On Saturday 05 July 2008, Larry Stotler wrote:
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/
What usability problem might that be? The guy asking for a fork complains about plasma in specific, I imagine that it would have been far easier for someone to simply port kicker, desktop etc from KDE3 to KDE4 instead of forking the entire codebase. I doubt he really knew what he was talking about.
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.
I've been using KDE 4.0.85 here for 5 days, yet cannot see what all this fuss is about. You want a fork for what reason? Because it has bugs? Because it looks different? Because of plasma?
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.
KDE4 works for most purposes at the moment, I see no reason to waste resources supporting 3 desktops instead of 2.
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.
Could you please explain how you perceive this difference? In what way is KDE3 functionally different to KDE4?
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.
Are you talking about opensuse-updater? Are you implying that the main difference between KDE3 and KDE4 is the appearance?
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.
You can use KDE4 without the desktop effects and it is faster than KDE3 at many things.
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.
Could you specify what functionality that was added in KDE4 consists "bloat"? If you don't like desktop effects, don't use them, it's simple. KDE4 is reported to be faster than KDE3 in most aspects, so it should run better on old machines.
"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.
I don't understand it either and agree with the latter part. Kind regards -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org