatisfaction among the developers so strong .that some were speaking of a fork to get back to the usability of KDE3: http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/kde-developer-quits/
If the current situation doesn't improve, I would probably support a fork. Look what happened to Xfree86. They made a "small" change in their license, and people moved away fast and forked it to Xorg. Now, the development of X has come very far in a short time. Anytime a "radical" change is made to an established project without any real justification or compelling reason for the changes, you risk alienating your user base. That's what makes open source work. The only real problem with a fork is that other parts of qt are commercial, so there could be compatitibity problems. This is no different from the FSF trying to force the GPL v3 on everyone when a lot of people feel GPL v2 is just fine.
There are lots of good links in those articles which reveal the mindset and inner workings of the KDE developers, and its clear they knew going in that 4.0 and even 4.1 were and remain BETA, the fact that two distros pushed them out into the world early has probably done more damage to KDE than any other single event.
I don't know if I can agree with that. While I don't care for it, the devs did a good job of getting it to work as well as they could. Of course, that effort could have went to making a KDE3 liveCD, but we can see where the devs are planning to take openSUSE. If things continue, I doubt that KDE3 will survive past 11.1. Honestly, considering how much different KDE4 is from KDE3, it's almost like they have forked it anyway. Maybe we will end up with just another desktop choice. Gnome, the KDE3 branch, or the KDE4 branch. openSUSE has forced so many of the KDE4 programs in the KDE3 system that you have to go in and select the KDE3 versions to keep your desktop consistent. I don't care for the look and feel of most of the KDE4 programs, much less that way KDE4 works. Not everyone wants there desktop to be flashy and stuff. After recently installing SuSE v8.1 on an old laptop, I miss the "eye candy o'meter" they had. It was amazing how much faster and more responsive your system was by turning off all that garbage. When you get right down to it, not everyone uses the newest and fastest hardware. So long as I can make use of my P3/500 Thinkpad, I will. If that means I have to move to a distro that has less bloat, then that's a decision I will have to make.
"Ubuntu" is an African word meaning "Suse is too hard for me".
As much as I don't understand the Ubuntu hype, I'm not sure that this helps any. As long as different projects snipe at each other, that keeps new users from being interested in using a better alternative. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org