KDE in Debian, a personal POV
A couple of ideas that might not be very clear:
Suggestions if you still want to use KDE 3.5
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- keep using Lenny forever
- learn how to build it, install it e.g. in /opt/kde and learn how to update it
every time there is a new non-compatible library in your system
- switch to another distribution that stills ships kde 3.5 (I think centos 5.0
still ships KDE 3.5.4)
- pay/bribe somebody to make packages for you.
Somebody will add here about some KDE 3.5 repositories that are out there, but
those repositories are unlikely to be there forever.
suggestions if you do not want to use KDE 4.4
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- switch to another desktop like Gnome, XFCE, GNU STEP or LXDE
- don't use any desktop
- learn how to love KDE 4 ? :)
suggestions if you are OK with KDE 4.4 but you have some issues
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Ask yourself what you can do to improve it. Understand developers working in
a project do not have the same motivation or interest than you and they primarily
write the software for them, not for you, just they share it and you can use it
too (or improve it)
You can ask them nicely to look at your stuff, and they can tell you nicely if
they are not interested.
Complain unfairly will only demotivate developers and will have the opposite
effect of what you wanted.
Some extra comments:
If you think "Debian" (*) (not the Qt/KDE maintainers) should be acting different,
make sure you agree with the Debian Social Contract and Constitution, start
contributing to Debian until you become a person who has a track of contributions
and then you can try converting Debian in what you think it should be.
(*) mind debian is not an entity, it is a bunch of people with very different
motivations.
If you think you do not have the skills to contribute, you can try start learning,
all the developers started as a mere users, sometimes because they did not like
something!.
If you do not have the time, that's life, you have to choose, I would love eating
good vegetarians meals every day but I do not have the time to learn how to cook
them every day or the money to pay for them, mostly because I choose to do other
things on my time.
Finally, a more personal opinion, that I hope will help to understand the point,
in the case I would have not liked KDE 4 at all, I just would have switched
to something else. It would have never cross my mind maintaining KDE 3, it would
have required like 2 or 3 times the work currently it takes maintaining KDE 4,
that is not exaclty little.
Some people seem to believe we do not maintain KDE 3 just because we do not want and
it would just be matter of keeping those packages there in a corner of the archive,
it would be a titanic work maintaining such a piece of abandoned software.
You would be underestimating if you think 2-3 persons could maintain KDE 3 on
their own, when KDE 3 was actively maintained it had more than 200 developers,
some paid to do so full time! Maybe you do not need so many people to maintain
it just working, but there are small features you might want in the future,
e.g support for HTML 5. How can 2-3 persons without deep knowledge of
all the code expect to do that?
Have a nice weekend,
Ana
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