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What To Expect In KDE 4.1
andrewmin writes "Recently, Gnome's been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn't work most of the time. However, the developers were not without hope. They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0. That time is coming soon: in just four days, K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released to the Linux masses." A release candidate for 4.1 came out just over a week ago, with binaries available "for some Linux distributions, and Mac OS X and Windows."
The main problem is the dichotomy between the KDE platform and KDE environment. It was a stable release of the platform, but not of the environment, because the tools which use that platform and create the environment (all the applications) hadn't been ported yet. They should really be two separate releases.
Since Archlinux is providing packages for of the KDE 4.1 tag from svn in it's testing repos I've merged to 4.1 and I'm amazed how everything works. I only had to find a new irc client since konversation isn't ported yet but I found Quassel and compiled the second alpha of amarok2 and now I'm happy :)
I think you misunderstood the excerpt. What it says is that KDE lost ground in the last few years, which it did. Even SuSE, once a cornerstone of KDE's market share, defaults to Gnome now. Kubuntu is not on par with Ubuntu, and Red Hat/Fedora always was a Gnome shop. Today, no major distro has KDE as its default desktop environment. I'd call that "losing ground".
I hope KDE 4 is able to stop or even reverse this trend. I use 4.1 on a daily basis since Beta 1. It's mostly stable and shows big improvements compared to 4.0.
On the KDE website, there was no mention of KDE 4.0 being a developer release. It hinted strongly, in fact, that KDE 4.0 was a general release.
It was only after all the problems and complaints that the KDE devs said that the release wasn't for mainstream users.
KDE 4.0 wasn't a developer release. What it was, was the first release with major architectual changes for public consumption. This was the first release with a stable library and without this release, a large number of KDE application developers wouldn't have a platform for porting and polishing their applications for KDE 4. Ultimately it is the decision of the distributions on what to include in their releases. I wouldn't consider KDE 4.0 a proper replacement for KDE 3.5.x, but I would make it available for use by application developers.
All this was well known and openly discussed during the planning and development of the KDE 4 platform including 4.0, 4.1, 4.x. To state otherwise is disengenious at best.
See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080710131440951 for more information.