thelinuxlink.net

http://practical-tech.com/operating-sys ... or-a-fork/

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who I normally enjoy reading, goes on a rant about not liking KDE 4 and wishing KDE 3 would get forked and updated to QT4. He seems to have ignored Aaron Seigo who apparently offered to communicate with him directly, and Aaron chimes in a few times in the comments to the article which makes for interesting reading. Aaron actually took it personally as he was mentioned in the rant by name. What does everyone at TLLTS think about forking KDE? And the direction of KDE 4?

Myself, I like what there they are doing, but was giving them more time to iron out the rough edges and add intended features as well as update applications before plowing in and running it full time myself. Consequently, I'm perfectly happy with KDE 3.5.9 which I run on my desktop as well.

Bugz

Same here, I run KDE 3.5.x regularly and am happy with the way KDE 4 is turning out to be. Although I think the development effort is a bit slow. But I don't think a fork is required.

I have mixed feelings, honestly. I like some of the stuff I see in kde4, other stuff not so much. Bottom line is, though, that every time I fire it up and do my updates, I discover that there would really be no way for me to get things done w/o substantially rethinking my workflow. It bums me out that there are apparently not going to be any more non-critical bugfixes to the old code, though.

It would be a massive, massive undertaking to fork KDE3, I'm guessing.

jturning wrote:http://practical-tech.com/operating-sys ... or-a-fork/

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who I normally enjoy reading, goes on a rant about not liking KDE 4 and wishing KDE 3 would get forked and updated to QT4. He seems to have ignored Aaron Seigo who apparently offered to communicate with him directly, and Aaron chimes in a few times in the comments to the article which makes for interesting reading. Aaron actually took it personally as he was mentioned in the rant by name. What does everyone at TLLTS think about forking KDE? And the direction of KDE 4?

When the deva asked "Which armour is invulnerable?", the Buddha replied "an invulnerable armor is patience;".

I personally think KDE is doing a ton of great things with KDE 4, the FolderView I really like, and all the stuff they have done in the lower layers of "the stack", so to speak. I don't see the 4.0 release as a mistake, I personally see it as the foundation-laying release, which we then add on top of, +1 = 4.1, +1 = 4.2 etc.
KDE 3.5.9 is the result of over 5 entire years of development and bug-fixing, comparing it to something that isn't even a year old and saying "This new thing sucks" I think is a totally bogus comparison. People who aren't savvy to see the difference I can't really blame, but I think people like Steven are smoking something seriously mind-altering on this one. Was the first version of OpenOffice.org great? No! Was the first version of Firefox great? NO! (It had memory leaks coming out of it's ***). You never get something that is "perfect" on day one, not necessarily even a year after that, Steven needs to wake up and smell the coffee if you ask me.

I personally use KDE 3.5.9 on Fedora 8 on my main computer, which I plan to stick with for a while to come. Even though I think KDE 4 is cool, it isn't in a state where it's something I would use as my primary desktop, mostly because of the obvious issues, but also just the fact that 3rd party apps like Amarok, digiKam, Konversation etc. don't yet have KDE 4 ports. I don't know how long I will stick with KDE 3, but I am very excited about the things happening in KDE 4. Patience is an essential tool, in achieving any sort of goal or aspiration in life.

Snarkout wrote:It bums me out that there are apparently not going to be any more non-critical bugfixes to the old code, though.

KDE 3.5.10 will be coming out in August, so there's at least one more maintenance release left. Also, Red Hat and Novell will still be fixing security problems discovered in the future, in the KDE 3 code they ship in their enterprise distributions, even when KDE officially kills off support for KDE 3. Red Hat is, in fact, still supporting KDE 2, and it is in one of their RHEL versions which is still supported.

diazamet wrote:http://blogbeebe.blogspot.com/2008/07/f ... h-qt4.html

I seriously doubt that's gonna go anywhere, let the silly fools keep on having a circle jerk about their fear of Plasma.

IMHO a fork of KDE would be bad. All these people should be working to make KDE 4.* better. Nothing is stopping you from running KDE 3.5.* until KDE 4.* matures enough for most people.

Patrick wrote:IMHO a fork of KDE would be bad. All these people should be working to make KDE 4.* better. Nothing is stopping you from running KDE 3.5.* until KDE 4.* matures enough for most people.

My sentiment exactly, I don't get what these people's problems are, nobody is forcing anybody to upgrade to KDE 4, just keep using KDE 3, and contribute a bugfix now and then, and it'll keep chugging along for while to come.

For the past couple years, I put Steven Nichols in the same boat as John C Dvorak. While I sometimes read and enjoy their columns, I think sometimes they just need to throw something out there so the column gets more attention and they get more attention. Dvorak admitted he does this once in a while.

I wonder if this is what innovation with not much marketing means. OSX is a major workflow change from widnows, however this is presented with all the glamour and glitz and make people forget they need to convert all of their workflow.

KDE doesn't have such a thrive so even if KDE4 runs on Windows or Mac, they wont get much tracktion into those desktops.

Jza wrote:KDE doesn't have such a thrive so even if KDE4 runs on Windows or Mac, they wont get much tracktion into those desktops.

There are no plans to port "KDE 4" to Windows and Mac OS X, only the libraries and applications will be ported. Not Plasma or KWin or the things that make up the actual desktop.

I think real direct harsh judgment should be targeted at kde when 4.4 is at least released. I may use fedora 10 on my laptop which i hope will include 4.2.x as its not used as much as my desktop which runs debian using gnome.

One of the misconceptions of kde 4.x is that its a new revolution in desktop experience. At the moment the developers are just catching up with features from kde 3.5.x. I am under no illusions that kde 4.x is going be that different to use as kde 3.x was.

I think what tripped KDE 4 up is that the KDE team use a major version number update to signify an ABI breakage. Most other projects indicate a new stable release with a major version update.

Thus people have the misconception that KDE 4.x is a stable release and consequently, it has received a lot of flak because this is not the case.

Regardless of any of that, the fact remains that for many people it's currently unusable - even diehard kde fanboys such as myself. Ill informed media pieces aren't doing much to help, unfortunately, and OP-ED fluff such as linked to is just a waste of time for, well, everyone. I have to admit, I've kind of lost touch with where blogging ends an "Journalism" begins - wasn't Steven a journalist at some point?

Sebastian Kügler from KDE covers 11 myths about KDE 4 on Groklaw:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 0131440951

Bugz