4 ms·

Similar to KDE 4.0 being beta and everyone lost their minds.

magduf 8y ago
No, the big problem there was that KDE 4.0 was really alpha-quality, but all the distros just adopted it as-is and made it the only choice. So if you moved to a newer distro version to stay up-to-date with everything else a distro encompasses, you got stuck with KDE 4.0 whether you wanted it or not; the distros refused to continue to support KDE 3.x while the 4.x series matured. That whole debacle can mostly be blamed on the distros, though the KDE team can get a little blame for their numbering scheme (moving from "3.95" or whatever to "4.0" and not explicitly calling it "alpha" or "beta"). The distros are the ones who are supposed to be exercising some quality control and making intelligent decisions about what to include or not, rather than just blindly throwing things in from other projects.
- TheCycoONE 8y ago
  My recollection of the events was that the KDE team was very much promoting 4.0 as a general release. The beta story came about later. Certainly the release announcement looks like a public release: https://kde.org/announcements/4.0/ https://kde.org/announcements/4.0/
  - emilsedgh 8y ago
    Not really. Take a look at this blog post written right before the 4.0 release by kdesktop's maintainer who founded Plasma: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html To quote: KDE 4.0.0 is our "will eat your children" release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5. The fact that many already use it daily for their desktop (including myself) shows that it really won't eat your children, but it is part of that early stage in the release system of KDE4. It's the "0.0" release. The amount of new software in KDE4 is remarkable and we're going the open route with that.
    - magduf 8y ago
      What's more, as I said before, it's the distro's job to do quality control, especially for something as critically central and important as the DE. Just look at Linux Mint and how their distro is all about their DEs; they don't just grab whatever some group says is "released" and slap it into the distro, they ensure all the parts are working together as intended and that the distro release is a coherent whole. The distros at the time of KDE4.0 didn't do this. They just threw some stuff together without doing even the most cursory checking to make sure the thing actually worked decently as a desktop/workstation OS for users and put it out there, and then wondered why users were so mad about the unstable behavior.
      - emilsedgh 8y ago
        That is right. I think the excitement and hype around 4.0 was so much that everyone just wanted to released it. Which hurt KDE so badly. These days KDE is amazingly stable, fast and feature-full. But the reputation and brand has not recovered from the 4.0 release yet.
  - baldfat 8y ago
    > My recollection of the events was that the KDE team was very much promoting 4.0 as a general release. That was what the community stated but I never found one single thing from KDE to state anything but a warning on not adopting for production. I am still 100% mad how the community reacted to 4.0 and it wasn't fact based. Gnome would consume more resources but KDE = Bloat? Many would post showing how Gnome 2 was more resource hungry and we just got yelled at for being stupid. KDE = most tied in OSS DE ouyt there and the rest were just window managers at the time.

No, the big problem there was that KDE 4.0 was really alpha-quality, but all the distros just adopted it as-is and made it the only choice. So if you moved to a newer distro version to stay up-to-date with everything else a distro encompasses, you got stuck with KDE 4.0 whether you wanted it or not; the distros refused to continue to support KDE 3.x while the 4.x series matured. That whole debacle can mostly be blamed on the distros, though the KDE team can get a little blame for their numbering scheme (moving from "3.95" or whatever to "4.0" and not explicitly calling it "alpha" or "beta"). The distros are the ones who are supposed to be exercising some quality control and making intelligent decisions about what to include or not, rather than just blindly throwing things in from other projects.

TheCycoONE 8y ago
My recollection of the events was that the KDE team was very much promoting 4.0 as a general release. The beta story came about later. Certainly the release announcement looks like a public release: https://kde.org/announcements/4.0/ https://kde.org/announcements/4.0/
- emilsedgh 8y ago
  Not really. Take a look at this blog post written right before the 4.0 release by kdesktop's maintainer who founded Plasma: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html To quote: KDE 4.0.0 is our "will eat your children" release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5. The fact that many already use it daily for their desktop (including myself) shows that it really won't eat your children, but it is part of that early stage in the release system of KDE4. It's the "0.0" release. The amount of new software in KDE4 is remarkable and we're going the open route with that.
  - magduf 8y ago
    What's more, as I said before, it's the distro's job to do quality control, especially for something as critically central and important as the DE. Just look at Linux Mint and how their distro is all about their DEs; they don't just grab whatever some group says is "released" and slap it into the distro, they ensure all the parts are working together as intended and that the distro release is a coherent whole. The distros at the time of KDE4.0 didn't do this. They just threw some stuff together without doing even the most cursory checking to make sure the thing actually worked decently as a desktop/workstation OS for users and put it out there, and then wondered why users were so mad about the unstable behavior.
    - emilsedgh 8y ago
      That is right. I think the excitement and hype around 4.0 was so much that everyone just wanted to released it. Which hurt KDE so badly. These days KDE is amazingly stable, fast and feature-full. But the reputation and brand has not recovered from the 4.0 release yet.
- baldfat 8y ago
  > My recollection of the events was that the KDE team was very much promoting 4.0 as a general release. That was what the community stated but I never found one single thing from KDE to state anything but a warning on not adopting for production. I am still 100% mad how the community reacted to 4.0 and it wasn't fact based. Gnome would consume more resources but KDE = Bloat? Many would post showing how Gnome 2 was more resource hungry and we just got yelled at for being stupid. KDE = most tied in OSS DE ouyt there and the rest were just window managers at the time.