There's an inherent problem with releases and the range of bug-tolerance in the Linux community. It's hard to know when something is "ready," unless you are a

There's an inherent problem with releases and the range of bug-tolerance in the Linux community. It's hard to know when something is "ready," unless you are a bleeding edge nightly builds kind of person. For example, KDE4 caught a lot of flak for shoddiness and flakiness before its first release. That happens to a lot of software, and it's completely unfair. I criticized people for expecting KDE4 to be polished enough for a general audience before the point-0 release. However, when it actually was released, it was still in terrible shape. I first installed 4.1 and gave up on it pretty quickly. Not only was it woefully incomplete, but the aspects where 4.1 caused me the most grief (cosmetic glitches, unpolished UI elements, non-intuitive and non-discoverable customization) were supposed to be major focuses of the KDE4 effort. Then it was my turn to be criticized: KDE 4.0 and 4.1 were intended for early adopters, and it wasn't until KDE 4.2 that KDE4 was deemed a good replacement for KDE3. Well, I admit I didn't read the release announcements, but what the hell is a major release supposed to mean, then? What does it mean to go from beta or RC to point-zero if the point-zero release isn't ready for most users? There's a rule of thumb that conservative users who absolutely need stability are wise to sit out an x.0 release, but there sure as hell isn't any convention that most users should wait for an x.2 release. And why did my distro suggest 4.1 as the default KDE to install? Clearly the open-source world needs a more explicit and widely-followed convention for labeling releases. Projects are willing to cheat and release x.0 versions that aren't ready for general consumption, just so they can make an artificial deadline, keep up with their competition, or even just to ensure plenty of users for testing a new version. And they have no shame about it. If a project as high-profile as KDE does it, anyone can defend it based on their example. There needs to be an explicit convention for labeling releases so each user knows which release they should wait for.