Beta 8.10 released

Fri Oct 3 17:47:31 UTC 2008

I have never done a rant like this, so my apologies to anyone getting
offended. But I guess, the placenta connecting the KDE4-womb is
running severely short on blood supply (blood plasma?), and hence
Oxygen! More and more "family members" are getting restless and when
the cord is cut (8.10 without KDE3) with an immature baby (KDE4),
Earth save us, "There will be Blood!"

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
> But you don't have to hurry because 8.04 will be supported one more
> year. Then you can decide if you still don't like KDE4 and prefer to move
> to another desktop.

Aha, as someone else mentioned, this is where the problem is: most of
the applications as soon as they get ported to KDE4 will receive
*only* critical bug fixes for their KDE3 counterparts. All the feature
development will focus on the KDE4 port. And for this, I certainly
don't blame the application developers. One can not expect them to
develop both KDE3 and KDE4 ports simultaneously.

Thankfully, two of my most extensively used apps, Kile and KMyM2, are
still being developed on KDE3, though KDE4 porting is in "progress." I
hope they stick with KDE3 for a little (is 1 year little?) while
longer. And *the* most essential app for me, RKWard, has moved to
KDE4, and that is why I use the backported KDE4.1.x packages for
Hardy.

> Give the developers time to finish their work. I
> expect there will be many improvements within that one year and KDE4 will
> be usable until then.

I am assuming by developers you are referring to KDE4 devs and not
application devs. Now, I am not a developer myself, though I have
dabbled on and off on some "plugins," I am just an avid and curious
user, rather faithfully wedded to KDE. I try to follow the planetkde
blogs almost regularly, and my impression is that the KDE4 devs have
done *almost everything* they can to give us a "rejuvinated" KDE
platform. The current performance issues, that has become synonymous
to KDE4, (which were once the bane of XP and today is for Vista) can
be blamed on the drivers. By drivers, I refer to both open source,
(X.org and the multitude of video modules within), and closed source
like nVidia/ATI. But we are not new to "issue with drivers" - it has
been there since time immemorial for Linux (and other *ixes) users!

KDE4 technology has pushed the limits of software development to such
fringes that they have found the existing drivers fall short of their
requirements. A not too bad analogy will be the current US economic
meltdown - taking loans more than what you can afford, viz, "spending
beyond your wallet!" Sometimes, to me, the stupidity of the whole
thing, seems to resemble the current US presidential (especially,
VP'ial) race.

Now, say this to a KDE4 dev, and you'll get back a rhetorical reply:
"without pushing for the limits there will be no invention." Hmm,
pretty convincing! NO! There are stages of developments: Hypothesize
Theories > FLowchart > Planning > In-Lab Development and
Experimentation > Field/Clinical Trials > Back to the lab for
Improvements/Fixes > Second trial > Mass release. Now I haven't
followed the pre-Google-campus-release-of-KDE4.0 days of its
development, but will I be too off-base to claim that the in-lab stage
for KDE4 has been, if anything, superficial? You can not afford to
conduct such experiments in real life in a mass scale. Inventions are
for labs. Prove it in a lab, then apply it en masse. Remember, many
well respected distros, openSuse, Fedora, Ubuntu are making KDE 4.1.x
mandatory, so you are going en masse. KDE4 is no longer the
pet-project of a group of ambitious developers. When things don't
work, you expect the responsible end-user to report a bug. And I
think, at least this, we all should do. But in the process, the
end-user realizes that the software is broken. When this happens
repeatedly, the end-user is pissed off, and moves on. I, such an
end-user, can report one or two occasional bugs, but can not live in a
"SARS environment." It will ruin my own time and job. This was the
reason I moved away from Debian/Sid to Kubuntu. Speaking of
Debian/Sid, no one blames the Debian team for maintaining/providing
Sid, it is called "unstable," and it will perennially remain unstable.
Yes, people blame them for taking too long for releasing stable
versions, but realize that is takes time to provide a "stable"
platform.

So, what should've they done? May be, they should've taken more time
to gestate through the KDE4 feature and optimization development
process rather than such a hyped "premature-release" - may be two to
three years. Ah, but then that would seem like the Microsoft/Apple
development cycles!! Nooo, if we are Messiahs of freedom, we can not
do such a thing! Well, who pays the price? We, the users! Why? Because
*we* choose to use such half-baked softwares - and that is "open
source!" BTW, what "price" are we really paying? Not by money, but by
time and emotion! Ah well, an economist will say " *.* is money," and
hence we are paying by money, but I personally beg to differ!

We, the over-enthusiastic opensource-loving users, are like the
pre-teens: give us a new toy (software with a decent hype), and we
want it! When the toy doesn't live up to our expectations, we crib; we
want a better one.

Woosh.. lot of nonsense! I just hope the ignominious mix of
pushing-the-limits-and-redefing-desktop KDE4 and open and closed
source drivers churns out something good. The developers should talk
among each other and produce a usable environment for the end-user!
There is no point is playing the blame-game: "no my code is right,
your code is not up to the mark."

OK, that "explains" the limitations of the drivers, specifically the
video drivers. But what about the inherent sluggishness? Why does
konqueror/dolphin take so much time to start? Even KMenu (KickOff?)
takes time to pop up!! My machine is NOT an antique piece, by any
stretch of imagination: Athlon 3200+ with 3+ GB RAM! I mean I can go
on and on and on... KDE4 is no longer lean, it is as bloated as
Vista/OSX 10.5. When a software forces you to upgrade the hardware for
the sake of eye-candy, I say you've lost the boat, a long while back!
Is this happening to an open source, well respected  project?

Then, what is with the "usability" improvements? KDE3 windows had "too
many lines/frames" which is clumsy so they were removed in KDE4. Good,
fantastic, honestly, no sarcasm! But have you seen the amount of
"unused white space" being wasted over the KDE4 windows? I agree
cramming information is against "usability" but not at the cost of
screen real-estate. Sometimes all these gung-ho about usability
improvements sounds like Freudian psychology! Sorry, I know this is a
bad example, but couldn't help it! One other thing I am surprised that
the classical menubar (File Edit View ....) is not plugable! Firefox,
using metacity/XUL (pardon my ignorance here) allows icons and plugins
on the menubar - that saves space. Is that ugly? NO! (ok, may be my
personal opinion)

Something was holding me back all these days (actually months),  and
that has just snapped because of this thread. Again, apologies to
anyone offended. Developers, I bow to you for your time and selfless
commitment; you've given us KDE3, I am sure you can give us a usable
KDE4, hopefully before time runs out!

-- 
Regards
PK
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http://counter.li.org  #402424