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Although KDE 4.0 was a disaster, it wasn't that developers were greedy or something. KDE is mostly driven by volunteers. During KDE 4.0 time, KDE didn't have a

Although KDE 4.0 was a disaster, it wasn't that developers were greedy or something. KDE is mostly driven by volunteers. During KDE 4.0 time, KDE didn't have any releases for a long time. That meant some volunteers were losing motivation, things were getting too long, etc. As an example, KDE's Games collection was in a fantastic shape and ready for a very long time. Should they all have waited until things were polished? That would've taken 1-2 more years. KDE Games developers were not gonna keep waiting for that long. While releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake, the biggest mistake was distro's rushing to ship it by default. KDE 4.0 should've been optional/sideloaded. That would'v been the right balance. However, the hype around KDE 4.0 was so much that distro's rushed it and the rest is history.

makomk 6y ago
KDE 4.0 was pretty bad. For example, the Plasma desktop which provided things like the taskbar and application launcher menu was rather unstable and liked to crash. On its own, that wouldn't be a problem - it just automatically relaunched after the crash and that was that. Unfortunately, there was another bug where if you set your desktop wallpaper during the first launch (you know, like a new user of KDE 4 probably would) and then Plasma crashed, it would corrupt its own configuration file in such a way that you lost all the things it provided like the task bar and the application launcher, and there was no way to fix this except manually finding and deleting the configuration file because although the existence of the task bar etc was part of the configuration there was no way to actually modify this from the GUI at the time. Made for a pretty terrible new user experience.