KDE 4.0 is NOT a failure; it is a place to start
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 06/16/2008 - 19:13.
There is an old saying that "Any press is good press", amongst the marketing types. Well, I was checking on KDE in various news sources today, and we must be getting a lot of "good" press. Is bad press still "good" press?
We (KDE) need to look at this response and judge whether or not it was fully expected. We knew there would be some pushback to the major changes in KDE 4.0, because, believe it or not, history is simply repeating itself. KDE 2.0 was met almost exactly the same way, although open source was flying a lot lower under the public radar in those days. It took until KDE 2.2 before distros mostly stopped shipping KDE 1.1.2 and were happy with 2.x
Technical success, just a marketing failure.
IMHO.
They ought to have marketed 4.0 as a placeholder for developers only right _from the very start_.
Re: KDE 4--Recent Live CD trial version changes my opinion
To say I was disappointed when I first tried KDE 4.0 is an understatement. It was truly pre-alpha. While I understood Aaron Sergio's comments about important new foundational libraries being finished as his rationale for calling it version 4.0, it didn't wash. For everyone besides a few developers, KDE is the interaction with the desktop and files--working foundational libraries are taken for granted. Labeling it 4.0 was misleading. However, I bit my tongue, and held my silence. No problem really--just keep using 3.5.9 until KDE 4 becomes good enough.
I recently downloaded, as packager Ralph Dieter describes it at planetkde.org: a rough preview Fedora 9-based kde 4.0.82 live image that he whipped together. You can get it here.
Well, I find this version of KDE 4 promising. Yes, it's different from KDE 3.5.x, but it's quite responsive and getting very usable. It's great to look at. I'm not bothered by using the Desktop widget to actually view the icons in my Desktop folder.
And when KDE 4.1 is available for my distro, I now think I will be installing it promptly. KDE 4.1 won't be great, but I now believe it will be good enough. KDE 4.2 should be stunning.
If 82 fixes pleases you ? Everything under Konquorer is the end
In the end, browser should present all the desktop offline stuff, then toolbars/browser, taskbars/window manager and anybars/media players to control your computer? Browser has window manager built in, and Firefox and Opera can fold in taskbars and anybars? On the other hand, desktop does not have enough controls in toolbars and anybars?