Comments on: KDE 4 Delayed Until January

By: Brandy Norwood

Brandy Norwood — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:08:29 +0000

Hi there…Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin..holy Sunday

By: mcinsand

mcinsand — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:14:16 +0000

Of friggin’ course the team is going to get it right before releasing it. Otherwise, they’d be like the big monopoly.

Seriously, thanks to the team for all you do, and for doing it well. If I have to wait a month or two or six, so what? I’ll be happy to have KDE4 when the team is ready for me to have it.

By: FLow

FLow — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 18:32:25 +0000

I think the KDE team made the right choice, KDE4 looks temptimg i might actually switch from gnome, KDE3 just did not cut it for me personally at lease not as a whole.

By: Mrs Bean

Mrs Bean — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:03:26 +0000

It’s way better to wait until January, KDE3 still works better than anything else, but man it is getting hard to wait.

By: alex

alex — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:04:55 +0000

Finally! Some real innovation on Desktop Linux! I know we had all sorts of good things before Apple and MS, but it was beginning to look as if they were catching up.

A Dec. release would have stunk. The RC was barely usable.
However. I’m not switching to KDE until they completely change the K menu and the bottom bar. I don’t know, KDE just always feels so bulky compared to my GNOME. However, all these new APIs are very tempting. I personally think that KDE and GNOME should work together, but the communities wouldn’t agree with each other.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:38:52 +0000

This is a tradeof and classic in management.
In one hand, waiting one month more (or even 4 months) is not a great deal, for the project to be in good shape/with right APIs. That will prevent user grief, support overhead, and coding mess if the APIs are not suited to the developers’ needs.
In the other hand, waiting “even a year later” would definitively be a mistake. “Release soon, release often” is the mantra for project life in open source, and more generally in many extreme programming projects. If you wait longer, you take the risk to have user leaving you, taking the wrong approach and not fulfilling the needs, as well as causing more grief. If that is the case, the goals were simply too ambitious and the project has huge chances to fail anyway, whatever the man power you give it.
KDE is indeed well managed: there is a roadmap, ambitious but feasible, it is followed with less than 50% derive (slip of 6 months for now I think for KDE4, on 1.5 year development - in software this is a performance), it is not bloated (each version is better and faster), the API is clean and refactored, the sources are self contained (only 3-4 major packages to build instead of zillions of libraries) and the apps are integrated and functional. The rest is polishing.
So KDE4 will certainly be a great version… as always, in 6-9 months, when 4.0.2 for instance will be out, that is when distros integrate it.

By: Asker

Asker — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:36:13 +0000

Well, I don’t think it is that bad. After all, I heard that all Santas helpers are of the Gnome-type!!!

… I’ll get my coat…