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KDE 4 to Be Released on January 11th
VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."
Yes, with Qt4 we should see KDE apps on all, Mac, Windows, and obviously, Linux. It will be nice to see some of the apps I use on a day to day basis (like Kile) ported to Windows. If someone starts using KDE apps, it'll ease the transition should they ever choose to switch to Linux.
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
For me, KDE is already good enough. I'd rather wait until KDE4 is really solid than ty get it out on some arbitrary ship date.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
As a common user, I care about
1) eye candy
2) rendering times
The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.
One simple question: Why can Microsoft not slip release dates without getting flack, but it's okay for open source projects? Both are slipping for the same reasons.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely mod you up...
I agree completely; most people I know who are "hardcore" linux users spend time tweaking their systems, but it's usually just to the point of getting all their hardware working, and then maybe glitzing it up a little bit, usually by downloading a theme they think looks cool. The thousands of fancy customization options usually get left behind, and completely reconfiguring how applications look and run is totally beyond what they care to do. The linux users want to *USE* linux, not waste hours and hours digging into arcane details to reach some potential "perfect setup".
Windows can be tweaked too, but definitely much less-so, and there isn't much support about it either. I don't know anything about tweaking MacOS, other than the fact that i've never seen anyone using a recent version of MacOS that looked like it had been customized any significant extent.
ìì!
For heaven's sake, don't spread FUD! That "stable code base" you talk about was a mess to mantain
It was a feature-complete, stable mess to maintain. Sure, it's a good idea to replace it with a better design, but not immediately before a major release when the rest of the desktop is pretty much finished and not if you can't finish it on time.
The "fanboys" you talked about were people rightfully ticked off by the constant, uncostructive and negative attitude on the part of the complainers
Those negative attitudes didn't come from nowhere. The initial criticism was reasonable, but it was met with stone-walling and blowing people off. Then they kept releasing beta after beta that didn't work right, continually telling people to wait and that they were trolls for complaining. It is that which really kicked off the flaming you see today.
which did not bring any improvement and only demotivated the developers.
If you're echoing the complaints that people aren't "constructively" criticising, I think you're wrong. When you take something that works and totally breaks it, it's your responsibility to fix it, and you shouldn't complain when people point out it's broken and want it back the way it was. There really isn't anything more to elucidate on when you tell somebody that they just fucked everything up and you want it back the way it was.
Those people did not even bother testing later revisions
Can you blame them? "Here's a beta". "But it's totally broken!" "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's another beta." "This one's broken too." "Stop complaining, it's not finished yet. Here's a release candidate." "Nope, still broken. Aren't release candidates supposed to be at least feature-complete?" "Stop complaining! It's not supposed to be ready until 4.1!"
When you continually feed somebody shit, eventually they are going to realise that the next spoonful isn't going to taste any better. Not testing later betas is completely understandable in light of how the stability has been misrepresented. The devs already know what they need to work on, they don't need testers to tell them. The real WTF is that if they already knew what the problems were and that it wasn't finished, why did they tag a "release candidate" that had absolutely no chance of becoming 4.0?