Anton Aylward wrote:
Tony Alfrey said the following on 08/20/2010 11:44 AM:
I have not used KDE 4.x yet so I do not speak from experience, only from what I hear on the lists. But what I hear is that many things in KDE 4.x were seriously broken when released, and complaints were greeted with "get used to it".
I do speak from experience: experience with KDE4 from .0 onwards as well as commercial products from storyboard, though pre-pre-pre-alpha onwards.
The mistake KDE4 made was to call its pre-alpha "4.0".
That seems to have been a major problem from all that I saw.
KDE4.4 was better quality than the "commercial release quality" of AIX or or Windows/XP, both of which were pay-for items at my relevant employer.
Well, as you can imagine, I'm not fond of most M$ products. Your point about commercial stuff not necessarily being decent in spite of payment is well taken. But I was comparing to Mac stuff.
It is normal practice in the software industry to 'release' "seriously broken" software and let the users do the debugging. A trip though the relevant vendor forums on the 'Net will show this.
That's why I wait for the second or third version before drinking the Kool-Aid.
A good or bad thing? Well if we are talking about banking software, aviation software, various types of planning and design software, multitudinous examples of embedded software (traffic light controllers, GPS/maps, pacemakers...) the it is most definitely a Bad Thing.
But then again, look at the economics. The testing has to be paid for somewhere.
The FOSS world uses the "community" for development; members of the community develop the software, document the software, package the software, test the software and review the software.
If embers of the community, lets call them 'users', the same users who will be the ultimate end-users of the software, don't use the pre-pre-pre-alpha version and give feedback to the developers then what real testing gets done? We know that developers are incapable of testing their own work in a realistic manner.
And this is an admirable approach, IMHO.
As I said: The mistake KDE4 made was to call its pre-alpha "4.0".
And perhaps another mistake was to make it at least appear to be the default DE when installing SuSE 11.x
As for the "get used to it": No, I don't recall that. I do recall being told that feedback was wanted - useful feedback not bitching that it isn't KDE3.5. I do recall being told that KDE4 was the way forward, that work on KDE3.5 had ceased and the developers were committed to KDE4. If you want to read "I'm sorry, KDE4 is the way forward, we're working on KDE4 development and we're not interested in working on KDE3 any more" as "get used to it" then OK. I can see that some developers, feed up of being harangued and abused, might reply snappishly. My advice is that everyone take a few deep breaths, walk away from the keyboard and go play with your kids, or dog, or bunny rabbit or S.O.
I'll let those intimately involved in that debate offer their viewpoint. ;-) I saw a lot of anger going in both directions that could have been avoided had some of the simple guidelines that you suggest above been followed. -- Tony Alfrey tonyalfrey@earthlink.net "I'd Rather Be Sailing" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org