The KDE Projects is announcing the third beta of its future KDE 4.0 platform. "This Beta has mostly been focussing on finalizing the design of the libraries in preparation for the release of the KDE Development Platform. Yet, many user-visible changes have gotten in as well. While new features and usability improvements were added, bugs were found and fixed in KDE and the stability of Beta 3 has improved much compared to the previous Betas. With the third Beta, the KDE project has begun to finalize KDE 4.0."
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Member since:2007-02-17
I guess people are more disappointed in the fact that so far the releases are beta in the traditional sense as opposed to the more common OSS sense. In other many projects have beta versions of their software but for the most part they are stable and work since most issues should have been resolved in the alphas, the betas are fro stabilizing not adding features, anything that was going to be added should have been added and prepared for stabilization. Right now KDE4 feels very alpha quality, but it might be due to the packages I've been using, I'm compiling from svn as we speak.
Member since:2005-07-07
The reason it feels very alpha and unfinished is really mostly Plasma. Most other apps are pretty usable, though a few low-level bugs still have to be shaken out of the libraries (ssl support is one).
So as long as plasma (which is moving insanely fast right now, taking up a big part of the crazy amount of almost 400 commits a day) is usable, I think things will work out for the good.
Release early and often, that's important. We need comments, bugfixes, new contributors - so we need to release.
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:
2005-07-13
This comment from a poster by the name of Johnny Akward on the dot (http://dot.kde.org/1192512637/1192546591/) pretty much says it all:
People, get over it. Complain about stability when it's released, not when it's in development, because here's a hint: the devs know already. See something specific or broken, file a bug and they'll appreciate the feedback, don't moan on a public forum.
A year ago people postured and tubthumped that the devs set the bar too high and would never implement the major changes and that pie-in-the-sky frameworks would wind up vaporware. Now the complaints have been reduced to postulating whether the polishing will be finished by deadline, or that it looks too much like Vista (WTF?), or that people born post-70's wondering why the clock has a line through it.
I'd say that's progress, and impressive at that. As one of the chief execs at the company I work for, during a period of major acquisition/restructuring/global expansion, was fond of saying: "I know we're making progress because you're complaining about new problems now, and not the same ones from last quarter." Food for thought...