Re: PulseAudio

[Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com>]

On Thursday, July 18, 2013 06:35:17 AM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 07/18/2013 01:39 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > Kubuntu never shipped KDE 4.0 as it's default/primary desktop.  In 8.04,
> > it
> > was KDE 3.5.9, IIRC, might have been .8.  There were KDE 4.0 packages, but
> > no one got them unless they installed them on purpose.
> > 
> > I'm not sure what you're getting at?
> 
> What I said before. KUbuntu were among these who shipped KDE 4 *long*
> before it was considered really usable [1]. Yes, you can blame upstream
> for tagging something as KDE 4.0.x or even 4.1.x as stable, however
> it were the distributions who made the jump way too quickly which
> ended up damaging KDE's reputation and sparked things like the
> Trinity fork and KUbuntu was one of these.
> 
> One of my friends is a KDE developer and he often complained about
> that. His words were usually "Why on earth are they (KUbuntu) shipping
> that already? It's not ready for production yet and we end up
> getting pointless bug reports about things we already know."
> 
> The same happened with PulseAudio. Ubuntu already shipped it when
> it simply wasn't mature enough yet which also left a very bad impression
> on it. Versions prior around 0.9.20 had just many problems still.
> 
> And, coming back to what I said in my reply to Steve: Yes, Fedora are
> usually the ones who ship all that fancy new stuff first. However,
> Fedora has a completely different target audience. Fedora is and
> never was targeted at the Average Joe but the advanced user and
> developer who wants to test-drive these new technologies whereas
> the developers behind Fedora are very often upstream developers from
> GNOME, X.Org or the Kernel and just need a playground for their
> projects.
> 
> Adrian
> 
>  > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu#Releases

I agree with you about Ubuntu Desktop's decision to switch to pulseaudio by 
default being premature.  Kubuntu didn't switch until 2010 when there was 
support for integration from upstream KDE, most of the driver issues had been 
resolved, and the package itself was more mature.

Many of the problems Kubuntu had with the KDE 4 transition had to do with 
things that would have been a problem regardless of when the transition was 
made (e.g. translations).  There was messaging encouraging people not to 
update to the latest release for the early KDE 4 releases unless they were 
prepared to deal with problems.  I think that given the six month release 
model, a reasonably good job was done.

I'd ask your friend why KDE is releasing stuff they don't want shipped then?

When I've head such complaints it's been about not shipping all the KDE micro-
release updates, which Kubuntu has done for two years now.

That said, no matter what you think about how Kubuntu handled the KDE 4 
transition though, it has nothing to do with Canonical decision making about 
things like pulseaudio, upstart, etc.  Canonical management has no say in what 
Kubuntu ships (and didn't during that period either), so it's a poor example 
to make a point with.

Scott K