[Discuss] RC1 designations (was Re: KDE-4.3-RC1 released.)

[John Blomfield]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> I don't have any first-hand experience, but my understanding from the 
> Linux
> reading I have done is that KDE-4.0 was an extremely special (and also an
> extremely bad) case. The fine print for that release essentially said 
> it was
> a late beta for the KDE core to encourage KDE application developers to
> convert KDE3 applications to KDE4 and develop new KDE4 applications. But
> since a lot of those applications hadn't been done yet, KDE-4.0 was 
> known to
> be incomplete for the end user (as well as being buggy).  Thus, 
> calling it
> 4.0 mislead some of the distributions into distributing it to end 
> users with
> disastrous results.  KDE should have called it a beta release for KDE4
> application developers and an alpha release for end users, and that would
> have been the end of the discussion.  That release really was for KDE
> application developers. Those developers are pretty smart and 
> well-motivated
> people who presumably do not need hype and distortion of release 
> labels to
> get them to develop KDE4 applications!
>
>
This is the heart of the problem from a user's point of view.  KDE is 
not a self contained application its a platform for a host of 
applications that are an essential part of the user experience.  Most of 
the reported problems with the KDE 4 releases so far are about the lack 
of functionality of the whole desktop experience KDE plus applications.  
It has been hard to separate the inherent KDE bugs from the lack of 
functionality of the applications.  For example, a file manager is a 
major component for any desktop and with KDE 4.0 the default file 
manager Dolphin had minimal features and konqueror did not work at all 
and this was probably nothing to do with KDE 4.0 itself. I would guess 
that this was due to konqueror developers not getting ahead with 
converting from Qt 3 to Qt 4.  This could have been done without KDE 4.0 
being released as its perfectly easy to develop a Qt 4 application that 
runs on KDE 3.5. I program all my apps that way so that they will be 
ready to run on KDE 4 when it works.

John

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