[Discuss] 2009 has a deal breaker.

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-10-24 08:32-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> You will probably find this is more to do with KDE 4.1.x than with Mandriva 
> 2009.  KDE 4.1 is much improved over the initial introduction of KDE 4.0 but 
> as yet its not full functional (stuff just does not work or is not there), 
> lacking many, many features that exist in KDE 3.5.10.
>
> KDE 4.1 looks pretty and shows great promise but wait a while before using it 
> as a production OS.  I keep checking on Fedora 9 /KDE 4.x but continue to use 
> Fedora 8 /KDE 3.5.10 for everyday operations.  It will be interesting to see 
> whether Gnome 3 when its rolled out has the same teething troubles.

Nobody on the GNOME development team wants to take the reputation hit that
has happened to KDE.  The issue is that KDE-4.x is truly innovative, but
they didn't educate their distributors and users sufficiently about the
downsides of innovation.  For example, innovation means lots and lots of
bugs and some functionality that is missing altogether in early versions.
KDE needed at least one more beta release before 4.0 to shake out bugs, and
they didn't educate their users AND distributors enough about the 4.0
release limitations, i.e., it was a developer's release of core components
which KDE applications could build on.  By definition that means missing
functionality for end users for 4.0, but that message didn't get through.
Furthermore, once bugs and missing functionality are taken care of for later
KDE-4.x releases, the user still has to adapt to a different ways of doing
things compared to KDE 3.x, and again KDE got a reputation hit because they
didn't educate users enough about those necessary changes.

To help avoid a reputation hit similar to what KDE-4.x has suffered, I
expect GNOME-3.0 will have extra beta releases to help get rid of bugs.  I
also expect there will be a huge emphasis on educating distributors and
users about the initial limitations to expect as well as tutorials on the
different ways to do things in GNOME-3.x compared to 2.x, etc.  I also
expect that GNOME-3 won't be as innovative as KDE-4, but I hope that
prediction turns out to be untrue because I generally like innovation despite
the downsides as described above.

BTW, I notice that Debian currently has KDE 4.1 in their experimental
version (see KDE http://packages.debian.org/experimental/kdebase), but not
unstable and certainly not testing or stable.  So Debian and Debian
derivatives like Ubuntu generally have not suffered the KDE-4 blues like
other distro users.  Of course this may be all about fortuitous Debian
timing; Debian is being conservative about adopting KDE-4 because Debian is
in the final stages of it's own release. Fairly soon after that release, I
expect KDE-4.1 will get into Debian testing, and I plan to try it then.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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