Ars reviews KDE 4.0.0: "KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series." They were also at the KDE 4.0 release event.
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Member since:2005-07-24
So *show me*. So far all I have seen is a bunch of talk about how fantastic, revolutionary, and all around totally, mind-blowingly ***COOL*** KDE4 is *going to* be. That and a very unimpressive and lackluster 4.0.0 which is a big step backward from 3.5.
Now, maybe KDE4 is going to be all these wonderful things. But *show me* don't tell me. I've been using KDE 4.0.0 since it came out. (Dropping back to my usual desktop when I need to get real work done.) I watched Aaron's presentation. It all *sounds* great in his talk. But aside from watching KStars and Marble over and over and over getting a bit tedious, the only new feature that he was able to demonstrate in the 1 hour and 20 minute talk, other than a prerecorded video of the desktop effects, which are pretty old hat under Linux desktops now, was tagging a media file from Dolphin.
Show me.
Edited 2008-01-21 20:25 UTC
Member since:2006-01-02
The point of view that you show here, by saying "show me", is that of a *consumer*, which illustrates perfectly this post of butters:
http://osnews.com/permalink?297105
Please do yourself a favor and don't restrict yourself to being a mere consumer -- that's good enough for Apple/Microsoft users, but Free Software users are supposed to behave differently. The whole point of Free Software is to blur the disctinction between producers and consumers, instead everybody is an active "user".
Member since:2007-04-05
What I saw was an impressively well-designed framework. I think they are showing us the start of something big. But, this takes a lot of work; they already have thousands of volunteer programmers working and they'll get there.
Design is important. You don't tack on integration between applications later and get good results, you design it in from the start. You don't tack on support for hot swapping peripherals and sound and networking for a whole environment. If you want to share the libraries between all these applications and not have redundancy, it's best they be well-designed from the beginning, and that's what the KDE folks are doing.
Don't just throw down the gauntlet to a lot of very hard-working people in the middle of a huge project. Pick up your C++ compiler and get cracking on the code.
Do it. Now.
Member since:2007-03-29
I'm pretty sure such would be percieved a failure and would be heavily damaging for the reputation of the respective company. I believe that the public is pretty much mercyless in this regard.
Which does not rule out that you always have a second chance to compensate your earlier failure. Look at the history of Mozilla, whose reputation also reached pretty damaging lows around the release of Netscape 6..
Edited 2008-01-22 09:22 UTC
Member since:
2006-10-09
Plasma has drawn a lot of criticism for its vision: which is to completely change the way we interact with our desktop. There's been all kinds of negativity because KDE 4.0.0 hasn't met that vision with the very first release. If a new cell phone company springs up with a vision to "make the world's most durable cell phones with the best battery life", but releases a fairly average phone as their first product, it's not a failure. Their vision isn't the first step to take - it's that point off on the horizon you keep working towards. Same thing with KDE4 - and it was a welcome relief to see Ars acknowledge that Plasma, as it is now, is a framework, the first step towards realizing the vision for KDE4.