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Re: KDE 4 simply broken



On Thursday 14 May 2009, Mike Bird wrote:
> On Thu May 14 2009 12:54:50 Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > Not that I shall abandon KDE 3.x.x until I am dragged off it
> > kicking and screaming.
>
> Amen.  KDE 4 has been out well over a year.  In fact it's more than
> two years since the first test release.  I've tried it a two or three
> times and always run away screaming.  There's no way I can force that
> on my users.

I've done my share of complaining about KDE 4, here and elsewhere. 
Konqueror (as browser and filemanager), Akregator, and Plasma still 
regularly crash for me. I really hope that the most severe of these 
problems will be history soon. There are annoyingly missing missing or 
broken features as compared to 3.5.x. Several choices, mostly in the PIM 
area, seem misguided to me, more for the benefit of imagined corporate 
users than actual users.

Still, I'm convinced that KDE 4 is the way forward. The underlying 
architectural changes, as far as I've come to know them, look like solid 
improvements to me.

The problem with KDE 4 is neither stability nor missing or broken 
features. The problem is that it is billed as the current *release* of 
KDE, although judging it on its own (stability, misfeatures) as well as 
comparing it to KDE 3.5.x, shows that it is pretty clearly not ready for 
prime time.

As a programmer myself, I fully appreciate the situation. It's much more 
enjoyable to develop something from scratch, implement exciting new 
features and eye candy, than it is to maintain and enhance old and 
crufty code. Even more so for people who work on KDE in their spare 
time.

I don't think there is a happy solution, rather it boils down to a tough 
decision to be made by the KDE teams of the various distributions. 
Either way, a lot of users will be displeased.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/


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