Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 5th Jul 2008 22:03 UTC
KDE KDE 4.1 is supposed to make everything right with the recently troubled desktop. Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was -- and whose -- is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything. More here. Also, Tectonic published an article titled "Beyond the desktop with KDE4", while the now well-known for its sarcasm 'Linux Hater' blog has something to say too (warning: some profanity).
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Amazingly poor choice.
by JMcCarthy on Sat 5th Jul 2008 22:18 UTC
JMcCarthy
Member since:
2005-08-12

Linking to a post that begins:

"As a shit-storm chaser, it's been fun watching the fecal hurricane that has resulted from the KDE4 devs chucking their shit-pile 4.0 into the proverbial fan that is the internets."

Edited 2008-07-05 22:18 UTC

v RE: Amazingly poor choice.
by Eugenia on Sat 5th Jul 2008 22:20 in reply to "Amazingly poor choice. "
JMcCarthy Member since:
2005-08-12

It's not a question of profanity, it's a question of respect. You link to an article which if posted here as a comment would be fair grounds for deletion or even being banned, according to the rules.

Edited 2008-07-05 22:31 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 26

rexstuff Member since:
2007-04-06

Bullshit, Eugenia. I'm a fan of a lot of what you do, but your admiration of the Linux Hater is dead wrong.

I'll admit the excessive use of profanity is a bit off-putting, but I, too, am willing to look past that and get to the meat of the post. Unfortunately, there isn't any, or at least, precious little.

What the Linux Hater does is use profanity to disguise his vacuous opinions. The rationale is that if he expresses his opinion strongly enough, with such forceful language, that to disagree with him would be inviting idiocy. No-one wants to be associated with 'shit-eaters' and 'jackasses'. And anyone who marginally agrees with his side of the issues finds him or herself nodding along, "yeah, stick it to those f--ktards!"

The Linux Hater's conclusion is "So what's the answer? I say f--k 'em all. Go invest your time in something else where the devs aren't so full of themselves." Tell me, is that really worthwhile? Has the hater actually said something interesting and insightful? His conclusion: giving up on open-source development because he doesn't like the community - really the solution?

And the truth is I -would- have a lot more respect for the LH if he could clearly, intelligently and respectfully articulate his opinions. Instead of opting to be a respected voice, he simply ops to be a loud one.

Let us pay him no more heed.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 40

segedunum Member since:
2005-07-06

I've found many of Linux Hater's posts bang on as well (some quite amusing), and he actually has a go at people like SJVN and all the loser journo's who like to stir up storms:

With this theme in mind, today, I'd like to call out the jack-assery of a particular kind of luser: the luser journalist. Typically, these journalists occupy positions of large influence (or they believe they have influence, at least) and they pontificate their opinions that show they don't have any idea how anything works.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 4

superstoned Member since:
2005-07-07

"meat of the post"

What meat? I like funny posts like this one like the next guy/girl, but I don't see much meet.

Maybe when he talks about how innovation should be incremental, but that's a rather misguided notion anyway. Incremental doesn't get you very far.

Besides that comment, he just repeats what has been said over and over again everywhere. Been there, done that, got the sucky t-shirt.

Earth to KDE devs: we don't need plasmoids! we want boring, old wireless networking to work.

Of course, it's a fun post. But I can't take any of it seriously - I suppose he's actually a lot like Steven JVN. Writes controversial crap to get hits on his blog. Maybe OSNews shouldn't support him.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 14

Soulbender Member since:
2005-08-18

Unfortunately LinuxHater is neither dead on nor funny. Unless you find the rantings of an apparent 12-year old who's watched too much South Park funny.
Yes, the lame-ass excessive profanity DOES take away from the message and if you cant express yourself in other ways chances are that what you have to say isn't all that important.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 6

FunkyELF Member since:
2006-07-26

I have to agree with you. Words are just words and I don't really understand why people get upset about them.

I agree with the part of the article that asks what would be wrong about using QT4 without radically changing everything from the ground up?

KDE4.0 should have been KDE3.5 with whatever changes it needed to be built against QT4. When you change everything you should call it something else, like KDE X, or KDE Vista, or QDE or something else. It does make the people using KDE3.5 feel like they'll be left and no more effort will be put into it since everyone will be working on KDE4.

But on the other side, I feel that it is kind of silly complaining about numbers. They wanted to change everything so they chose a new number, that number was 4. Before having a complete working system they need some milestones with targets, those milestones are 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 etc. So those numbers gave the illusion that it is a complete system? Shame on the distros that try luring in new users by saying "we got the new shiny kde...switch to our distro". They knew better...and it probably worked against them. They probably got new users for about 2 days before they switched to a distro that used a working KDE.

BTW, I use XFCE but have tried out KDE4 every once in a while.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2