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Posts in 2008 January 12
Often when a new distribution of piece of software comes out in the Linux community, the feature list looks something like this:
- Updated package blablabla to 1.4.00.10
- Fixed bug in <name of other package>
- Added support for random hardware x through qjidjf 2.3.00.1
Ok, its not quite that bad, but it could be a lot better. If Linux is going to attract general users, it needs to start advertising the “cool” features, not the under-the-hood tweaks.
KDE 4 did this really well. The release announcement, while also talking about some developer-oriented features, is mostly about the over-the-hood changes, the changes the users care about.
Although it seems like a small thing, advertising features that users care about is an important step to spreading open-source software and Linux.
Yesterday I said that after I played with KDE 4 I would write an article about it. Now that I have downloaded and installed both the OpenSUSE CD with KDE 4 and the Kubuntu CD with KDE 4, I have decided that I cannot write anything that resembles a review of it. That is not because there is some horrible problem with KDE 4, though.
A Linux distro is made of many parts and the desktop enviroment is only one of them. Without the other parts, KDE is nothing but code. Right now, KDE 4 has been put onto a couple distros in a few hours with a remaster. That is useful for playing with some of the features, but I don’t feel like I can judge KDE 4, a project that took so much developer effort, when very little time has been spent making sure it is well integrated with the other software that makes up a distro. I am not criticising anyone or anything, I just don’t want to review KDE 4 until a major distro has released a stable, supported version of their distro with KDE 4.