In the majority of aspects, it’s even a lot better. So yes.

My point is simply that most of the Linux community in general knows that KDE 4.x was released before it was ready. Can you honestly tell us that KDE 4 is as intuitive, feature rich, and generally ready for prime-time as KDE 3.5.x? I understand how anyone close the the project would feel pride with the work they’ve done so far, and I wouldn’t take anything away from that. I’m not here to tear down the accomplishments of KDE 4. However, it is my opinion along with many other people that it was rushed out the door before it possessed the level of usability of the existing platform.

KDE 4 has great potential that we hope is achieved soon.
When you quoted statistics on how many people are using KDE 4.x, does it account for how many users felt they had little or no choice because their current apps would no longer be maintained or supported on the older platform?

I say these things because I want KDE 4 to succeed, not tear it down.
I’m also attempting to point out that there’s an element of group-think surrounding the KDE project, and it’s causing those involved with the project to be blinded to some important things. I know it is hard for some people to listen to what I’m saying with an open mind, and it will likely turn off some folks. However, we need to have an open & honest discussion if we want KDE & Linux in general to achieve greatness.

KDE users loudly voiced their disapproval when KDE 4.x was initially released, and the din gradually faded as users came to believe and/or accept that they had to settle with the options presented to them when their distros moved to the new platform in the name of progress. If you doubt my claims about how users felt, Google is your friend. ;)

This article says it all in the following paragraph:

http://www.itlure.com/2010/05/trinity-project-picks-up-where-kde-3510.html

The Trinity Project Picks Up Where KDE 3.5.10 Left Off
Posted by Danny on Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Labels: KDE 3.5.10, Kubuntu, Legacy, Linux News, old school

“Hey, pst! Yes, you! I know you’ve been crying yourself to sleep at night ever since those mean, mean people developing the K Desktop Environment decided to radically change the way your favorite DE worked and release the dreaded “4″ version. Good news! There’s no more need to get over it and move on with your life, as, apparently, the God of open source decided to bring you a fork of KDE 3.”

Did the folks at KDE know about and listen to the real user feedback, or was it filtered by their own perceptions?
If we all want KDE 4 to be great, then we have to be open to criticism and feedback from end users.
My end users are telling me that KDE 4.x makes their computing experience more difficult instead of improving their computing experience. If you use Google, you will see that the feedback says KDE 4 is improving but isn’t ready for prime-time yet.

Trinity is one of many responses that can take place when a new platform disorients and/or alienates users.

Just for the record, we don’t “lean back and wait until others have solved all our problems”, my devs have contributed to both our upstream distro and to KDE. As founder of our distro, I insist on my devs doing so :)
This post is one of many ways that we are active and contribute to the community, in the form of open discussion as well as code and bug reports. These types of honest discussions are just as important as any other process in the open source community as a whole. I donate money to projects we rely on as well. ;)

We are a small distro and not publicly released yet, but we believe in open source.
Open source also needs to have open discussion in order to ultimately succeed. :)

Thanks for the effort!

As to forcing people to use something, that statement is ridiculous. Firstly, KDE never forced anybody to use the 4 version. In fact, we’ve been very clear as to the status of the 4 series, and have since the release of 4.0 spent ridiculous amounts of time on improving its stability and completeness — and that’s very visible. If your distro automatically updates you to a version you don’t want, choose another distro or pay more attention to the software you’re installing.

As to comparing anything here to rape, that’s completely out of proportion, please tone down.

Can you give some example bugnumbers your users suffer most from, or haven’t those been reported and triaged yet? You can just lean back and wait until others have solved all your problems. For others to work on those issues you seem to be facing, your participation is needed, though. So I’m not sure your attitude of vague statements about quality, and “armchair developer” statements such as telling others to pull software which is in use for nearly two and a half years by millions of people. How would one be able to do that, by the way? And if one did, how would not releasing updates help any users at all?

I personally find my KDE 4 desktop to be working well and stable. Of course that is highly dependant on the use case, and on the underlying platform. Stability seems to vary between various distributions, so if ReveLinux has problems with KDE 4, comparing your underlying stack (Xorg and driver versions, among others) to other distros might give you some clue. Especially graphics performance seems to vary a lot (in general, I find the newest Free drivers for intel and ATI working best).

I’m the founder and lead developer of a KDE based distro. Our distro is still using KDE 3.5 because many of our users practically hate KDE 4.x because of lack of usability/features & serious crashes. KDE 4.x is bloated and performs poorly compared to KDE 3.5.x. We applaud the Trinity team for their efforts in maintaining KDE 3.5.x at least until KDE 4 is no longer performing like a late alpha/early beta. I’m not against change or progress, but change just for the sake of “progress” is an exercise in vanity, and changing version numbers does not make a project stable. Especially if the newer product simply cannot do what the former can do, or is many times less stable than the previous version!

Even though we are a small and very recent distro, we are now looking to see if there’s some way our 4 person dev team can help the Trinity project. I would encourage other dev teams look into doing the same thing until KDE actually releases a product worthy of normal use by Linux users.

KDE should pull KDE 4.x out of production and maintain/support KDE 3.5.x until KDE 4.x is truly a stable, feature-rich product that is actually ready to use.

It depends also on you also; there are people whose normal KDE use involves applications that were ported to KDE4.
Do you still have kde3 application which you use?

> When KDE4 was announced there were many promises e.g. platform independence.
> Why aren’t the MAC OS X and Windows port stable yet

The fact that KDE4 is more platform independent than KDE3 does not imply it will compile,
work, and produce packages of itself without anybody doing the job.
There are some people working on the Windows port, but quite less on the Mac one.

> and what still needs to be done there?

I guess you should ask to the kde-windows and kde-mac teams.

> What can be done to improve the translation status of KDE4 applications?
> http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/team/

There were translations as well in KDE3, I don’t see what it has to do with this blog…
Anyhow, back to your question: the way is always the same, ie contact and work with
the translation team of your language: http://i18n.kde.org/teams-list.php
(Note also the trunk statistics reflect the development version, which not all the teams
translate everyday; you might want to look at the “stable” statistics for the current
stable serie, ie KDE 4.4.x.)

> What happened to Raptor?

Dunno.

> When will Plasma be crash-free for normal use? KDE 4.6?

Note also kicker had “normal use” crashes, and a couple got fixed with quite late versions like KDE 3.5.10.

> How can contributions to KDE4 be simplified? How to simple set a KDE4 built environment with TRUNK that “just works”?

Just follow the instructions on http.//techbase.kde.org ?

Look at the Mozilla team. Any feature of Firefox 1 is realized in Firefox 2 and any feature of Firefox 2 is realized in Firefox 3. It was an ethically wrong decision to issue KDE4.0, while you knew that it did not support EVERY feature of KDE3.5. Surely, you can force users to use KDE4 finally, but it is like a rape.