Linus, KDE4, and Yapping Anklebiters

Ya need to dilute that coffee a bit, man.

KDE 4 has not been an engineering triumph. It has been an engineering disaster.

Engineering is not research and it is not mere technology. It is the application of science and technology to meet defined needs and, to date, KDE 4 is an engineering disaster.

Those things you call bad management? Sure, but they're bad engineering, too. Engineers are not supposed to work in a vacuum. KDE4 seems to have been "Engineers Gone Wild", a replay of the Mozilla debacle from years ago.

The Mozilla folks engineered themselves into near-irrelevance. Fortunately, they did some good work along the way that others could pick up. The KDE folks seem a bit smarter and more sensitive to criticism than the Mozilla team was. Good thing, I think, because a whole desktop seems harder than, say, Firefox.

Why do you call it an engineering disaster? It seems to me there are lots of people who are excited about KDE4 (me included) - and I think version 4.2 solves the most important "missing features" from 3.5.

Quoting:and I think version 4.2 solves the most important "missing features" from 3.5.

Some, but not the ones I want most. It's certainly better than 4.1 - damning with with faint praise there - and a lot of the issues that caused my noob guinea pig to panic have been fixed.

I'm still waiting for the proposed functionality that got me really excited. the ability to customise each desktop individually. At the moment, though, it's still mostly bling with missing functionality.

Right now some implementations of the GNOME desktop look much better, and are more pleasant to use.

My point is that "not there yet" is quite different from "disaster". It probably takes/took longer than expected, but I'd say it's a sign of the size and complexity of the task rather than an engineering disaster (and the issue with 4.0 getting pushed out to end users was a marketing problem).

mortnealver --

A disaster happens when you a lot of self-absorbed take it upon themselves to codeturbate all manner of "cool" things without regard for any obligation to the user base that had grown to rely on their work.

Vista was a disaster.

KDE4, to date, has been a disaster.

I have confidence that the KDE team will fix the problem. I hope that a sense of pride and responsibility will drive that, but it's ok if it springs from a narcissist's aversion to criticism.

It's not fair to say that people "rely on their work" when KDE 3.5 has been available and maintained all the time. Those who rely on a stable KDE can perfectly well use the old one.

mortenalver --

KDE users have grown to trust and rely on the KDE team to deliver a modern, functional, and attractive desktop, as well as the basis for a number of useful applications.

To say "Screw you if you don't want to come along" is hardly a responsible engineering stance.

Dunno man... my bank switched from their old ATM system to their new one last year. The old software was ugly, came in only one language (in a country with 11 official languages), had very little on screen help, was generally slow and far worse than that of any competing banks.

So, one day, during that time I ended up at an ATM, and noticed one long line of people behind one ATM, and nobody at the ATM next to it. I asked the lady in front of the line what was up, and she said "Don't know, something weird's going on with that one, feel free to go in front" ... so I did. Turns out the one on the left was running the old software, and the one on the right the new software.

Seeing something unfamiliar seemed to just totally freak these people out. True story.

The new one is better. If I were on the team that built it, I sure as heck would have said "screw you" to the entire line on the left.

jacog -

Yeah, yeah. Users are always stupid and long for the good old days.

Sorry. Doesn't fly. KDE team screwed up royally. They are talented folks (probably why they screwed up so royally) and I'm sure things will end up OK>

Yeah, the KDE team screwed up. Their screw-up though, in my opinion, was not a technical / design / engineering screw-up, it was a PR and marketing screw-up.

EDIT: On the one hand, naming it KDE 3.9.5 alpha, instead of 4.0, would have meant fewer users being horribly disappointed after blindly switching to it, but on the other hand, they would have had a lot fewer developers actually port their apps to it. Either way, there was a massive avalanche of dung. It's over now, for the most part, and I am sure there will be peace in the kingdom again soon.

EDIT2: Yes, mixed methaphors, be quiet.

It's also the fault of the distributions (I'm thinking of kubuntu in particular). The job of a distro maintainer is to filter out upstream instability so the enduser has a reasonable experience. In the kde4.0 or kde4.1 case that meant reading the release notes which clearly stated it was intended for developers and waiting patiently for version 4.3 or whatever is appropriate. Kubuntu 8.10 uses kde 4.1.4 as default and there are stability and usability issues. That should have been clear to the maintainer who should not have taken it upon themselves to shove this down throats of Ubuntu newbies. Just my 2c.

KDE 2 was an engineering triumph.

They tightened up the code, made it smaller, faster and less buggy. KDE 3 added functionality but didn't introduce too much bloat.

Give the KDE team time and have some faith. The team will do a KDE2 again and make the 4.x code shine.

jacog -

I don't agree with your characterization of "blindly switching" when users have been misled.

KDE users like me, who started using KDE before there was ever a 1.0 version, had learned to trust in the skills and judgment of KDE developers.

There were, ahem, hiccups along the way, but it's always been pretty safe to start using KDE before there was a .0 release.

Yes, I know. The guys said that it was really for developers, etc. But -- That ain't a general release guys. That ain't even an alpha.

6x -

I think that's right. I also think somebody is going to get some much wiser developers as a result.

I'm trying kde 4.2 on the SuSE live cd (in VirtualBox) right now.

I haven't used KDE for a few years. I used to use SuSE as my main distro and my fastest computer was a 233Mhz AMD K6 w/ 512 Mb ram. KDE started slowing down on that in the early 3.x days and I switched to NextStep and then to XFCE as my desktop. I also switched from SuSE to Debian and slack.

My laptop is plenty powerful so the new KDE is responsive.

It is very different.

Maybe they should have called it NDE 1.2 (New Desktop Environment)

Its not bad, but it would be a big hit in productivity for someone who has used KDE continuously. For me it is so foreign, there is not too much to dislike, just lots of 'I know how to do this in XFCE, how do I do do this in KDE 4.2"?

If I had used KDE continuously, i do not think I'd be a happy camper.