Let me address the "Linus issue" first, because it's the simpler and less critical issue. Linus is precisely one user. For every Linus Torvalds (there's exactly one of them), we have 10s of millions of other KDE users and a few billion who don't use any F/OSS solution at all yet. I don't like losing any user, though, and such a happening can be deflating and make one second guess what they are doing (which isn't an entirely bad thing either, as long as it doesn't result in bad decision making or paralysis).
The decisions made in KDE 4.0 were for the future. A future which we are about to be living in with 4.2 released on the 27th. KDE 4.2 is a phenomenal release and unlike KDE 3.5, which was also a phenomenal release, this new release is a platform that we can successfully build on and compete in the market with for the next decade. It's cross platform, the libraries are much clearer and the technology available in KDE 4 for the user is appropriate to modern computer usage.
While 4.0 was a brutally hard decision and one that cost me (and I assume others) sleepless nights, it was what we needed to do to ensure that we didn't end up stagnating ourselves into irrelevance. By "ourselves" I mean the F/OSS desktop, which includes the Linux desktop. KDE 4.2 is a validation of those choices and while '08 will be remembered as a freaking tough year (mostly for my nerves ;), we're already past that time period and into the beginning of the pay off period. That period will extend several years out, and will gain us yet millions more users on all sorts of systems.
I already know of at least one significant downstream that is migrating to KDE 4 due to 4.2; and no, they aren't migrating from KDE 3. This is the start of the pay off period, though we still have a large amount of territory to explore before KDE 4 is "done". Nepomuk, for instance, is really still only getting started despite the huge leaps forward already.
Now, if Linus needed to get off the train while we rode through '08, that's just fine. It's a strength of F/OSS that you have choices. It's a strength that we can speak openly about it, too. Linus knows that, too, as he said in the article:
"I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.
I got the update through Fedora and there was a mismatch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.0. The desktop was not as functional and it was just a bad experience for me. I'll revisit it when I reinstall the next machine which tends to be every six to eight months."
I don't think that Linus was out of bounds saying this publicly, either. That's another strength of F/OSS: the ability to engage in open discourse. Compare and contrast how Linus approached it and how the "Linux Hater Blog" style writers do it, though. Linus is using his noggin, being honest and being analytical. That is cool in my book, and I'm confident that when Linus reinstalls his OS in '09, we'll win his attention back; KDE 4 has become just that good. One thing he wasn't in that interview was confrontational and repugnantly rude.
Interestingly, when I said something similarly even handed, accurate but negative about Canonical and Ubuntu in the media once, I got a serious "spanking" in private by the Canonical people and as a result people from other distros chided me as well. ("Don't make waves, Aaron!") This is where the cracks in our community start to show. We need to be willing to accept cross-talk between ourselves.
In that article, Linus said he got burned by his distro updating him to 4.0. I have to admit that it's really hard to stay positive about the efforts of downstreams when they wander around feeling they should be above reproach while simultaneously hurting our (theirs and ours) users in a rush to be more bad ass bleeding edge than any other cool dude distro in town. I hope this time instead of handing out spankings, the distros can sit back and think about things and try and figure out how they played an unfortunate part in the 4.0 fiasco.
The real Kings of Disappointment, however, are the community press who sensationalized the article and raise the choice of one person above the result it's having for all. This, by the way, is why I keep my own choices in software fairly quiet. While certainly nowhere near the same level as Linus in the community, I know just how untrustworthy the community press can be. The behavior they display on a regular basis means we have to treat them all with kid gloves for fear of collateral damage to others.
Here the collateral damage will be fear of innovation. "Don't do anything too big, because it'll cost you and cost you ..." is the lesson some are taking away from all this. Fear is a killer. It's also something that tempers unreasonable risk taking, but it can also prevent healthy risks from being taken. Trotting out a sensationalized story about 4.0 when we're about to release 4.2 is going to have exactly that effect unless we are conscious of this.
I will make another small prediction: there won't be a single follow up story on this if Linus does install KDE 4 in the future. After the damage is done, the community press has a way of just "moving on". There is very little long term commitment to full stories; instead there is rife sensationalism. It's more fun and interesting, after all, and besides who cares about our future?
I hope that everyone proves me wrong on this one, though. I hope someone writes an article taking what Linus said about 4.0 and analyzes the path through to 4.2, the role of distributions in coordinating sensibly in light of upstream advisement and the humps we in KDE tripped up over as well. It wouldn't stand much chance to be sensationalistic, but it would be a useful contribution to the dialog we as a community need to have.
Nobody and no project is perfect. Mistakes will be made, sometimes even in the process of producing success. Punishing each other unreasonably for it is stupid, learning from it is smart. I know we've learned a lot from it and made various changes to improve. We've worked really hard with downstreams to help improve coordination; we've worked really hard on improving external communication; we've worked really hard on making the community robust against divisiveness; we've been working on how to improve the development process with things like "always Summer in trunk" (which has evolved into "always Autumn in trunk" ;) such that we can more effectively chase innovation with less risk.
When 4.2 is rolled out to users, I hpe that we can take some time to do some round-table follow up as a community and engage in some deep reflection on how 4.2 (and future releases built upon it) was made at all possible.
After all, Linus' "hobby kernel" ;) needs a world class interface to match what it has become, and it's up to us to make it.
121 comments:
With all due respect Aaron, I've seen this go on too long. At the start, I believed in 4.x a lot. Eventually, I too moved to gnome. If you read Linus's comments, it's not about "precisely one" user. He says that he doubts he's the only one that KDE lost. People on slashdot confirm that he's not alone.
I just hope, when people express similar concerns about 4.2 that they expressed about 4.x, the KDE project finally starts to listen. For now, I'm with GNOME, and REALLY am too weary of the argument to care about KDE 4.x any more. But I'd rather see KDE eventually get its act together, than be swept away into history like MGR was.
Written with best wishes for the future, and sadness for the present, and fond memories of the glorious past.
Using 4.2 rc1 right now I have to say 4.2 will be a fantastic release. Very solid, fast and good looking.
Thanks to the whole kde team.
This was bretty bad hit for KDE4 PR image. Linus is the father of the Linux OS (as everyone know that monolith kernel is not just a kernel, but complete operating system alone), he is in same position as Steve Jobs is on the Apple. When Linus says something about applications what he use or how he likes to configure system and what OS version he use etc... the new Linux users watch him just like Apple fans look Steve Jobs.
At least it is good to see that Linus did mention about the 4.0 release type, hopefully people notices it. And hopefully magazines etc writes articles when the 4.2 hits the road.
I have used KDE4 since early versions (beta 1 or 2) and it has be long and rough road until 4.2 came. I have always tought that 4.2 version is the first version what can be given for normal user. 4.3 version is what I can think to be in the situation what is the "final" state for normal user so they are happy with it, because nepomuk will be very important feature and because it is not easily used on 4.2, this version will be "out" this round.
I dont care what applications, distributions or Operating System versions Linus use (for Linux OS, he must use the latest version because he is the responsible for development ;) ) because I use applications what fits best for me.
As far the KDE 4.1.x was the point where I could turn 100% to KDE4 and 4.2 is what makes me to suggest it for avarage users if possible.
Interesting post. But I don't really get what all the fuzz is about.
Fedora messed the update from 3.5 to 4.0 and Linus had to use Gnome .. big deal!
I think your comment on Jeffrey Stedfasts blog was bit too "KDE vs. Gnome", this post is much better. Counting users is not a very good comparison though. Windows XP has billions .. so what?
I am totally with you on the releasing bleeding edge stuff. Only Debian gets that right IMHO .. although they get it a bit too right ;)
When I win the lottery I will start a commercial KDE distro that will have no dotZeros. I would mostly take the last point releases and focus on stability and avoiding regressions ( and it would be x64 only ).
The business world would probably like such a conservative KDE distro now that Qt and KDElibs are going to be LGPL.
I can understand that Linus and some others have moved over to some other DE when their distributions decided to ship a KDE that did not live up to what they were used to. After all, DEs are tools to get work done and many applications in the F/OSS world are interchangeable.
However, I know quite some who have moved into the other direction as well. KDE 4.1 already attracted users that have been interested in KDE during the 3.4 and 3.5 times, but never made the switch. If what I see happening during the 4.2 RC cycle is any indication, _many_ will move to KDE. I am sure that in the course of the next months, most of those who moved away from KDE will come back to 4.2 and 4.3... in fact, more will 'come back' then ever went away. :)
I have seen the reaction of people to 4.2, and this is the release that will tip the balance for us. There is no question about it, it is JUST THAT GOOD. I voiced some criticism over 4.0 (not the release, but the marketing around it), but I can see now that without it we would never have reached the quality 4.2 has. We are better in every aspect now, both as a community and as code, and this was only possible because we took this year to learn from everything positive and negative that happened.
Everywhere I look I see KDE 4.x starting to generate positive momentum: look at playground for lots of new applications and authors. So I think there is no need to worry anymore: in one or two years the FLOSS desktop landscape will have changed completely, for sure.
to parapjrase certain general: "gentlemen, what we have here is an opportunity, not a disaster. I want to see only smiling faces around this table".
Linus is a hi-profile user. Does KDE need him? No. After all, gnome seemed to do just fine even though Linus used KDE all that time. So I expect that KDE will do fine, even if Linus used gnome.
That said, we should see this as an opportunity. While KDE should be a desktop for everyone, we should figure out why Linus felt it's unsuitable for him. He's a power-user. If we figure out why he is unhappy with kde, and resolve those issues, we will end up resolving a lot of the issues that power-users are unhappy with.
We should do the same with other types of users as well. Why is some newbie unhappy with KDE? If his issues were resolved, KDE would be not only suitable for him, but for many others as well.
It reminds me of the way VW designed the Volkswagen Phaeton it is an awesome car (it doesn't sell well because people have trouble paying that much for a car that is not considered a luxury-brand, not because it's a bad car). What VW did is that they created a set of demands that the car must meet or exceed. And when they design a car that meets those criteria, they will end up creating a car that is awesome in other ways as well.
So, if KDE sets itself a goal which says "KDE will be Linus torvalds desktop of choice" it would mean that KDE would have a goal which could be measured for failure or success (is Linus using KDE or not) but when reaching for that goal would also make the desktop better in numerous other ways and for numerous other users as well.
@Lee B: "too weary of the argument to care about KDE 4.x any more"
ever consider why certain people keep making an issue out of 4.0 even though we are a year and 2 releases past it?
@mutlu_inek: "However, I know quite some who have moved into the other direction as well"
yes, that has been a growing trend as well. it is one of the reasons why when i do evaluate what we've done thus far i feel we've headed in the right directions despite some wobbles along the way.
@piacentini: i completely agree. hard lessons, but good ones.
@Janne: "we should see this as an opportunity"
yep.
"If we figure out why he is unhappy with kde, and resolve those issues,"
i think we already have done that with 4.2; it wasn't really ever in question what needed to be done, just the time and process needed to go through to do it.
"We should do the same with other types of users as well."
agreed.
"if KDE sets itself a goal which says "KDE will be Linus torvalds desktop of choice" it would mean that KDE would have a goal"
in 4.2 several of the projects had the goal of "more feature complete than 3.5". i think that was a useful goal.
i don't think "be the desktop of Linus Torvalds" is a particularly useful goal, though.
i do agree with the goal setting thing and picking target user profiles though. it does work.
I've seen a lot of criticism around KDE 4 since KDE 4.0 was released. At the past (before use kde 4.1), I was skeptical of what KDE 4 can bring us.
Today, I have no doubt that KDE 4 is in the right path. A model to follow. I see that little by little, technologies you were implementing are emerging.
Frankly, I applaud what you achieved with KDE 4.1 and KDE 4.2.
PD. "Don't look back" ;)
I've been with kde since I adopted linux on my home desktop and, consequntly, on my laptop. And went from kde 3.2 to kde 4.2 rc.
And I say, everything is allright about it. Kde 4 witnessed the total redesign. How one can predict if the end result of the first try in any field will be successful? It is almost impossible. And though 4.0 release was a hard thing to adopt, it had its purpose - to bring a crash-test for the new design. I bet that's why MS Explorer and GNOME do not try to "redefine" themselves ;). Maybe they are afraid to fail the crash-test.
And concerning Linus' switching to GNOME. So what? I mean, if he finds there enough functionality to deliver the desired result - that's it, let him be. It is only a matter of preference. I bet there are developers making kde apps from fluxbox of some kind...
"ever consider why certain people keep making an issue out of 4.0 even though we are a year and 2 releases past it?"
I really can't believe I'm reading this. Did you ever consider that the users and developers have been trying to help keep things on course since before 4.0, and keep raising the mistakes because they're still being unrepentently made?
Seriously. This is why I'm with GNOME now. Good luck guys, you'll need it.
A celebrity like Linus changing trains is surely high impact in the public, that's true. It's also true that 4.2 is a good release, worth migrating to even for a 3.5 user - and 3.5 is damn good as well.
KDE 4 has so far proven to incorporate an interesting problem:
On one hand, a major rework of technology and a foundation for the future like it is worth picking up by applications but it's not ready for users unless those actually do pick it up - on the other, applications will only pick up the technology when it is in actual use, and applications developers will concentrate coding on the platform users are on.
The decision was made to release KDE 4.0 when the base technology was stable but the user applications were not ready. Somewhat reminds me of Netscape 6, which had a quite similar fate. The technology now shipped in Firefox was at an early stage there, the user-facing stuff was not completely up to the job though. In both cases, serious damage was done to the image of the product.
I hope that now that the user-facing applications are quite ready, KDE 4 will prevail better than Netscape did.
KDE 4 technology is really nice and ready for the future, the 4.2 release has the applications and user-facing parts ready for the users as well. The damage to the image was done with or without Linus, he's just an additional stone in the wall.
Now let's see if we can tear down that wall of bad talk the early release of the KDE 4 technology has enabled and rebuild the image of the project and desktop with the now complete KDE 4.2 suite enabled by this early release of the technology.
Lee B: what mistakes is KDE still "unrepentedly" making?
Yes, we could say that 4.0 was unusable for normal users, I know it was for me. So what? I might care about the quality of 4.0 if that was the most current version. But it's not.
Instead of complaining about quality of some past release, we should focus on the current release, or the upcoming release. Those are the ones that matter. It does not matter where KDE has been, what matters where it is at this moment and where it is going.
Now, you would have a point if 4.1 and 4.2 were/are bad as well. But they aren't even the most vocal critics agree that 4.1 was a massive step forward when compared to 4.0. Now, they might think that it's still not good enough, but everyone can see tha KDE has both direction and momentum.
And just about everyone thinks that 4.2 kicks ass. So really: what mistakes are being made here?
Was 4.0 a mistake? Maybe, maybe not. But what's done is done. It doesn't help at all to keep on crying about the quality of 4.0, since 4.0 is history.
Should we keep on whining about the fact that first releases of gnome 2 were crap? No. What matters is what the software isniw, not what it was on the past.
@Lee_B: Good job. Linus switched to Gnome, and so did you. I don't think that Linus necessarily disagrees with where KDE is headed, but more with where it was when he tried it. I agree with Aaron that Fedora acted irresponsibly by forcing the switch to 4.0, and those kinds of decisions certainly hurt both Fedora and KDE. By the same token, 4.2 rc1 has been what convinced me to stay with KDE 4 (I've been running it since 4.1.2). I'm excited for the future, and I think that 4.2 is "the" release. This is a desktop I can proudly show off to my Vista and Mac-using friends, and smile, and say "Now what's that about Linux being behind the times?"
Gnome, on the other hand, bugs the living daylights out of me.
Welcome to journalism. Sensationalism sells, and is the reason you don't hear of all the good things happening in the world. A special forces detachment could build a school, provide medical attention, etc. to a small village (I'm not just talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, they do this every day all over the world), but people helping people just doesn't carry the shock value of people dieing, etc, etc... not to steer too far off topic.
Luckily, software is a much smaller microcosm than some of the ugliness of the world. I agree, KDE 4.2 is something most people will be willing to use (4.1 wasn't bad itself), and time will show that this was the right decision. In defense of Fedora, they make it no secret that it is a cutting edge distro. That is one of the things that makes it nice, and if you just want to use a computer without thinking about it RHEL, Debian, and co are a better choice. If they didn't do all the hard work: patching, testing, and pushing forward, we'd all be using GCC 3.x, X.org would still be a joke, glibc would be a disaster, I can go on.
I think FOSS freeloaders owe a lot to Fedora, Gentoo and the other distros and users pushing forward and taking risks rather than stagnating as you say. The shortlist of Ubuntu contributions really pales in comparison, not to rag on them, but it is just a different mind set and purpose.
First: SOrry for my english.
How stupid people can be.
I respect and Admire Linus for his work, but he is a human too, and he can get wrong from time to time.
During the kde 3 age, Linus said that he was a Kde user, that gnome users were stupids, bla, bla, bla.
After the update disaster, why he just doesn't move back to Kde 3.5 as many user did?.
Pffff.
Also, I question if paradigm shifts can happen without rifts. History shows that there is usually fallout from any change in thinking, but we usually only associate with the final outcome. Thinking of periods of art, society, or otherwise, people didn't get together and say "Hey, this is the renaissance!" It just sort of happened and that is the way we remember it, but people were off doing different things at the same time.
The move from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was not an easy one. Nor was MacOS to OS X, or XP to Vista (or Win7)... or gasoline to hybrid/electric, or fossil fuels to renewable. Catch my drift?
Really great post Aaron. I very much doubted that KDE 4 will be a success the time I saw 4.0, and I got frustrated and angry. I thought about switching over to GNOME too, but having the stable and reliable KDE 3 Desktop in sidux made me able to wait, and to follow the process KDE 4 made with the 4.1 Releases and the huge, gigantic improvements it saw during the development of 4.2. I am more optimistic and enthusiastic for KDE 4 than I ever was, and what is going to be 4.2 is just wonderful even now (and was already months ago), it makes me await the integration of KDE 4 into sidux more eagerly and imaptiently than ever before.
What's really important next time a huge change like 4.0 comes, is to tell the bloody distro guys to stick with the stable and reliable release, because bleeding-edge software hurts users and can do much bad. Instead of focusing on a smooth transition, all major distros have been rushing to have KDE 4 as the default KDE-Desktop as soon as possible, which was just wrong in my opinion. They should have stuck to KDE 3.5.x as the main desktop, while providing 4.0 and 4.1 packages for enthusiast and testers.
4.2 is absolutely going to rock, and I hope that people will give KDE 4 a second chance.
Keep on rockin!
I don't think you can blame Linus for not wanting to use KDE 4.0 and not having a choice to use KDE 3.x in Fedora when other distros like Suse had managed this feat without any problems. Fedora is junk for KDE, despite the best efforts of some maintainers. I'll leave it as an exercise as to why Fedora decided to blatantly disregard everything said and communicated about KDE 4.0 and use it as a rod for KDE's back. Ubuntu did a similar thing.
Again, I have made a point for a long time of KDE having its own focused and sensible distribution around KDE 4 that will show KDE in its best light and enable better communication between users and developers and enable some sensible people to look at the many open source desktop problems we have today. I don't know who'll do it, but we'll never get ahead otherwise.
The open source desktop world needs to move on and respond to what Microsoft and Apple are doing with their desktops, look at resolution independence (a given for the many devices we have), look at doing more with graphics and provide a framework for applications and applets to be more easily developed and deployed as well as better organisation of user data. KDE 4 and Plasma had to come along to pre-empt that.
As much as I respect what the Gnome people have been able to do, I'm sorry, but if you think that is the medium and long-term answer then you're in a minority and are on the equivalent of CDE in the 90s against Mac OS and Windows 95 when the people behind it felt they could simply define certain things as desktop 'standards'. It was a really successful approach, as you can see.
He even justifies the approach somewhat of trying to sacrifice some stability for a new leap forwards when he talks about Btrfs. People are going to have no option but to reformat there.
In the end, it really is KDE 4 or bust because nothing is anywhere near capable of keeping up. Even the final licensing pins have been knocked down. Trying to procliam 'standards' and 'defaults' and trying to hold everything else up won't work. Perhaps some people don't like that, I don't know.
Yes, it's cool that Linus was quite relaxed about the whole thing and revisiting it in a few months, but there are times when you need to stick a 'Linux Hater' hat on and ask yourself how things will really get ahead. We've already done that with PulseAudio to a large extent.
4.1 had all the features that I thought I needed and lots that I didn't so 4.2 is just the same but prettier. I can't see why anyone would leave KDE for Gnome it also has all the features but presents them in an ugly way (as a desktop I know some of KDE's apps aren't so good like Konqueror and how it won't render my banks website, still Firefox and Opera work perfectly so nothing is lost)
I noticed that one can add JS bundles on to the plasma desktop. I would like to add Google's igoogle tools to my desktop but can't think how to download them to get them on there, any ideas anyone. It'll be like having 'active desktop' from Windows 95 back again (am I the only person that used that?)
I'm glad Linus acknowledged that he understood why the KDE 4.0 was released they way it was, since he has himself pulled similar releases of the kernel several times in order to get large numbers of people to test new code. Remember the virtual memory excitement in the 2.4 series? There are other examples, too.
WarDron > "I bet that's why MS Explorer and GNOME do not try to "redefine" themselves ;)."
The GNOME project is in fact designing their version 3.0, which seems to be a major departure. The UI (if not the underlying technology) might actually be even more of a change than KDE 4.0 was. Linus even mentions this in the interview and says that the next time he upgrades, the DE choice may go the other way for the same reason he refused to use KDE 4.0. (It seems unlikely that GNOME 3.0 would be released by the time of his next upgrade, though.)
There are those who hang onto the past, and there are those that get over it and move on.
I have seen a lot of crap from bitter past KDE users, because KDE did not take their particular pet direction. If they can't move on how progressive are they, and do you really want them associated with KDE.
I am not a coding geek, just an experienced user who builds his own PCs. In my experience KDE 3.X did not "just work", there was a ton of stuff that "did not work" when the OS was installed, and you had to go looking for drivers, and applications all over the place.
Coding geeks might like this, but the every day user does not. So the question then is who is this UI for? For the mass market of geeks?
There are those who hang onto the past, and there are those that get over it and move on.
I have seen a lot of crap from bitter past KDE users, because KDE did not take their particular pet direction. If they can't move on how progressive are they, and do you really want them associated with KDE.
I am not a coding geek, just an experienced user who builds his own PCs. In my experience KDE 3.X did not "just work", there was a ton of stuff that "did not work" when the OS was installed, and you had to go looking for drivers, and applications all over the place.
Coding geeks might like this, but the every day user does not. So the question then is who is this UI for? For the mass market of geeks?
@ yJNTxfs5j.KZJAp9er13NOGPJqo
Ok, I've got your point. I will slightly make mine a little more precise:
"I bet that's why MS Explorer and GNOME haven't tried to "redefine" themselves yet ;)."
They are on the way, still. It'll be interesting to see brand new GNOME and there are some interesting features in Windows 7 concerning desktop.
Looking forward to see what it all will become :)
I use KDE 4.2RC1 and I like it.
BUT (big-but) the more I use it, the more I find crashes. Please, please, please, cute please, consider making a RC2 and RC3, even if that means delaying the release a month back.
If KDE 4.2 is the turning point of KDE4, we MUST NOT deviver a buggy release, let's focus on fixing those well to avoid letting them to 4.2.X?
{Couldn't see out how to edit a posted comment. ^^;}
I felt the same way when I read that article about Linus. I respect both Aaron and Linus, as they're both level-headed, intelligent, and perceptive, speaking to my own peaceful personality and take on arguments/conversations/reconciling_differing_views. The first comment on this post makes me a little sad because, though Lee_B has a valid (albeit somewhat shallow IMO) point, so too do other intelligent community members that are so fervently and unconstructively against KDE4 (beyond 4.0).
[DISCLAIMER: The following is NOT about Lee_B.]
Thing is, intelligence doesn't automatically vindicate you. There are plenty of intelligent people who simply lack other "intelligence" and rationality to be able to properly weave together a constructive and beneficial argument (in the neutral sense). I too am tired of the trolling and general irrational intelligence that some people present and honestly wish that, if people have got something bad or critical to say, be OPEN, CONSTRUCTIVE, CONVERSATIONAL, RESPECTFUL, and properly divulge ALL your rationale for your position, as well as listen to your opponent's rationale. If all this is done, at worst you'll discover that you're left with two fundamentally irreconcilable views (on the future direction of a project, for example). Then you should try to reach a reasonable middle ground or, at the worst of worst of worst, just agree to disagree. For heaven's sake... don't just buy into sensationalism (as Aaron said), prejudge, discount, or be unconstructively stubborn in your views (which is hard for intellectuals and CS-types ;) ). Maybe the Dalai Lama should head community relations. Or it be suggested that community members read Desiderata. ^^;
Anyway, it's nice to see most of these posts being positive towards KDE4, and the others being calm and rational. That's a BIG change from the status quo not but some months ago (you know what I'm talking about... when poor Aaron was lambasted into the remote Canadian wilderness). I just hope that, after all this, the community will come out stronger than ever, with good documentation on how to be progressive, successful, understanding, and how to work well together. The code's no good if its future is uncertain or the minds backing it in turmoil.
The GNOME project is in fact designing their version 3.0, which seems to be a major departure. The UI (if not the underlying technology) might actually be even more of a change than KDE 4.0 was.
I very much doubt it will come to the fruition required. I hope to be surprised, but I doubt that I will be.
Everybody seems to talk about Gnome 3 as if it is going to be just around the corner in a few months once people start coding, but it won't be. First of all you've got to serve your open source developers first, and to do that you need to outline what your application developers need to do with regard to modern desktops, design or refactor a toolkit and a set of programmable APIs around that and make sure that you have your application development methods sorted out in a sane and layered manner. The project must get past C. Only then can you design a desktop around it, and only then can you port a set of applications to that desktop in turn.
I think most developers quietly realise that is a huge amount of work where the fruits of it will not be seen for many years. You only need to look at how much effort it took to get Qt 4 out into the world and then to build KDE 4 off the back of it. That's why people around Gnome have been reticent to talk about Gnome 3, or have tried to take various diversions about what needs to be done by talking about new user interface concepts or the ill-fated online desktop. All are just distractions from the main event and there doesn't seem the wherewithall to tackle it beyond a scratchpad of ideas (http://live.gnome.org/ScratchPad).
If open source desktops are going to improve, be sustainable, go out into the world and increase market share where there is the functionality, applications and support to sustain that share, and to compete on an equal footing with what the proprietary stuff is doing, then it will be done by KDE and nothing else now. We'll just have to see where the next few point releases take us.
So, no pressure or nothing ;-).
Aaron, thank you for great post.
From one side I completely agree with Linus and from other side I understand KDE team.
I'm still using 3.5 on my PC, though I waited for KDE 4 since the start of development in 2005. But I still believe that KDE 4 will reach the level, when you can say = KDE 4.X = KDE 4. After this I'll upgrade to it and switch to it from XFCE on my note.
Nevertheless I admire the way KDE development doing.
I've been in Gnome world in years. I don't know why, KDE 2 series and the KDE 3.5 series always hangs on my machines at randomly (my distro was Mandrake and Debian). Even the E17 more stable that in a point the only reason to keep the K blobs in my machine was because of Amarok and Yakuake.
But, frankly, KDE 4 stunned me a lot and made me even add planetkde.org to one of my fave RSS feeds just to have the bleedy stuff updated news.
4.0 was a mess and made a very brave decision. But, 4.1 have won my heart. KDE 4.2 SVN even amazed me more on how fast to maturity and stability the KDE've become. In that, I believe that one day (shortly) kwin will stable enough to compete Compiz in term of 3D stability.
All in all, I'd just want to say you've already won new bands of fans and that's me one of them. Every DE (Gnome, KDE, E17, etc) have their own vision of what a desktop should like, and yours works my taste. So, thank you and keep your great work!
Anyway, congratz on 4.2, I'll wait it in my Debian Experimental/Kubuntu machines (soon hopefully, can't wait to do that in synaptic).
I agree 4.0 was rather poo, but it needed to be released, otherwise adoption and development of v4 series would have been slow.
Rather than going back to gnome, i would rather use KDE 3.5 and rather than using windoze, i would rather use gnome xD
But it's too late to go back now, KDE4.2 is so kick ass :)
Hi Aaron, I'm using GNOME at the moment, but I've never seen this as anything more than temporary. 2008 was a gruelling year for KDE and some of us users were worn down by constant brokenness of one thing or another over a period of many months. Indeed, I know the distro I was using was responsible in part. I'm also using a different distro at least for now (a point worth making I think).
In the last three or four months I've been using GNOME I've also discovered things about GNOME that I really don't like, though I'm not going to get into that here.
And as far as moving back to KDE 3.5 goes well... It just looks old now ;)
KDE 4.2 looks like its shaping up to be a great release and right now I'm looking for another distro (again) that will hopefully deliver a great KDE 4.2 desktop.
I miss my KDE desktop and the integration I get with my favorite KDE apps. So yes, I will be switching back for 4.2.
OH GOOD GOD! A few years ago everyone started blowing chunks when Linus said he was using KDE. In fact if I remember correctly, he had several extremely harsh words for gnome (something about it being designed with the intention of handicapping users if I remember correctly). Now Linus switched and all of a sudden GNOME is the end all is all be all of the DE world? GNOME people have looked at kde technology and they have analyzed their own and decided that they needed real change. They have a slightly different idea about how to do that, but they are now motivated to do so. Before KDE 4.0 gnome people didn't intend to have any new major releases.
Now that ends my angry comment. Here is my sensible one. Linus didn't move to GNOME because he "liked" it, he moved their because he likes Fedora and he didn't think KDE 4.0 was usable (it wasn't really meant to be afaik it was a platform release for developers). He intends to come back later. If he was using OpenSUSE I don't think he would have switched he would have just stuck with kde 3.5 until KDE 4.2 or something.
In the F/OSS world success isn't just measured in how many users you have, but how many developers you attract. Before KDE 4.0 I was an average jo gnome user. After KDE 4.0 I am now putting effort to actually help with kde development. Someone may not be as good as a developer as Linus, but then again he wasn't working much on kde. So if they solve one bug a month they are already a more valuable asset. That's not to say users are ignored. But the early kde4 version were really the place where developers were going to be attracted to work on the new platform. We are starting to see the fruits of that here in kde 4.2. Now not to bag on gnome but as a nice exercise let's compare the changelog of gnome 2.26 and kde 4.2. How much of gnome is new features and how much of it is maintenance. What about kde 4.2? The new platform has helped make people far more productive and it has made for a far more maintainable code base. So I say in my case you've got a victory Aaron. You guys can sleep easy.
Also, Aaron I was wondering, if you could do kde 4.0 differently how would you do it? I personally had no issues with it. But is there anything you think could have been handled better?
In addition to the first paragraphs of AhmedG:
When one really wants to judge this statement about kde 4.0 (!) in fedora, considering Linus knew about the 'beta' status of 4.0, remember what Linus said about GNOME in 2005 ( http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00021.html ) :)
And this was his judgement over a stable release of Gnome. So the discussion (of the kde4-folks) could boil down a little.
KDE4.2 adds a level of maturity (automation, usablility e.g. storage-device-manager in the panel, dolphin etc) to Linux, that will win many new AND old users. Dont worry:
Quality convinces.
Congratulations for 4.2 to all KDE-developpers.
KDE4 has been unstable and feature incomplete for a full year now, so don't act surprised when people give up and stop using it. This is what happens when you try to change the meaning of alpha/beta/RC/release versions... people get frustrated and choose other options. You may get more early adopters, sure, but you also will end up generating bad press.
"I hope this time instead of handing out spankings, the distros can sit back and think about things and try and figure out how they played an unfortunate part in the 4.0 fiasco."
Wow. Please tell me you're not trying to pass off blame onto distributions for using your final release software. It would have been easy to avoid the frustration of distros being in "a rush to be more bad ass bleeding edge than any other cool dude distro in town." You simply could have informed distributions and users that KDE4 was not ready for everyday use until KDE4.2. You could have put it in big bold letters on the KDE website. You could have even written it on the default desktop background. Distributions may still have used it, but then at least you could reasonably claim some plausible deniability. To try and place blame on distributions at this point for your mishandled release strategy is silly.
You and others in the KDE4 team seem to have conflicted feelings about this. You wanted to release KDE4 early so people would test it, use it, and submit bugs, but you didn't want people to actually use it day to day because it wasn't really ready for everyday use. There's a term for this type of software project, and you know what it is.
KDE4 has the potential to be a nice desktop environment, but it's going to take a while to move past this disastrous beginning (and no, 4.2 isn't the showstopper you've convinced yourself it is). Hopefully the KDE team will learn from their mistakes, perhaps make some personnel changes, and do well in the future.
I think this only shows one thing: the community seems not fully ready to integrate big changes.
Linus is right when he says that 4.0 was half baked and not functional ... but that's exactly what the KDE dev warned us about when they released it.
As you noted, the real issue is that people wanted 4.2 or 4.3 as 4.0, and when KDE 4 was pushed in the distros that's what the users expected it to be.
Now we cannot blame the users for that, they got their solid KDE 3.5 replaced by what is still a work in progress beta.
The real issue was probably the lack of communication between downstream and their users, or perhaps the lack of a clear cut distinction between what would be KDE 4.testing and KDE 4.can_replace_3.5
Anyway i do not believe this hurts KDE much, KDE 4 was a needed change and all the work will finally end up in a fantastic release that will take the 3.5 VS 4.x complaining out of the picture.
At this point many people will probably switch from Gnome to KDE again without it making dramatic slashdot headlines.
nononononono: "Wow. Please tell me you're not trying to pass off blame onto distributions for using your final release software."
How long did it take before distros started using 2.6-kernels as their default kernel? It took quite a bit. Hell, some still use 2.4! Should we complain because 2.6.0 and other early releases of 2.6 were not really that good?
KDE4 is a huge undertaking and 4.0 was a huge change when compared to 3.5. Distributors had the choice of shipping 4.0 or sticking with the older release. Just like they had the choce of jumping to 2.6-kernel right away or sticking with 2.4. They had no problems sticking with 2.4, so they could have stuck with 3.5 just as well. But for some reason they did not.
Yes, distributors do need to share the blame here. They had the choice, and I think they do test the software they ship. They could have tested 4.0 and decide not to ship it.
Or how about Apache? same thing there: lots of distros/people stuck with the old version, instead of jumping to the brand-new version.
And still: 4.0 isn't really relevant anymore. It's old release. I remember KDE 2.0 being flaky as well, do we still whine about that? No we do not.
Some people (like you) seem to insist on keep on talking about 4.0. You insist on blaming the developers. What is it exactly that you want? Should the developers flagellate themselves and beg for forgiveness? I would much rather have them coding their butts off, making KDE4 as good as it could be. And that's exactly what they have been doing for the past year.
Seriously, it's time to move on. 4.2 will be released in few days. IF you want to complain about something, complain about 4.2 (preferrably through bugs.kde.org), at least then you might accomplish something. Complaining about an old release accomplishes nothing. No matter how much you whine, you can't change the past. And past is where 4.0 is in.
hey guys, read this: i also switched to gnome from kde for 4, but i am developing for kde from there, to make kde rock more than ever !!
Hello
If are you looking for real sado-mazo
go http://tooziq.com
Aaron some people might be leaving KDe but i have seen many adding to kde userbase just for KDE 4 just like me.....
I think it is sad that Linus switched to Gnome. On the other hand, the progress KDE made in just one year is just amazing. KDE 4.2 is lightyears ahead of KDE 4.0 and I don't think that would have been possible without releasing KDE 4.0. I also think that KDE 4 offers an amazing framework to developers for creating applications. I think in the long run this was the right decision. And I hope my first plasma applet is finished soon:-)
Hi Aaron
Just to say that KDE4(.0) also had some very positive effects.
I was a Gnome user 12-14 monthes ago, then I tried KDE4.0.
Yes it was buggy, yes it was bearly usable, but it showed so much promise that I kept with it.
Soon after 4.0 I switched to SVN head, and have been running HEAD ever since.
The progress has been astounding. KDE has come further in a year than Gnome came in 2/3.
Keep up the good work
Hi Aaron, there's something unsaid many people are ignoring.
Why switch to gnome, if kde 4.0 was incomplete and unusable for production environment? I never tried and didn't want to try any past 4.x release, but still am using 3.5 happily. Unlike naming convention suggests I always thought 4.0 and 4.1 as alpha/beta/unstable releases.
Anyway if people are migrating there must be some reason. I fear the migration of some users from K to G is not because the first 2 releases were incomplete. Maybe people did't like the direction 4.x was taking.
Since now we could justify people migrating saying that's because kde 4.x was not ready for production. But with 4.2 it's time for budget. The desktop with 4.2 is fully functional, and if it won't be a success I think you should try to find why.
Maybe people didn't like/understand plasma?
I really don't know what Fedora & co - the distros that shipped KDE 4.0 as the ONLY KDE desktop - were thinking.
I run ArchLinux, which is typically viewed as a "bleeding edge" distro (partly due to its rolling update scheme). ArchLinux said from the outset that they wouldn't ship 4.0. In fact, the original intention was to start at 4.2, but it turned out that 4.1 was good enough to make the switch from KDE3. And even then, kdemod provided KDE3 desktop packages.
segedunum > "I very much doubt it will come to the fruition required. I hope to be surprised, but I doubt that I will be."
See video of a demo at Fudcon F11 in Boston:
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/videos/2009/FUDConF11/fudcon-f11-rm345-session4.ogg
(Teh technical quality of the video is not too great.) It's a very early prototype with major UI parts missing, but apparently it was done quite rapidly and the language-beyond-C question and some of the other technology problems are being answered.
I wrote a whole post about this:
http://djdarkmanx.blogspot.com/2009/01/to-use-or-not-to-use-that-is-question.html
The moral of this story is that small thing do have big impacts, and everyone should choose what's right.
My 2 cents as one of the Fedora KDE maintainers (but not speaking for Fedora or Fedora's KDE SIG as a whole):
I think trying to blame the bad user reception of KDE 4.0 on the distros who decided to ship it really makes no sense. We distro people have based our decisions on communications from upstream. And guess what, when 4.0 was being developed, it was to be a great new release, not much was said about feature regressions. Only around the time of the 4.0.0 release, some developers have started coming out with reservations about usability of 4.0, missing features came to light etc. (Yet, 4.0.0 was still offered for download as the "latest stable release" and the 4.0.0 release announcement only talked about improvements, no word was lost on regressions.) At that time, at least Fedora had already decided to ship Fedora 9 with KDE 4 (heck, the original plan was to ship it in Fedora 8, we already postponed it for a release!) and Rawhide already had its prereleases, so it would have been really painful to revert everything. Plus, at that time, people were still talking about 4.1 as the release which would fix everything. Only around the release of 4.1, it got redefined as "for early adopters only" and people started talking about 4.2 as the "real stable release".
And no, Fedora did not force anybody to use KDE 4.0. KDE 4.1 was pushed as a Fedora 9 update only 4 months after F9's release (and it would have been out faster if some jerks hadn't broken into Fedora's infrastructure - we had it in testing 3 months after the F9 release and prereleases in kde-redhat before that). Fedora 8 was still supported for all this time. (And this was part of our plan: Those people who didn't want 4.0 could stay on F8. Offering 4.0 meant we were able to upgrade F9 to 4.1 as soon as it was released, upgrading from 3.5 to 4.1 would not have been practical. Nothing coming from KDE at that time suggested that even 4.1 would not be suitable for some users.) In fact, when F8 was discontinued, we already had KDE 4.2 Beta 2 available in kde-redhat testing, so it was possible to switch directly from 3.5 to 4.2 Beta 2 (or RC1 if getting no updates for less than a week wasn't a problem for you), skipping both 4.0 and 4.1. (Unfortunately, it was not possible to extend F8's EOL until the final KDE 4.2.0 release. We KDE maintainers don't have much influence on Fedora's schedules. KDE is just one of many upstream projects we work with.)
@segedunum: What you're missing is that the people who decided to ship KDE 4.0 are the same people who're trying to make KDE in Fedora great. The "KDE haters" have no say in our decision what KDE version to ship. (And FWIW, I expect our GNOME maintainers to do something similar with GNOME 3.0, they already did it with the GDM rewrite in F9 and the gnome-session rewrite in F10.) And also FYI, the btrfs-convert tool can convert your existing ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions to Btrfs without data loss.
@Iuri Fiedoruk: KDE 4.2.0 has already been released to packagers, it's too late to do another RC. And the only distros ending up with 4.2.0 will be distros which shipped with 4.1.x before (like Fedora), so you really have to compare with 4.1.4 to see if it's really worse (I don't think it is, the feedback we got so far has been positive). Those which start KDE 4 at 4.2 will most likely release with some later 4.2.x release.
@Janne: Fedora switched to 2.6 in FC2. That was with a 2.6.6 prerelease (and pretty unstable, updates fixed it fairly quickly though, just as F9 updates fixed KDE 4). And 2.6 was the only option in FC2. And maybe if development of FC1 hadn't been started as "RHL10" even FC1 might have shipped with 2.6, who knows? And back when Apache 2 was released, those were still RHL times, yet Apache 2 got shipped, as the only option, not too long after upstream declared it stable. So we're being consistent. Fedora is a distribution for early adopters, if you want old software, you have to use something else.
Thnaks for your information Kevin.
And for the record, I do agree 100% with you, even before 4.0.0 release some users (me included) started complaining about 4.0 and telling developers to release it as 3.9 or 4.0 test, they made deaf ears to our claims and some ar enow trying to rewrite history as if 4.0 was told since start to be a "test" release.
This is not true, but we should stop fighting on the reasons, accept errors from both sides, and see history as it is, and learn from it instead of trying to say we were right. Just lets ensure we stop doing silly things as shipping alfa-quality code as final, okay? :)
And that means users will have to test and report bugs more, ask for more betas, rcs, distros doing user-oriented tests and developers calming down to release their shiny new code full of bugs and empty of features :D
Love for all!
Hello. Just to point that getting the lattest, even if quite broken packages is what I use fedora for. When I whant to use my comuter for production, I use Mandriva or Open Suse. And in my opinion, KDE 4.0 on Fedora is just the perfect fit : Fedora is said to be integrating the latest, in order to advance the free software world, puting the problems in the face of users to get the needed feedback to iron folowing releases. Doing things write ( eg, package kit instead of yet another package manager UI, getting network manager, provinding last kernel etc...) is just in line with the KDE4 vision : provide a good base for the future.
Don't look back, just look forward. Or don't use fedora. It's like I see it, and it's like I see KDE 4.0
And just to point that Mandriva and Open Suse, wich I use for production, still provide KDE3. And also that never did Linus said KDE 4 (as a whole) to be a disaster. I beleive he knows wy he uses Fedora.
I am running trunk at the moment in my 4 year old laptop and it is fantastic - great work on usability and eye kandy (sorry could not resist). I am sure 4.2 will be the turning point for KDE.
I do love the idea of KDE4, but installed in my computer is not as good as GNOME. I have KDE4 for Windows installed too, I do like it is cross platfform, And I'm an addict to knetwalk for bored moments, but there are a lot to do. i will try KDE 4.2, but I will use it only if it gives me a better experience.
Perhaps is 4.4 the release that beats Gnome in my computer, but I do like the way to the future you have choose.
And I would like to recommend KDE to all windows users, as a desktop way to use Linux or FreeBSD.
Aaron, not trying to start something here, but you really need to learn to sit and think for a day before you write posts. Not saying this post is too bad (although Kevin did give a very reasonable explanation of why Fedora shipped KDE 4.0).
However, I think the trolling on Jeffrey Steadfast's blog here is really not appropriate for a high profile KDE dev.
http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2009/01/epic-weekly-news.html
Of course you can do whatever you want, but lets try to be adults here.
Aaron, I switched to KDE from GNOME years ago (KDE 2.1). I was a very happy KDE 3.5.x user who occasionally dabbled with KDE 4.x until I had enough. Most distributions started mixing KDE 3.5.x and KDE 4.x applications and configurations together to the point that both became unusable. Amarok 2.x launching (as default) instead of Amarok 1.x when both are on the system, yet I only wanted to use 1.x and "play" with 2.x is an example. Another example is KDE 4.x messing up KDE 3.5.x icons in the file manager. Or Konqueror for KDE 4 launching while I was in KDE 3. I had to go back to GNOME for the time being. GNOME is boring, outdated, a feels a little like being nurtured when compared to KDE 3.5.x but it works well. I'm hoping that the distros can get it right with KDE 4.2. Cheer up. Even though I switched, my favorite website is still www.kde.org. I've been following the development of KDE 4.2 very closely. GNOME is just an "ok" rental car while my Porshe (KDE) is in the shop. As soon as KDE is fix, GNOME will be history for me. Good luck and God bless!
I am a KDE user for quite some time, and I have no more than say that the project KDE 4 is one of the best I've seen so far.
But that problem has been the major distributions to include unstable versions of KDE 4, for most users forgetting KDE 3.5.
Actually i'm using Ubuntu Hardy with KDE 3.5 and 4, and I'm testing daily in VirtualBox, all news of Jaunty and KDE 4.2. I hope that in 3 days i can upgrade to Intrepid with my shiny KDE 4.2, finally stable.
Thnx Aseigo and all developers of KDE :-)
I have to agree with you Aaron, so he switched to another windows manager big deal. I go back and forth too as I use what features I need and or like. As I like to say "lighten up Frances"
The point is that no-one forgets this kind of hubris:
http://dot.kde.org/1200050369/
Who authorised that?
Please KDE, just listen to your USERS.
As for me, KDE4 haves certain problems:
1) Why KDE copied STUPID and UNUSABLE menu from Vista? Are you going to loose like Vista did? It really sucks in terms of navigation. Like in Vista there is search. Why? Because finding something i such menu is a real pain in the ... !
2) Desktop. It's AWFUL. And please, go away with cool conceptions. Or I will go away to another desktop environments like Gnome. I want JUST MY DESKTOP! And not some crappy box for my files on your desktop! This is more than annoying to see stupid boxes for files. Maybe plasma is good but when you FORCED to use it and ONLY it, I will really HATE this word. Why I can't simply put my files and shortcuts on desktop by default? WITHOUT stupid plasma craplets? This is simply ANNOYING. Even if KDE programmers think otherwise and having fun with Plasma.
3) Well, failing KNetworkManager in Kubuntu is well-known. I really hope people will co-operate on issues like this. Adept (packages manager in Ubuntu) is HORRIBLE in KDE (maybe not KDE fault but still it makes things worse). And hey, where is my bluetooth? Even sucking Gnome has no troubles with bluetooth.
4) I also have a numerous glitches (icons in tray are partially covered by garbage, KDE menus on fade in\out displayed with some garbage, etc).
5) You're using DBUS. How about freedesktop.org compatible popup notifications? And other compatibility issues. When something works only on Gnome desktops but does not works in KDE - this is BAD...
6) As for me, I'm rather preferring Konqueror as filebrowser. As web browser it is HORRIBLE - very slow and could crash. Firefox beats it to the hell. Very strange if we take into account that WebKit usually faster than Gecko.
Conclusion: UI looks promising but not yet ready for prime time and haves a bunch of annoyances. Let's hope you will fix annoyances while retaining certain advantages (one of them is that UI looking well enough).
7) I hate HUGE icons. Really. Especially this AWFUL stuff in the tray. And when some icons are small (in tray, etc) and some are huge this looks HORRIBLE...
8) And no, I do not need yellow stuff on desktop by default. Questionable defaults. Users HATE to be annoyed and yelled and yellow is yelling. As for me: REMOVE yellow notes by default. Nobody sells monitors with yellow sticker in center of screen for notes. Same should apply to desktop IMHO. Annoying and enforcing users is deadly. Proven by Vista...
9) But yes, Run dialog could be better and more helpful.
10) I'm really do not need desktop search and whatever. I do need environment where I do not have to use search to find something. And this is not about KDE4 (yet?...).
11) I'm really hate extra stuff on desktop. How do I remove nasty KDE icon in top-right corner? It used to configure widgets. After using KDE4 a while I still did not figured this out. And I hate when my desktop is not under my control. There should be easy option to remove crappy extra icons, widgets and whatever from my desktop. Polluting my desktop by someone's else "cool conceptions" which can't be easily removed is UNACCEPTABLE for me.
@john: You *do* know that in KDE 4.2 setting a traditional desktop is exactly three clicks away?
Appearance Settings > Set type to "Folder View" > click OK
Maybe Folderview should be the default Desktop plugin....
I mean, it gives you back your old desktop, and still lets you use plasma widgets.
It would be simple better because it's old+new instead of just new.
I for one will never need widgets in my entire life, cause most of the time my desktop is covered by my web browser and/or my IDE.
The critical thing I need is the panel.
Just one question I would like to ask, I mean I respect this whole plasma concept, even though I will probably never make use of it, but here it goes:
We can drag, rotate, scale and style our desktop widgets the way we want to, but how come that, when it comes to the panel, all the widgets do is try to align to the left?
In KDE 3 I place everything on the panel where I want to, in KDE 4, the only usable hacky method I have is using the not-official panel spacer, which is not only an ugly way of doing it, but even makes plasma crash a few times.
In GNOME I can do it, In XFCE I can do it, why not in KDE 4?
I asked this question on #plasma too, but got a technical answer, something about QGraphicsView or something.
If it's technically possible in KDE 3 and knowing, that Qt never looses features, I can't imagine why it's not possible in KDE 4. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no C++/Qt developer.
@k4ever: That's exactly why we don't support/allow coinstalling KDE 3 and KDE 4 nor installing both KDE 3 and KDE 4 versions of the same application in parallel in Fedora. It just doesn't work. You invariably get the wrong one.
@john:
ad 1.: Right-click, Switch to Classic menu style.
ad 2.: This can be changed easily in KDE 4.2.
ad 3.: KNetworkManager 0.7 works fine for me in Fedora 10. But there's already a better successor in the works, the NetworkManager plasmoid. And besides, this has nothing to do with KDE 4, KNetworkManager is a KDE 3 program, any regressions are due to the switch from NetworkManager 0.6 to 0.7, not to KDE 4.
ad 4. The tray icon glitches are fixed in 4.2. The menu glitch is probably a bug in your graphics driver, not in KDE.
I didn't mean to bash GNOME too much. It is a very capable DE that "just works". Its just too darn simple. There is no excitement with it. I just installed the KDE 4.2rc on Linux Mint. Great job! It needs some more themes (for the windows, icons, and styles (not plasma)) like 3.5.x has. Other than that its stable and looks good. Don't like what it does to GTK apps though. I like some GTK apps to look like they do in GNOME (Firefox, Synaptic) but that is minor.
John: Looking at your LONG list of complaints, I must say that while you do have some valid issues there, it becomes quite clear that you haven't researched those problems at all. I mean, you have several complaints in your list that can already be resolved very, very easily (like the style of the Kmenu, icons on the desktop etc.).
Also, the tone of your post is quite demanding. You wont get far by making demands.
Janne:
"Some people (like you) seem to insist on keep on talking about 4.0. You insist on blaming the developers. What is it exactly that you want? Should the developers flagellate themselves and beg for forgiveness? I would much rather have them coding their butts off, making KDE4 as good as it could be. And that's exactly what they have been doing for the past year."
No, the developers shouldn't beg for forgiveness, but it wouldn't hurt them to admit some mistakes instead of trying to rewrite history (such as: We always said 4.0 wasn't ready for users! There was never any hype!)
But Aaron won't admit mistakes; instead he wants to say "I told you so" to the critics because the team managed to create a usable desktop a year after the first stable release. Look at this language:
"When 4.2 is rolled out to users, I hpe that we can take some time to do some round-table follow up as a community and engage in some deep reflection on how 4.2 (and future releases built upon it) was made at all possible."
A lot of words to say, "I told you so!"
I'm sorry, but now is the time to be modest and just concentrate and creating a nice desktop environment that lives up to all the hype. Having the KDE devs blame distributions, users, and everything else under the sun but themselves isn't helping the project.
Yet now they will have (another) party to pat themselves on the back before they have to waste more time defending themselves from bad press.
KDE has always been a very nice software project, but the arrogance from the dev team over the past year has been extremely off-putting.
@the guy who's pseudonym is a bunch of "no"s:
"But Aaron won't admit mistakes"
then you haven't been reading my blog.
"instead he wants to say "I told you so" to the critics because the team managed to create a usable desktop a year after the first stable release."
i'm not trying to say "I told you so", i'm trying to demonstrate that the path we set out on is the path we have walked. to those who didn't believe us or misunderstood and arrived at incorrect conclusions, that might sound like "I told you so" but what can i do about that? should i simply let those same people continue to spread mistruths?
"I'm sorry, but now is the time to be modest"
you're reading a lot into my words that simply isn't, including arrogance.
"and just concentrate and creating a nice desktop environment that lives up to all the hype."
we are doing that.
"Having the KDE devs blame distributions, users, and everything else under the sun but themselves isn't helping the project."
if you read this entry and past blog entries you'll see that i do take credit for failure where due. KDE was not alone in making the furor around 4.0, however, and there's a lot of things that could be done better by various people in the community. is it so wrong to point those things out, for the betterment of all, while at the same time KDE works on its parts in the machinery too?
"Yet now they will have (another) party to pat themselves on the back"
would you prefer us to beat ourselves with whips and wear sackcloth or something? we worked hard, we've produced a good release .. hell yes we're going to take a moment to appreciate that.
"before they have to waste more time defending themselves from bad press."
i don't *have* to defend against anything. i *choose* to work on improving what doesn't work so that things end up better. that seems to offend you, so perhaps you'd like to go elsewhere and find a community of people who are not interested in constant improvement.
"KDE has always been a very nice software project, but the arrogance from the dev team over the past year has been extremely off-putting."
again, you're ascribing motive and emotion that just doesn't exist. you need to check yourself.
"i don't *have* to defend against anything. i *choose* to work on improving what doesn't work so that things end up better. that seems to offend you, so perhaps you'd like to go elsewhere and find a community of people who are not interested in constant improvement."
Oh, I like constant improvement, but lots of feature regressions from 3.5.x and then partying when you approach that same level of quality is not constant improvement.
"would you prefer us to beat ourselves with whips and wear sackcloth or something? we worked hard, we've produced a good release .. hell yes we're going to take a moment to appreciate that."
Now that you mention it, if I were your boss, I would have made you wear hairshirts for most of 2008. You deserved at least that much. :)
Differences aside, I appreciate your reply. Best of luck in 2009.
"Oh, I like constant improvement, but lots of feature regressions from 3.5.x and then partying when you approach that same level of quality is not constant improvement. "
I would say that 4.2 surpasses 3.5 on just about every level. Sure, there might be some individual features that might not be there, but as a whole, 4.2 is A LOT better than 3.5 ever was.
Do you expect that "constant improvement" means that existing things should never be discarded? It's not quite like that. Sometimes things need to be discarded in order to make the whole better. You can't just keep on piling stuff. Sometimes, you need to trim the dead wood, in order to help the other stuff get better.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry has many great quotes. One of them is:
"Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed."
If you ponder the meaning of that, and understand it, you will see that it's 100% true.
It seems to me that you think that "constant improvement" means that KDE4 should have even more configuration-options, even more widgets, gizmos and gadgets. Even more "stuff" that distracts you. But that path leads to insanity.
KDE4 should be (and it is) about allowing the user to do more. To be more effective and to accomplish more. No, that does not mean that it should be filled with dials, spinboxes and other clutter that distracts you.
Or what do you mean by "quality"? We should keep in mind that KDE4 is now 1 year old, and (including 4.2) it has three major releases. KDE3 is A LOT older with more time worked on it. It should also be noted that while KDE4 is basically a rewrite (that is, it's not that much based on KDE3), KDE3 was a lot less ambitious. It didn't really have any new stuff, it was more about refining the technologies introduced in KDE2.
If we look at other projects, we can see that first few releases of OS X were crap, but today it's few orders of magnitude better than what MacOS 9 was. KDE is in a similar situation. KDE4 if a clean break from the past. It has a lot of new technologies and functionality when compared to it's predecessor, it's quite natural that it takes time for all that stuff to settle down.
Some people seem to suffer from an extreme case of schizophrenia. Take for example the case of desktop-icons and folderview. The old system of piling icons on the desktop was replaced with a system that is a lot more flexible and powerful. What did some people do? Whine. They whined that some essential feature was removed, when in fact a crappy feature was removed and replaced by something that is better, more powerful and more flexible.
If people want power and features, why do they insist on hanging on to features that are crap? Why do they whine when they are presented with features that have more power and flexibility? It honestly makes no sense.
Some people seem to have a nostalgic attachment to KDE3, and anything that deviates from that (no matter if it's ten times better) is automatically bad. Well, those people will never be happy with KDE4,
Here are two more quotes from the great man that seem relevant:
"Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings"
"Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it."
@nononononononononono
Calm down. KDE 4 had been in development for a long time before 4.0. KDE is an open source project and most of the people are not being paid to do so, or are being paid only for a part of what they do. It seems to me that the 4.0 decision was about injecting some new impetus into the project: Getting on a 6-month development cycle, giving the developers a boost and telling other developers that there was a platform there that they could start working on.
KDE wanted a bit of publicity but wasn't quite able to control it. There was a risk individuals or distributions would take it up too quickly and with fedora that happened. I guess the KDE team need to take some blame for not communicating clearly enough but they are only human and they don't have a whole marketing department.
Don't care about that very good man that provide us with the ultimate freedom kernel (and all of us love him for all the works provided us).
KDE it's a wonderful piece of freedom that works absolute well for daily use.
In my opinion the problem of Linus was not of KDE and KDE community or KDE code, but on how Fedora community package that KDE release.
I tested KDE on Fedora 10 and then this release I made for Ubuntu:
http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/infodomestic/ioKde4.2-Ubuntu8.10_8.04_InfodomesticObjects0.9.36
And I found the latest one that absolute rocks for daily use.
The Fedora KDE release crashes!!
I'm an heavy GNOME user and I recognize/realize the super value of the latest KDE available.
I believe that your code is the ultimate cross platform framework that become the next beam to follow.
It's all a matter on how you compile and package..
The result could be rock solid.
To Arron and the Developers - Great work - go party. Thanks for your time, energy and commitment.
To the nay-sayers and the nono's
Shut your gobs - what have you done? I bet sweet FA. - This is not a spectator sport - you don't get to boo and hiss from the side lines.
Don't like it? - go fork with sjv!
Talking of svj - How is the fork going mate?
Did you get enough hand clappers to 'decide that another path is a better path'?
Have you restarted 3.5 yet? Please; Is 3.6 currently in Beta or alpha?
Ping me when I can download the sourcecode - I'll shout my wants louder than any other non-contributor - "MONO, MONO, MONO"
Tut. - But I guess you do what you do and the KDE developers do what they do.
You shrill, and the KDE developers, well develop?
My experience has been similar to Linuses. 4.0 was plain broken. 4.1 was unstable. I think it is distro managers fault mainly for not offering it as an option instead of replacing the kde3 series completely so as a long time KDE user I was forced to seek refuge in GNOME. But now Jaunty has 4.2 and I'm slowly going back to KDE. Still using Metacity as WM tho, because kwin does not handle GIMP right.
Fix that and Ill happily stick with KDE.
Hi Aaron, this is insane, KDE 4.2 its here, and its f_cking ready!!!!!
Let then try 4.2, and test the community effort, its speak for it self...
btw the same Linus says about gnome (2006) "if you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it."
1 He only tried kde4.0;
2 He become an idiot;
3 Hes tried to peace off kde developers in a constructive way;
The key word for most of the people is "Usability" sure KDE4 is nice, pretty, etc. But if you can't get work done, or it takes more effort to do what you have done before then it isn't really an upgrade to us.
There is less information on the screen the effects slow down the system greatly (very greatly) and we now have a lot of 'don't go there' or 'it's only this way' type situations such as setting up our desktops.
I understand it is probably a great technological improvement on the back end but the front end is killing your user base. Have you guys ever considered porting over the 3.x style themes into 4 for those who don't have a need for the fancy borders?
"The key word for most of the people is "Usability" sure KDE4 is nice, pretty, etc. But if you can't get work done, or it takes more effort to do what you have done before then it isn't really an upgrade to us."
For many people they can get their job done BETTER in KDE4 than in KDE3. At least for me KDE3 was a confusing experience. Whenever I tried to do something, I kept on running in the confusion, clutter and complexity. Everything was more complex that it needed to be, everything seemed to take more effort than it needed to.
And what functionality is missing in KDE4 that prevents you (or someone else) from doing their job? Am I to believe that (fopr example) because the panel does not autohide in 4.1, it prevents you from doing your job? Or because icons on the desktop was replaced by folderview, it somehow prevents you from doing your job? Yor workflow can't be relient on those two features, so what exactly is missing?
"There is less information on the screen"
What information do you want? At least I want to see things that are important, not superfluous stuff that only serves to distract and confuse. So let's hear it: what information do you want to see?
"the effects slow down the system greatly (very greatly)"
I run on KDE on a laptop that is several years old, and I don't experience that slowdown. But if you experience it, you can always disable the effects.
"I understand it is probably a great technological improvement on the back end but the front end is killing your user base."
What is missing? Could you provide some tangible examples of functionality that prevents you from doing yo9ur job?
@joecommodore
There should not be a problem finding minimalist themes for your widgets (Qt widgets like sliders etc.), kwin and plasma. Compositing can be turned off and kde for the most part is as fast or faster than kde3.
The 4.2 cycle has been focused on making sure that you can do everything "sane" that you could do in KDE 3.5.
I think and hope that if you try using KDE 4.2 and changing a few options to meet your tastes you will find the experience surpasses that of 3.5
So what? Linus chose to stay with Fedora even if it means using Gnome just to get going with his life, what's the big deal?
I too am so into openSUSE that even if openSUSE messes KDE (3.5 or 4) I will use Gnome just to stay with it. Heck I would even use TWM if Gnome also gets whacked. In fact, I don't even use X on some of my installs.
I really don't understand why a lot of people can say KDE 4.0 was bad without even understanding what the release is for. At the application level, yes it sucked because it was not intended for production use. But have you people looked under the hood and appreciated what the KDE devs have brought us with KDE 4.0? I think not, all you can do, KDE haters, is rant! 4.2 is now very usable, but still you rant about how it is so bad even up to 4.3.
Really, have you people ever appreciated the technology behind Plasma, Phonon, Decibel, Solid, etc. Again, the answer is no because all you can see is the broken panel.
The foundations went first, then the applications will come next (as evident in 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3). Is that so hard to understand? Of course it is, if you are one of those who refuses to accept the fact that...KDE 4 RULES!!!
PS
My impression is that the KDE folks are aiming for uber portability. You can have KDE anywhere you can port the pillars of KDE. Again, just my impression.
I remember that in kubuntu 8.04 were 2 CD , one with 3.5 marked as rock solid and one with kde 4.0 marked as for early adopters.
Good job KDE team, keep up the good work!
IMO the problem laid largely with you KDE guys regarding the naming/versioning of the KDE4 releases. Frankly, KDE4.0.x (and perhaps even 4.1.x) should have been named as beta releases. By naming them as 4.x releases, you set expectations on them that they were ready to be shipped with distros and used in the mainstream. So you can't blame the distros for shipping them. You set the expectations and so its you that inadvertently caused a lot of the disappointment.
I love KDE, but frankly I went through the same experience as Linus and am also one of the people that he mentions that you "lost". I tried KDE4.0, found it to be such a big change to my DE that it impacted my productivity, and gave up. Although I haven't defected to GNOME, I'm planning on staying with KDE3.5 for the foreseeable future.
Although I'll probably revisit KDE4 at some point, I'm not really dying to do so. Just seemed like a lot of changes for change's sake - and took away a lot of great KDE functionality that I relied on.
I hope that you guys prove me wrong when I try it again down the road!
To me, the biggest surprise here is that Linus uses a distro. I always suspected that he builds his own computer from scratch, built his kernel and installed the GNU tools (maybe with the complete SVN repository on his computer and a script to update periodically) and other system and user tools.
There is and should be some blame placed on the distributions. After all it is there responsibility to test and package applications that they feel are credible for there user base. Smaller (and sometimes wiser) distributions like PCLinuxOS have chosen to not even focus on packaging KDE 4 until it's developers can at least admit it's ready for the user. When you have KDE developers saying (even when it was first released) that 4.0 was not ready for the "normal" user then you better believe anything packaged or put out by distributions is going to be not stable. Last I checked this was a DE which is a pretty major undertaking. You can argue that with so many ideas, features etc.. going into it when would it ever be a 4.0 release. Was KDE 3.5 a truly 3.0 release then? It's up to the development team to call the release whatever they want, it's up to the distributions to see if they can make it work to the users better experience. There was and is a disconnect. It seems as thought the longer for new technology (due to the feature drought of almost every other DE) caused distributions to jump the gun. If Linus can right a Kernel he can change distributions to use KDE 3.5 he can obviously find packages or compile his own. If Gnome was as bad as he said it was it seems like he would have. It's a shame, he should be one of the most understanding and he isn't but I guess he his human and just one human at that.
I was a KDE fan of over 8 years, I was always impressed with it's speed and quick responsiveness. Also, multiple monitor support was great. Compared to what I felt was gnome bloated feel.
KDE 4.1 - sent me running to Gnome.
I don't think I will be looking to KDE for some time to come. They have sacrificed performance, usability, and stability for eye candy.
It is now the bloated, slow, feature starved OS Gnome was. What a reversal! it isn't even default on a single major distribution...
I guess KDE will be a "once was great" memory.
Stop blaming distros. Blame redhat or novell if you want, for not paying gazillions dollars for quality assurance, but the packagers just listened to the developers which assured them KDE-4.0 (and then 4.1) was all right (it's easy to dig out links proving that, except those links would be deleted from this blog).
As to "better as a whole", KDE-4.2 is indeed thousand times better than 4.0 or 4.1, but it still has plasma crashing here and there, it has pathetic bugs with saving settings, and it has real features missing too. Example: kdvi is gone, okular hasn't replaced its functionality - that's no TeX for you.
After having used KDE for close to 10 years, I think its time to find something else. In a nutshell: KDE 3.5 was easy and intuitive, KDE4x is not. What the f... is a widget? (Google for an answer?) If I need a manual to operate (the simpler things) of my desktop, it has already failed. Simple as that.
What I need to do my job is functionality! Being curious about KDE (I think it was 4.2) I installed it on one of the machines. I noticed the change/lack of functionality and when I found out it was running slower than the old version, I knew it was time to move on.
I feel sorry for the KDE-developers, as I have a suspicion they work hard. But then I think: what gives you guys the right to rip apart what was good and trusted for the past 10 years? Who made you own KDE? I argue that KDE belongs to the users as much as it does to the developers.
This may not particularly popular, but that's how I feel.
Since I think KDE3.5 has gone for good - good bye.
I completely agree with the last comment. Fundamental decisions on priorities including whether/how much KDE 4 should replicate KDE 3.5 should be up to users as well as developers--at least if we strive for an open mindset.
Developers should not have the ultimate say just because they happen to have control. Who really sacrifices more in this case, the developers who work essentially for free or the users who have had to devote their own time and tried patience in testing recent development? Most have jobs that require a working desktop, yet they-some enthusiastically-play the guinea pigs.
I'm still on 3.5 (unlike Linus) and while I will certainly try out 4.2 (probably on several different distros) but unless I am convinced it is the functional equivalent of my present desktop, I will wait for 4.3. If 4.3 disappoints then you will find me over in the Gnome camp. I am willing to experiment and try new ways of doing things, but I have to get my work done too. Still, I'm not negative on KDE (yet), as all the ideas seem good; I can wait while their implementation catches up. Kudos Aaron, keep up the good work!
"If I need a manual to operate (the simpler things) of my desktop, it has already failed. Simple as that."
Like what? KDE4 is fundamentally identical to KDE3. that is, it uses icons, pointers, windows and menus. Now, they might look somewhat different, but do you need a manual if appearance of some UI-element changes? Buttons are still buttons in KDE4.
So, could you provide some examples of the simple things that are overtly complicated in KDE4? That, in your words, "need a manual to operate"?
As usual, I find the complaints in this discussion to be quite lacking. I don't dispute that people are unhappy with KDE4. But what I would like to see is detailed complaints, as opposed to saying stuff like "its missing some features". Instead of giving vague complaints like that, please, PLEASE give feedback that can be acted upon!
And to continue:
"I noticed the change/lack of functionality[/quote]
Like what? Please provide tangible examples. I'm not discounting your findings, I just want feedback that developers can use to imporove the product.
"and when I found out it was running slower than the old version, I knew it was time to move on."
I'm running KDE4 on an old laptop, and it runs juzt fine. So needless to say that I don't share your opinion here.
That said, we need to keep in mind that KDE3.5 has had optimizations done to it it starting from KDE2.0, is it really that surprising that it runs faster (for some at least) than brand new codebase does?
"But then I think: what gives you guys the right to rip apart what was good and trusted for the past 10 years?"
Um, they are the people who create KDE. Are you saying that they do not have the right to code what they want to code? You are in no position to make demands. Should I have the right to tell you how you decorate your livingroom, just because I would happen to spend some time there? By your logic, I do.
That said, as good as KDE3 was, it wasn't suitable to build the future of the project on. It was increasingly starting to feel like Windows 95 in OS X-world.
And, FWIW, tyhey did not rip apart KDE3. The code is still there, you can use it if you want it. I might give you some credit if the developers ha ddestroyed KDE3 source and destroued every last trace of it. But they didn't.
"I argue that KDE belongs to the users as much as it does to the developers."
Just because you happen to use something, does not give you the right to demand how future versions of the product should be designed. you can give feedback, sure, but to think that you can basically say "this thing here is MINE, and I demand that you design it the way I want it to be designed!" is a bit selfish.
KDE is a meritocracy. What merit to you earn by simply using the software? Should I have the right to mane demands to Genelec-engineers, just because I happen to have their speakers in my living-room?
But in a way, KDE does belong to you.You are free to take the KDE3-codebase and fork it. Go right ahead and do that.
@Janne:
"Now, they might look somewhat different, but do you need a manual if appearance of some UI-element changes? Buttons are still buttons in KDE4."...
Ok, I'll answer this one, you asked for it, here you go, try this one out:
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/3741/snapshot2cs8.png
show me how simple it is to do this in plasma(plasma-desktop) without the panel spacer, cause:
1) it makes plasma crash
2) it's a hacky method
3) some distros don't ship it, because it wasn't in the main repositories
4*) it's not a simple solution
the background is important too.
@Luca Cappelletti: Did you file any bug reports for your crashes? If not, why not?
@Jasper: Decibel? What Decibel? Are you aware that it's only optionally used by Kopete at the moment and that the maintainer and primary developer of Kopete considers the Decibel backend experimental and unsuitable for production use? It's also not the only "pillar of KDE 4" which underdelivered: Sonnet is basically just a port of KSpell2, all the planned new features are missing. Akonadi only came with 4.1 (not 4.0) and starts actually being used only in 4.2.
@zooplah: Well, he obviously doesn't run the Fedora kernel. ;-)
@JMiahMan: The problem is, they didn't say that KDE "4.0 was not ready for the "normal" user" back when it was released.
@Yevgen Muntyan: Uh, Okular displays DVI just fine.
@Kevin Kofler: display without inverse search is rather useless.
Two things about Qt 4 I might add which aren't the fault of the KDE developers but contribute to the beta feel of the desktop:
1)Slow painting. Try resizing for example a konqueror window in 3.5 vs dolphin in 4.2. KDE 3 is much snappier. Contrary to what some claim, Qt 4.5 doesn't seem to remedy this.
2)Qt 4.4 doesn't support subpixel slight font hinting. Qt 4.5 fixes this, but probably won't come until KDE 4.3. All fonts currently look like crap because anything more than slight ruins kerning.
Point is, Qt 4 isn't even at a polished level yet. That reason alone is enough for KDE 4.2 to be considered beta software, let alone KDE 4.0 or 4.1.
"show me how simple it is to do this in plasma(plasma-desktop) without the panel spacer, cause:"
Do what? Have systray on the right and bunch of icons on the left? I think I already had something similar in KDE4, and it was pretty easy to do.
"the background is important too."
Why? Why do I get a feeling that you have a really, really corner case (a panel that is set up in some certain way), and if you can't duplicate it 100% in KDE4, it means KDE4 has "failed".
But, FWIW, I could give it a shot later. My system is currently hosed, so I will be reinstalling anyway, and upgrading to 4.2, so I will try to come up with something sinilar (well, maybe not that horrible background...).
And to continue on my previous comment: I was replying to a claim that says that "you need a manual to operate simple things in the desktop". I fail to see what your question about panel-setup has to do with that claim.
@Janne:
"Do what? Have systray on the right and bunch of icons on the left? I think I already had something similar in KDE4, and it was pretty easy to do."
Yes, that's exactly what I was trying, to say, that I can't do simple things like this in KDE4, that's why I'm not using it.
"Why? Why do I get a feeling that you have a really, really corner case (a panel that is set up in some certain way), and if you can't duplicate it 100% in KDE4, it means KDE4 has "failed"."
This is how I want my desktop to be, and I don't feel that I used extreme things. I just simply want a K menu, a few application launchers, a show desktop button, and a color picker on the left side, and a systray and clock on the right side, I think this is fairly trivial.
KDE4 as a whole didn't fail(in my eyes), I use a few KDE4 apps, it's just that I don't want to loose my favored KDE3 desktop features.
"But, FWIW, I could give it a shot later. My system is currently hosed, so I will be reinstalling anyway, and upgrading to 4.2, so I will try to come up with something sinilar (well, maybe not that horrible background...)."
It doesn't have to be this background, only something custom, I know making a custom image file a background is not considered an elegant thing to do, still, it's something that I like.
"Buttons are still buttons in KDE4"
I was replying to this, that either the things I need are either very hard to achieve or missing.
Disclaimer:
These are not rants, but personal opinions, none of these will make me switch to GNOME, even if it means using the KDE3 desktop forever.
"Yes, that's exactly what I was trying, to say, that I can't do simple things like this in KDE4, that's why I'm not using it."
Like I said; I recall having a similar setup in KDE4 and it was pretty easy thing to do.
"This is how I want my desktop to be, and I don't feel that I used extreme things. I just simply want a K menu, a few application launchers, a show desktop button, and a color picker on the left side, and a systray and clock on the right side, I think this is fairly trivial."
And like I said, I had something more or less similar in KDE4. What am I missing here?
"I was replying to this, that either the things I need are either very hard to achieve or missing."
But they aren't. IIRC, I created a panel, placed a Kmenu in the left along with pager and show desktop. On the right I placed systray and clock. There was no voodoo involved, I just placed the icons like I wanted to.
That said, I then moved to a whole new setup: No Kmenu at all, taskbar on the bottom, a small hiding panel on the right of the screen with systray, clock and few other icons. Top-right was a hot-corner that showed me all windows. That's how far I got with my setup when I accidentally nuked my system, so I might end up with something different in the end.
I don't think a setup like that is possible with KDE3. Not to mention all those nice touches, like glowing panels when the pointer is near them.
@Kevin Koffler: we were pretty damn clear that 4.0 wasn't for end users.
if, as someone who works on a distro, your entire decision making process on "are they saying 4.0 is ready?" starts and ends with one public announcement (because there was one announcement where 4.0 was discussed without provisos) then you are exhibiting precisely the kind of issue i have with distros.
if, however, as someone who works on a distro, you read but ignored all the advice we did give everywhere else, then you are also exhibiting precisely the kind of issue i have with distros.
in retrospect, we should have included in every single public discussion of the 4.0 release a bit about who the release was for.
but to hang us for missing that in one announcement when we communicated it clearly elsewhere is brain damage.
we did communicate, some distros just dropped the ball anyways and they should take the credit for that move.
@Joe: "After having used KDE for close to 10 years, I think its time to find something else. In a nutshell: KDE 3.5 was easy and intuitive, KDE4x is not. What the f... is a widget? (Google for an answer?)"
what the f... is an applet? turns out lots of people didn't know that term either. however, "widget" is one of the common terms being used for these kinds of things now.
"If I need a manual to operate (the simpler things) of my desktop, it has already failed. Simple as that."
so you never, ever had to learn how to use a computer? the knowledge just lept into your head fully formed? please.
"What I need to do my job is functionality!"
agreed.
"Being curious about KDE (I think it was 4.2) I installed it on one of the machines."
4.2 is set to be release *today* so you either installed a development version (which would be odd given your "i need things to just work" position) or you are not remembering correctly which makes me take the rest of what you say with a whole lot of salt.
"I noticed the change/lack of functionality and when I found out it was running slower than the old version, I knew it was time to move on."
nvidia card? :)
"But then I think: what gives you guys the right to rip apart what was good and trusted for the past 10 years?"
your question is flawed. KDE 3 was not so good as to not be improvable and it was not trusted by more people than those who did trust it.
as for who gives me the right to work on these issues, the same way i got the right to work on making KDE 3 rock. so what's your point?
"Who made you own KDE?"
by working on it and creating that thing you call "KDE", those of us who contributed to it have a certain kind of ownership of it.
"I argue that KDE belongs to the users as much as it does to the developers."
and you'd be wrong. it's like saying people who drive cars should have the final say in where the support struts go in a bridge. it's lunacy.
the people building such a bridge ought to know where people drive, how they drive and what they expect from a bridge. that knowledge can be gained by working with drivers to dig out this information.
so your assertion boils down to the concept that we as developers need to know how users "drive" their desktops. good news is that we have been paying attention. bad news for some people who drive a bit differently than others is that the bridge we're building now is meant to be driven on by everyone, not just you, and so some of the odd things in KDE3 that fit your driving habits are changing.
you may find that your driving habits leave room for improvement.
and finally, if you wish to have some ownership over something you merely consume but never give anything substantial to you may want to consider the idea that your feelings of entitlement are bizarrely out of whack.
given all of the above, if you do move on to something else, i honestly won't miss you. others will fill your seat several times over and i won't have to deal with your attitude that you own my work.
@Antal: and if i trot out my screenshots of plasma configured in useful ways that kicker and/or kdesktop can't be, what does that prove?
btw, there's a report on bugs.kde.org for the specific issue you are highlighting there and it will get addressed.
@ Kevin Kofler:
You're right but my fedora 10 installation was made into virtualbox with a 512MB of host ram and was painful for me to do a full test with reports.
But at the end there was some crashes that I do not expect if compared with my package that works very well.So it was up to fedora on how they fit KDE into that complex system.
@ Aaron:
I think the only very big mistake taken by the KDE team is to claim 4.x before 4.2 real code release.
X.0 something in the average means: ready for stable production (or it's expected to be so).
In case of a desktop environment this could be understood as: ready for stable spread to the end-users.
For me KDE is at 3.9 and when 4.2 will be release and tested I'll consider it as a real 4.0 (for end user point of view I mean).
The KDE team until today produced just a very big marketing campaign made by hype..that will be fully consolidated and validated only with 4.2.
For the rest of us...it's very clear that from 4.0 there was a revolution that break with the 3.x past and 4.0 release marks it as the "change".
I fully agreed with that "change", but we have to expect negative feedback from general end users due to the instability from the pre 4.2 releases.
From the "KDE users pool" point of view, Linus is a generic user and not a distro hacker.He's just a generic distro consumer and if the distro (in this case Fedora) does not provide the stable feedback that all of us expect, you've to expect reactions.
I don't think it's a very big problem for the future of KDE that will spreads everywhere through appliances.
@Aaron J. Seigo:
"and if i trot out my screenshots of plasma configured in useful ways that kicker and/or kdesktop can't be, what does that prove?"
If it would convince me(after I tried it out), that it's better than the way I use kicker & friends, and if no broken_or_outdated_distribution_package/fglrx/nvidia-glx/64_bit would stop me, I would definitely use plasma that way instead of kicker.
I always use what is optimal for my work-flow.
"btw, there's a report on bugs.kde.org for the specific issue you are highlighting there and it will get addressed."
That just proves that I'm not the only one, who has that issue, and that you [the kde devs] are working hard. If these get fixed I will definitely use plasma-desktop, a the meantime, I am very happy with kdesktop&kicker and KDE4 apps that work for me.
@Luca: "The KDE team until today produced just a very big marketing campaign made by hype"
i've been ignoring that meme for a while hoping it would just get discarded with other half-baked theories. since some stick with it, i'll address it:
us writing about what we're working on in our blogs and talking about what we're working on with others in podcasts is not a "big marketing campaign". it's neither big nor a campaign. it's communicating.
we could just stop communicating and leave you all in the dark. that is an option.
but it wasn't hype then nor is it hype now: it is precisely what we were working on then, and what we are working on now.
realizing that people were unable to make these distinctions on their own, we have taken to trying to always mention precisely when what we are talking about is expected. that was something we directed kde bloggers to do specifically, and i think you'll see it fairly often in practice now.
before 4.0, we really didn't realize that people were that confused by what to us was clearly communication about what we were working towards. so we've worked on clarifying that for people.
however, that does not make what we communicated then or now either a "marketing campaign" or "hype".
Don't bother . That's what people are, including me. The good stuff needs no advertising. We all will appreciate the new era of KDE 4.0
Some small disappointments are small price to pay, even if they come from Linus, who at last is mainly a heavy command line user I suppose
First up, Kudos to Aaron and the rest the KDE team for the efforts on KDE 4.2, which has shaped up to be great step forward for KDE 4.x and desktops.
Second up, Kudos to Aaron and the rest the KDE team for knuckling down and getting on with the job of making KDE better, despite the onslaught of often fouled mouthed and impatient detractors - they've kept faith and executed on making KDE better by the day.
Third up, Kudos to Nokia for commiting to making QT 4.5 LGPL. This is a great step forward for making QT development more pervasive, as it deserves to be given it's the best toolkit of its kind.
Finally I'd say the detractors of KDE 4.x and the KDE dev team might be loud, but this I see as a desperate attempt at control, control they don't have because they aren't are contributors. Often the weaker the argument the louder one has to shout to be heard... Another trait of many of the detractors is that the cite things that were broken in the past, yet ignore that they've been addressed. How much is this a wilful ignorance, how much is just plain being mis-informed?
Blogs like this do try to address the issue of getting information out there, alas the support for comments is a double edged sword though - it gives all those detractors an avenue to vent and pass on mis-information or out of date information, tarnishing what is real progress.
Congrats to the KDE dev team on 4.2, it's been a hard but worthy cause :-)
Robert.
@ aaron seigo
"in retrospect, we should have included in every single public discussion of the 4.0 release a bit about who the release was for.
but to hang us for missing that in one announcement when we communicated it clearly elsewhere is brain damage."
Was that admitting a mistake, or some sort of snarky jab at distros and critics?
At the very least, you should have included such information in the main release announcement on kde.org. The fact that you may have clearly communicated it wasn't ready for users on your blog and mailing lists doesn't make up for that by half. That wasn't just one annoucement... that was the one that really counted.
But as others have pointed out, the real issue with 2008 was the KDE team trying to push out a beta project as a final release (with no caveat such as dev's release). I understand your reasoning for it, but IMO you should have waited until plasma was finished a bit more.
That's all in the past. Linux users are hungry for a modern desktop so I think you'll have no problem wooing users past 4.2 (and more likely 4.3).
And despite the continued flames you are receiving from internet jackasses like myself, I really think you should temper down your animosity towards critical users and (especially) distros. Dissing distros is not going to help KDE in the long run, and there's no point in trying to point fingers and assign blame about 2008 and KDE4's release (especially when you are so reluctant to admit any part in it yourself).
@Aaron
I know you're absolute right and I fully agreed.
I know very well the means of the terms communications and I'm closed to you about what you said but...
I used the obvious imprecise terms "marketing campaign" as the indirect effect of KDE dev team day by day value added communications.
I don't think that you made a closed-private-product sell base marketing campaign ;)
The great value provided by the world of KDE has no price at all.I thank you every day.
about:
"we could just stop communicating and leave you all in the dark. that is an option"
my answer is: you cannot!
You cannot stop communicate and you have the big responsibility to do right communications because you address a big project where thousands of peoples are waiting for.
You cannot leave peoples in the dark because it's a balanced system...the peoples leaves you in the dark.
You have no option, you must communicate and now..also in the right way.
But I understood very well what you mean, this are just my little opinion on how I think a development community with that responsibility should drive communications.
About "hipe",
as you wrote: "people were unable to make these distinctions"
I agree with you but I enforce the concept of good communications with the rest of the world.
Yes peoples were unable to make differences and separate technical writing from official communication.This is why KDE team should clarify the distinction using a common know standard method: 3.9 instead the old 4.0
Ok today all this verbal speculation are part of a past to be forgotten.
You said:
"however, that does not make what we communicated then or now either a "marketing campaign" or "hype". "
I'm with you.
The new 4.2 "aeon" bullet proof Rocks!
I'm actually rather excited about KDE 4.2... I'm returning to the main KDE page and refreshing it every few minutes to see if the release is official yet... and I come here to Aaron's blog and what do I see ? A lot of people attacking and complaining and generally being non-constructive. I love to be informed by Aaron's blog and often read the comments as well but maybe Aaron should just turn comments off... I'm not sure the grief is worth it.
@Kevin: Yes I'm aware of it. But do you agree that Decibel is a cool piece of technology when it becomes fully implemented?
Just give it some time :) Best case it gets a lot of love and integrated into KDE 4, Worst case it gets trashed. Either way, what do you have to lose?
* "underdelivered"
* "all the planned new features are missing"
* "starts actually being used only in 4.2."
These are some harsh words you got there. Did you fund the development of KDE 4? Of course we can donate, but does that give us the right to say such words?
1. kde4 is heading in an awesome direction despite what a minor group of extremely vocal people have said. Very small group, very loud group (you just think you aren't a small group because you're all so damned loud).
2. I hate to use terms like "normal" and "weird", but most (all?) of you complainers are "weird" (infact probably all of us reading this blog are "weird"). You're not "normal" computer users. You like technology, you read slashdot, and when something breaks on your computer you can probably fix it. We (the "weird") are a microscopic subset of computer users. The rest of the world, "normal" computer users love where kde4 is headed (in my experience). When Aaron J says "lets build a desktop that will sustain us in the next 10 years" I'm sure he's taking into account that all of us "weird" computer users are about to become the minority of kde (or gnu/linux) users. Gnu/Linux is on the verge (within the next 10 years) to break into the mainstream. Show your "weird" kde3.5 setups to "normal" computer users (your mac/xp/vista users) - their heads will explode immediately. Show a nice plasma desktop to a "normal" user and they'll drop their macbook pro / aero and run to see what you're pimpin.
3. If you really like kde3.5 so much more than kde4 then fork it. Oh, what's that? You can't? Right, I forgot, there's only a tiny minority of you which actually don't like kde4, it just feels like there are so many of you because you're all so damned loud. It actually takes man power to create/maintain a desktop environment, and man power is *NOT* what you have because there are truly so few of you. (And stop saying "there are alot of us!" because you know X hundred other people who agree with you - because there are literally millions who don't agree with you).
4. Expect high quality from free software - but don't expect *YOUR* software. The kde team is not here to make you happy. Infact, they are not here to make any one person happy. They are here to provide a high quality desktop environment which many people will enjoy (not everyone). Stop complaining, seriously.
5. About the Linus thing. See point 2. He's a kernel hacker... anyone who codes in vi or emacs should not be allowed to have final say on design decisions :p All kidding aside, usability studies, people who are entirely dedicated to ui layout etc... every desktop environment should have these people (which of course kde4 does!)
To the whole kde team - Thanks! kde3.5 wasn't for me, but kde4 is so incredibly stellar I truly can't thank you enough! Keep on rockin and I can't wait to see the magic you'll come out with next!
The rant to end all rants!!!
This has been dragging on for ooohhh so long it just wastes all our time, pro KDE or not.
The fact remains: KDE 4 aimed to be the next generation desktop and though not there yet, progress is being made everyday.
So, this is what I have to say:
* To the KDE devs, please ignore the jealous zealots and continue what you do best: make KDE better everyday.
* To the KDE supporters, let us continue to help the KDE devs in making KDE 4 the best desktop around. Use KDE, file bugs, etc.
* To the KDE haters, it's very clear that you won't be pleased no matter what the KDE devs do and no matter how much improvement goes into KDE 4. The KDE community is now living in 4.2 while you still continue to live in 4.0. Saying "KDE 4 sucks so I'm off to using [insert better-than-KDE-alternative here]" is plain and simple propaganda against KDE when 3.5 is just as good an alternative as the others.
Go KDE!!!
Just some points, without trying to put more wood in the fire:
- most complains I hear about KDE4 (not the 4.0 version number fiasco, but current KDE 4.X) are really, really wrong. Most things are already fixed, some will not be - as 4.X will never be as fast as 3.X is, it is fatter, live with it or do as most, change.
- kwin in 4.0 is really poor, even without effects, with it it is really unusable to work. I used kde with metacity and it was much better.
- why some KDE developers always come with this "you are not happy, develop yourself"? MAN I AM TIRED OF THIS!!! This gets me angry really. Are you developing KDE for other developers or for users? Users do not have the knowledge or time to develop, but still we must listen to theyr complains. Why taking "I like KDE 3 better than 4" so harsh? The best answer to this should be: "we are trying to make KDE4 great, if you like 3.X better, we are also happy because version 3 was a great product and your voice is a sign we must work hard to make anyone happy with version 4".
Is this so hard to be a little polite when answering to users?
- I had a lot of discussions with Aaron, mostly because 4.0 and 4.1 sucked big time, but I did sent a mail with congrats for 4.2 version, even that it still have a lot of bugs in RC that worries me. And I accepted that his vision for Plasma was right, even that I still think KDE shipped a alfa quality code as 4.0, this is no reason to keep complaining forever.
- Please dear KDE developers, do not try to say 4.0 was meant to be only for testing and put the balim in distros. it it was the case you would have named it experimental-KDE4. It is embarasing reading the release notes for 4.0 and you stating that distros should not had used it if you did not told anyone at the time that is was not ready for user-comsumption.
All in all, some posts here from both sides are really pathetic, and I'm ashamed of me and (alsmot) everybody else :-(
PS: I am a developer, and I do not tell anyone "fix it yourself" when they post me a bug or wish :)
warning! this is not a rant!
Aaron J, Kevin K, Janne,
love KDE 4, love that it looks great too. I do in fact believe that nowadays your computing device needs to do that. Take iPhone, KDE4, even Vista....
I think it is also grat that i can choose to run Suse 11 with KDE4.1, Centos 5.2 with KDE3.5, and Intrepid with Gnome. All 3 of which are actually awesome for certain things.
you want to use your OS for "production"? there is almost nothing that does not just works on Centos 5, and that KDE 3.5.x is not grat for.
You want a slick unassuming install and forget laptop distro? Intrepid is your friend.
You want to testdrive KDE4.x? OpenSuse is quite awesome (sorry kevin :)
Anyway i jsut want to explain what desktop icons are needed for (desperately)
my desktop looks like the top of my desk. Everything i need and use, or might need ever again is somewhere on top of my desk - put it in a drawer and it is forever lost to me...
i blame this on genetics :) Men are hunters and gatherers, Not searchers and finders. there is a difference
If i "search" for something, i go to where i "know" it is (usually) then i "find" it. If it is not there, lost forever....
Once i start putting icons representing files into other icons representing directories.... lost forever....
so, what does that mean in everyday computing life?
my work desktop is KDE 3.5.x as it will gladly let my put enough items on my desktop to hide the wallpaper.
my recommended non-expert desktop distro for laptop use is intrepid with gnome, not becaus i like gnome, just because Ubuntu functions great on a laptop and KDE4 integration is week.
my current (far and away!) favorite is OpenSuse with KDE 4.1.x. love the look and feel, all features of my thinkpad work (almost as well as on intrepid). KDE4 has all kinds of little quirks (learning to deal with them) don't quite like the fact that one can accidentally "disappear" the start button. (no i am not the only one to have that happen) but heck i figured out how to add the start button widget back....
So, yes i have a plasma theme and another desktop theme..... it has quirks...
I expect to use KDE3.5.x till i have a KDE4 desktop that makes me totally happy, yes, it will happen, i am confident.
Gnome has never made me happy, hardly ever pisses me off, some people like it, fair enough,
As i said thanks Aaron, thanks KDE guys, and Janne, please let us live even if we want icons on our desktops to make up for our inherent inability to "find" things that are not right in front of our noses :)
friendly regards
Uli (active suse redhat ubuntu kde3 kde4 gnome user)
@Uli: "Anyway i jsut want to explain what desktop icons are needed for (desperately)"
this is possible in 4.1, though not very elegantly, but has a gui to configure it in 4.2 and works rather nicely.
"my work desktop is KDE 3.5.x as it will gladly let my put enough items on my desktop to hide the wallpaper."
so obviously it's time to move to KDE 4 ;)
"don't quite like the fact that one can accidentally "disappear" the start button."
this is no different than kicker in kde3, so i can't understand how this would be a differentiator between KDE3 and KDE4.
I agree with Linus. KDE4 is a big thing but it's a bit early to use it on my old laptop. Hopefully, KDE 4.2 will give me the stability, but it needs a bit more time.
ps. The default theme is wasting a lot of space with 1024x768 resolution. Hopefully, I'll be able to find a better one as well.
another perspective: I'm a relatively new user, having switched to Linux just last year.
For what I need to do, KDE 4.1 works fine - and looks great. I'm not a power user, nor do I understand what's going on... but, for me, KDE 4.x is a great step forward, and I only have anticipation for where the project will go.
(please forgive my english!!!)
@aaron
first of all I'd like to thank you, and all kde devs of course, for your efforts (gee, we should praise you just for reading all these looooong list of posts...)
from my point of view the "4.0 fiasco" it's a thing of the past, but (there's always a but) I think we should learn something from that, and it would be great that we could show we took some concrete action in order to prevent such things from happening again.
So, in the hope of being useful, I'd like to propose the following idea:
(maybe what I'm about to say it's unfeasible, or plain stupid, I'm no kde bug tracking system expert at all)
I think it would be a great idea if before any major release (let's take kde 4.3 for example) kde would launch several (as many as needed) release Kandidates with the following naming convention:
kde 4.3RC1.235.789
235 being the number of "critical bugs" registered in https://bugs.kde.org/ and 789 the number of not so critical ones, at the time of freezing the release.
That way it would be absolutely clear the status of the release, besides it would be an objective (if indeed exists such a thing as objectivity) indicator, that could be validated by everyone.
The nice thing about it is that it would not reflect the developers opinions (or wishes), it would just show what has been registered so far by the community as a whole in the bug system.
And more important, somehow, the final user would be involved in the naming of the release, I mean, in great part, bug reporting comes from the final users.
Kde could compromise itself not to launch any final release until there are no critical bugs, or until a certain threshold is reached.
I think it would clarify things a lot, it would put some of the responsibility on the end user side and it would let everybody check the advances more easily.
I know it would be harder to launch a release on schedule, but releasing with critical bugs just to arrive on time is no solution either ;-) (in other words, let's stick with the it's ready when it's ready philosophy)
Just think of, in the release announcement, on every kde 4.3 rc1.xxx.yyy, just clicking on xxx would take you to the critical bugs list at freezing time of the release.
And it would show everybody that we acknowledged there was something wrong with the kde 4.0 release, and that we did something about it to involve the community in preventing these issues from happening again.
Well, I just wanted to contribute in some positive way...
so aaron, what do you think about it???
@Aaron
"I already know of at least one significant downstream that is migrating to KDE 4 due to 4.2; and no, they aren't migrating from KDE 3."
Would it be too much to ask to name them? In case you have done so already elsewhere, sorry for not bothering to look.
We distro people have based our decisions on communications from upstream.
I don't think you have. Even I knew what KDE 4.0 was going to be and that waiting to include a 4.x release or including a still-supported 3.x release was always going to be the wise choice.
And guess what, when 4.0 was being developed, it was to be a great new release, not much was said about feature regressions.
That's your job as distribution maintainers. You have to ask what is good enough to go into your own distribution. It's not something Fedora is particularly good at, as PulseAudio has shown us. I hope you get things right in future for your users.
@aseigo:
"Show your "weird" kde3.5 setups to "normal" computer users (your mac/xp/vista users) - their heads will explode immediately. Show a nice plasma desktop to a "normal" user and they'll drop their macbook pro / aero and run to see what you're pimpin."
Here is a "weird" desktop then:
http://techpark6.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ubuntudesktop-12801.jpg
I won't take a screenshot of plasma desktop in 4.2 just explain the steps:
1) create a new panel
2) remove your systray
3) put a systray on your new blank panel
And what do you see?
- All your panel is covered by the systray. You see this "everyday" and this is "normal" I guess.
Now, remove the systray and put a clock.
What do you see?
- The clock only takes up the space it needs.
Now THIS is weird.
As I looked at people I know who use KDE, I noticed that they are mostly "weird"(by Aaron's definition) people. I think KDE users use KDE for it's features and configuration dialogs.
"3. If you really like kde3.5 so much more than kde4 then fork it."
I don't think this is or was about KDE in whole, it's about plasma-desktop, so using another desktop shell is a way better option.
"because there are literally millions who don't agree with you)."
How come nobody sees these millions tell the "weird" people that they are not right?
"They are here to provide a high quality desktop environment which many people will enjoy (not everyone). Stop complaining, seriously."
It's called disappointment, and is a very strong human emotion, even "weird" people have emotions.
"All kidding aside, usability studies"
Replace the term complain, ignore the harsh tone on most anti-kde4(plasma-desktop) posts and comments, and you will get real life usability studies, from people who really tested out KDE to it's limits, yeah just like in linux haters.
The problem that's not pointed out is the Linux distro-hell treadmill. WHY are package versions linked directly to the OS release?
MS bends backwards to have non-OS core software to be compatible with any and almost all releases of the OS so you're NEVER forced upgrade your software just because the OS changed.
MS GIVES YOU the user the CHOICE of using ANY version of the software you want mostly independent of the OS. Anything else can be installed in layered, incrementing versions (such as .NET) so nothing old is broken by the new.
Even FreeBSD, somewhat Debian/Ubuntu, doesn't trap you in this deadlock of OS = certain app versions.
This is where Linux distros truly FAIL by removing the user's choice of app/library version they want to use.
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