GNOME developer quote of the day

Quoting:What I can't figure out is how to go about signaling "all clear" -- that it's safe to try out the software and consider returning to KDE for my desktop.

@Dino,

I fully understand where you are coming from and the concerns you have. Before I continue, let me iterate that, I am not trying to convince anyone to use KDE4 because I fully understand that, users are people who have different preferences, needs, requirements, likes and dislikes. They are mature (computer-wise at least) enough to make the selection that is best for them.

Now that out of the way, and I believe I know you enough Dino that you do appreciate KDE4 efforts and I understand why you can't try KDE again. But don't you think the developers deserve a break for what they have accomplished? You don't have to use KDE if it isn't for you or doesn't meet your needs or requirements, but try it at least to recognize the good things they have done.

The KDE team did make procedural mistakes, we all know that and they even acknowledge that on occasions. But the technical excellence they have shown and continue to offer is astounding. Personally, I consider those errors to be growing pains.

Here we are posting about Unity & Gnome Shell 3 and griping about how they abandoned the classical desktop. Shouldn't we be a little patient/cautious and wait to see what and how the end product is going to be? KDE experience should have taught us something else besides the mistakes that were done. It should have taught us to wait and see and not to jump the gun as being done to Unity & Gnome Shell 3.

KDE Is offering, not only an advanced classical desktop, but a Netbook/tablet interface and a new one coming out for phone devices. In the future, who knows what else is coming down the pipe. It might be good or bad, but why worry about it now? Instead of applauding their efforts and encouraging their commitment, some are bashing them for something that has long been gone. Why don't we wait and see what Unity & Gnome Shell is going to be before we chastise them? They might end up with similar capabilities where users can pick and chose any one of multiple interfaces and dependent on the device in use without having to reboot or re-login.

My whole gripe is about the continued bashing of KDE even after it reached a whole new level of sophistication and elegance. It just doesn't make sense to me when some FOSS supporters bash the team instead of offering encouragement, which they certainly deserve for what they have accomplished so far. I believe we should be talking about their accomplishments instead and to help them with how to take in into the next level.

Perhaps it comes down to something as fundamental as human nature.

Developers want to develop. They want to explore new concepts, new territories, new angles on enduring challenges. Last year's best-approximation is last year's achievement; now it's this year's bar to surmount. They want the heady free feeling of revolution; why not, in FOSS that's mostly what they're paid in, not dollars.

Users want the best they can get hold of, when they're selecting what they're going to use, and then they want it to Just Work. No new surprises beyond familiar foibles with familiar workarounds, no wearouts, no deprecations or life-buys. Oh, and no new holes, either, which does mean backports and security fixes to an otherwise stable codebase. It ain't nostalgia, it's practicality, but to adventurous devs it's booooriiing..

In which case, Trinity points the way. Dev teams declare end-of-interest and hand the codebase over to maintenance teams in an orderly transition with lots of contact for answering corner-behavior questions and fleshing out sketchy documentation. The KDE devs are deep into KDE4, but, last I heard, they're helping the Trinity devs pull together an LTS version of KDE3, after which the KDE devs can dive fully into the new game without guilt.

Maybe the Gtk/Gnome side needs the same kind of fork-to-maintenance. Maybe enough commercial interests will even find that it makes good business sense to pay out some support for such maintenance teams, so they have long-term-stable APIs to integrate against in their own stuff and their own user manuals.