Troy Unrau (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} troy_at_kde) wrote,@ 2008-06-16 18:24:00 |
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KDE 4.0 is NOT a failure; it is a place to start
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?
Anyway, first I'll link to the articles, so that you can read them and draw your own conclusions, then I'll give my take.
Desktops in Trouble: "KDE has spawned a new release, KDE 4.x, and although it looked promising at first, KDE is in trouble. People are not only complaining about its instability (which is not a good thing in itself) but also about the direction KDE is taking. It is a change of paradigm. KDE has always been what you wanted it to be. You could install it as is and just use it or tweak it until you were happy with it. Just about everything was configurable and every possible feature was available. That was what the KDE audience liked about KDE."
The rest of the article is not quite that negative, and the author does manage to say a few good things about KDE before the conclusion is reached, but this is the paragraph that Google News selected as it's anecdote.
KDE 4 sucks big time: "[T]he newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All glitter, all bloatware. And what’s with the desktop icons? Where’s the simplicity? Do you want to confuse new users to death?
The first releases were so buggy that only serious promotion through blogs and news articles kept people’s interest alive. Then came “bugfix releases” that didn’t change anything from the overall look point of view. Mimetype icons still missing."
While I can easily identify this article as the ranting of a single user, who, as domain claims, likes to rant. The comments are what bother me. Feel free to read them all and see if it's just reaction to imperfect distro packages for 4.0, or what. From some of the comments: "I agree with you there. I discovered KDE4 by downloading the KDE4 version of Kubuntu. I do not recall it saying anywhere that it was beta, a work in progress, or a concept demonstration. It was passed off to the naive user as a new GUI option. THAT is what is most wrong with KDE4: the premature promotion of it as working software."
Now, I've never tried the kubuntu 4.x packages, and maybe they are just bad, but I'm not sure where they got the impression that 4.0 was no longer a work in progress. I mean, I guess not all the users read the KDE news, or managed to read some of our promotional signals during the 4.0 release phase (which were clearly about where 4.x was going in the future, and not all about 4.0 being the second coming of Christ...)
I know that there are problems with 4.0. I've been using trunk for months because it's such a large improvement, even though not marked 'stable'.
Of course, this one has already been covered on Planet KDE in the last week, but I want to point out something a little bizarre. Wingo posted this original blog entry: gnome in the age of decadence, in which he talks about Gnome needing some revolutionary change to keep it vibrant. In the comments, which is where I found some interesting responses, KDE is mentioned quite frequently. Some comments are pretty harsh: "NOOOooooo. . . Don't use KDE4 as an example of what to do in order to move Gnome forward. The web is awash with complaint after complaint of KDE4. Sometimes, "good enough" and "just works" are high platitudes." but others simply "Get it(TM)": "We should separate the complaints about KDE4 and KDE4.0 ;).The complaints have been that KDE4.0 doesn't have all the functionality that KDE3.5.9 has. But that lack of functionality is not the "vision" that was mentioned here. Those absent features are absent because KDE4 is a big effort, and the initial release was more about preparing the groundwork for upcoming versions of KDE4. They are not absent because KDE-devels decided that "the future KDE will have less functionality than 3.5 has". It was due to the fact that implementing all those features would have been too much, considering the manpower, resources and time. But they will make their comeback."
So with those that follow the blogs closely, and see how and where KDE 4.x is going, we're making progress. Even Thom over at OSNews has some nice things to say about KDE these days: "The KDE project saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they had reached a certain limit when it came to what could be done with the KDE 3.x series - they named it the "big friggin' wall", and decided that in order to get over that wall, incremental updates wouldn't do - they needed massive changes, a big jump, and they went for it. It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality" Hey, I wonder if that was in reference to an old blog post of mine? Ah, here it is. That just reminds me of that fact that sometimes people remember what we say over on planetkde :) I should just repost my blog posts using some sort of cron job, that way people can still find them after they fall off the bottom of planetkde :)
Anyway, enough rambling. 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. I think some of the distros jumped the gun on 4.0, and sometimes I don't blame them (KDE 4.0 is very pretty in places), but in other senses, most of these distros are the same ones that delayed for months (or years) after Apache 2.0 came out before adopting it. It seems that KDE is held to a different standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.
So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!
Cheers folks. Be safe.
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?
Anyway, first I'll link to the articles, so that you can read them and draw your own conclusions, then I'll give my take.
Desktops in Trouble: "KDE has spawned a new release, KDE 4.x, and although it looked promising at first, KDE is in trouble. People are not only complaining about its instability (which is not a good thing in itself) but also about the direction KDE is taking. It is a change of paradigm. KDE has always been what you wanted it to be. You could install it as is and just use it or tweak it until you were happy with it. Just about everything was configurable and every possible feature was available. That was what the KDE audience liked about KDE."
The rest of the article is not quite that negative, and the author does manage to say a few good things about KDE before the conclusion is reached, but this is the paragraph that Google News selected as it's anecdote.
KDE 4 sucks big time: "[T]he newest incarnation of KDE sucks big time. All was fine until the 4.x series, then suddenly, the switch was made and what do we have now? All glitter, all bloatware. And what’s with the desktop icons? Where’s the simplicity? Do you want to confuse new users to death?
The first releases were so buggy that only serious promotion through blogs and news articles kept people’s interest alive. Then came “bugfix releases” that didn’t change anything from the overall look point of view. Mimetype icons still missing."
While I can easily identify this article as the ranting of a single user, who, as domain claims, likes to rant. The comments are what bother me. Feel free to read them all and see if it's just reaction to imperfect distro packages for 4.0, or what. From some of the comments: "I agree with you there. I discovered KDE4 by downloading the KDE4 version of Kubuntu. I do not recall it saying anywhere that it was beta, a work in progress, or a concept demonstration. It was passed off to the naive user as a new GUI option. THAT is what is most wrong with KDE4: the premature promotion of it as working software."
Now, I've never tried the kubuntu 4.x packages, and maybe they are just bad, but I'm not sure where they got the impression that 4.0 was no longer a work in progress. I mean, I guess not all the users read the KDE news, or managed to read some of our promotional signals during the 4.0 release phase (which were clearly about where 4.x was going in the future, and not all about 4.0 being the second coming of Christ...)
I know that there are problems with 4.0. I've been using trunk for months because it's such a large improvement, even though not marked 'stable'.
Of course, this one has already been covered on Planet KDE in the last week, but I want to point out something a little bizarre. Wingo posted this original blog entry: gnome in the age of decadence, in which he talks about Gnome needing some revolutionary change to keep it vibrant. In the comments, which is where I found some interesting responses, KDE is mentioned quite frequently. Some comments are pretty harsh: "NOOOooooo. . . Don't use KDE4 as an example of what to do in order to move Gnome forward. The web is awash with complaint after complaint of KDE4. Sometimes, "good enough" and "just works" are high platitudes." but others simply "Get it(TM)": "We should separate the complaints about KDE4 and KDE4.0 ;).The complaints have been that KDE4.0 doesn't have all the functionality that KDE3.5.9 has. But that lack of functionality is not the "vision" that was mentioned here. Those absent features are absent because KDE4 is a big effort, and the initial release was more about preparing the groundwork for upcoming versions of KDE4. They are not absent because KDE-devels decided that "the future KDE will have less functionality than 3.5 has". It was due to the fact that implementing all those features would have been too much, considering the manpower, resources and time. But they will make their comeback."
So with those that follow the blogs closely, and see how and where KDE 4.x is going, we're making progress. Even Thom over at OSNews has some nice things to say about KDE these days: "The KDE project saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they had reached a certain limit when it came to what could be done with the KDE 3.x series - they named it the "big friggin' wall", and decided that in order to get over that wall, incremental updates wouldn't do - they needed massive changes, a big jump, and they went for it. It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality" Hey, I wonder if that was in reference to an old blog post of mine? Ah, here it is. That just reminds me of that fact that sometimes people remember what we say over on planetkde :) I should just repost my blog posts using some sort of cron job, that way people can still find them after they fall off the bottom of planetkde :)
Anyway, enough rambling. 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. I think some of the distros jumped the gun on 4.0, and sometimes I don't blame them (KDE 4.0 is very pretty in places), but in other senses, most of these distros are the same ones that delayed for months (or years) after Apache 2.0 came out before adopting it. It seems that KDE is held to a different standard. Somehow though, there's still a lot of positive press about KDE out there, which means that the developers have done something right (or us Marketing guys are worth our weight in Rhodium...) and the naysayers have not killed a project they confess to love.
So my message to all the disgruntled users out there are: use KDE 3.5.x, and wait until 4.x makes you happy, or better yet, help. That's what the Mac OS users did. That's what the Apache users did. That's what our KDE 2.x users did. The software you are getting from the KDE project is free, worked on by a team of developers that actually like to use their own software. Improvements are coming fast, and KDE 4.1.0 is scheduled for July. 4.2.0 for January, etc. If you use 4.0.x, have found issues, and would like to help improve 4.1 before the release, grab the SVN version, using KDE4Daily (virtual machine image), the automated kdesvn-build script, anonsvn, and file bugs. Join the bug squashing days that are announced via planetkde or the dot. And bring a positive attitude because KDE is yours, just as much as any coder!
Cheers folks. Be safe.
