On Wednesday 10 June 2009 11:21:01 you wrote:

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

If you have been in the same holding-pattern lately in your thinking about kde4 as well -- I bet you will be pleasantly surprised as well ;-)

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have to give it a shot one of these days.

Clearly I'm not going to be able to remain on KDE3 for much longer, as no one's going to be doing new development on any of the apps.

DR

Yep DR, that's the boat I find myself in. From what I can tell now, KDE4 will be a good follow on to KDE3. 30 days ago, I would have ... and I did ... tell you it wasn't anything other than some pipe dream from the gaming crowd with cute names like plasmoids and widgets scattered through it that took more time to keep running that it allowed to get work done. But as more apps were built against the kde4 runtime base that broke kde3 functionality and as more and more apps moved exclusively too the kde4 base, it was inevitable I would have to go kicking and screaming to kde4 or some other desktop altogether. The screw-up, that will go down in history as the worst transition strategy ever, was the roll-out or force-out of kde4 long before it was ready for public use. (June 2008 to roll-out 4.04 in 'alpha' state as the default choice for a desktop by suse? What where they smoking?) First few releases of 4.1 were just as bad. No one in the 'general "linux-user"' category should have ever been faced with having that as a desktop when the kde3 alternative was near flawless. No wonder so much of the community has the mindset that kde4 is "broken", "not ready", "unstable", etc... Hell, it was. If it had just remained under development until where it is now, and then been rolled out as an "alternative" KDE version in the major distros, then I guarantee you the community response to KDE4 would have been fantastic and with a fanatical desire to see the next release. As it was done, there is still a large percentage of the user base that won't touch it with a 10 foot pole until KDE3 is no longer available. That's the true cost of an early push of an unready desktop on the community. You have half the crowd completely lose confidence in a beloved desktop and the direction the developers have taken. As I said earlier in the thread. It is now ready and is now usable as a primary desktop with no more than the run-of-the-mill bugs that need to be squashed. To have pushed it out the door a year ago as a default choice for a desktop was sheer stupidity. It was as smart as if GM and Chrysler suddenly decided to put out nothing but 3-wheeled cars as the policy that would save their financial futures and lift them out of bankruptcy. But now, with 4.3beta, KDE4 is usable, and even enjoyable, by the general linux user, so it is time to roll up the sleeves, dive in, and each send in their dozen or so clean up bugs to kde.org and then we can look forward to a great kde4.3 release. (which is something we should have been able to look forward to as a 4.1 release, but for the premature release;-) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com