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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."
... KDE developers don't understand release version concept, confuse users with improper 4.0 version number, and gain a reputation for a buggy major release.
But doesn't everyone know that you don't buy a release that ends with ".0"?
More generally, one of the standard rules is that you avoid releases whose bottom digit is even. Those are the releases that contain new stuff. The next release, with the last digit odd, is the one that contains the bug fixes for all the new stuff.
That's why I didn't get KDE 4.0 on my new machine a few weeks ago. In fact, I decided to give Gnome another try, since it's been a few years since I last rejected it in favor of KDE. It seems to work OK now (though I do sorta miss Konqueror).
OTOH, I did install Ubunto 8.0. The Ubuntu crowd seems to have developed a reputation for violating the usual rule that .0 releases are buggy. Still, I held off for a while, to see the first reports. They were almost universally "thumbs up", so I decided to give it a try. It seems to work pretty well.
(Except that, as usual, I gave up after about two hours of trying to get their apache2 configured like I wanted it. I uninstalled it, downloaded the latest apache2,and in about 20 minutes had it compiled and configged. It ran correctly the first try. Why do the linux vendors insist on fscking this up so badly? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
and more bugs, accordingly to bugs.kde.org.
As it has less feature and stability than KDE3, fewer people will use it, thus degrading the use-report-fix cycle.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]