Groklaw has interviewed KDE about some recent misconceptions about KDE 4. "There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed."
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Member since:2005-12-21
As an MS gold partner I've no doubt that you've got an attentive ear from MS. That, however, is not the case for the vast majority of MS customers.
As a "basic" user of FOSS you have access to developers, you can submit bugs and feature requests. Sure, you have no guaranty that those requests will be addressed but at least the communication channel is there.
And I'm sure that for the kind of money your privileged relation with MS is costing you you could get the same level of service from a commercial Linux distribution.
As for the quality of Linux desktop software, using it daily both professionally and at home, I must say that most applications don't feel the least like beta software. Firefox, Konqueror, Amarok, Krita, OpenOffice, KDE in general, none of them feel shaky or amateurish to me.
Now on the other hand using Windows always feels like an adventure, the question not being "will it crash?", but "what will crash and when?"
Member since:2007-05-12
Agreed! Let's face it, one customer (particularly an *individual*) is neither here nor there for MS, but individuals tend to get better attention from Linux distros. Not saying that always happens, but it's been my experience.
As for the quality of Linux desktop software, using it daily both professionally and at home, I must say that most applications don't feel the least like beta software. Firefox, Konqueror, Amarok, Krita, OpenOffice, KDE in general, none of them feel shaky or amateurish to me.
Agreed.
Now on the other hand using Windows always feels like an adventure, the question not being "will it crash?", but "what will crash and when?"
Ohh, yes.... Boy, is this ever true (when I was using XP). You just never knew if the thing would boot successfully or not. As for the "snapshots" that it used to have (for system-restore purposes), I found them to be utterly useless. I found XP to be very poor quality in terms of robustness. The amount of anti-virus software needed was ridiculous too. MS would do well to learn from OpenBSD's "secure by default" approach.
Member since:
2006-02-05
I work for a microsoft gold partner, and our VP of development is an MVP. When we report bugs, they get addressed.
As for features, a month ago I made a good argument for supporting POCO objects in dynamic data, and with the latest push we got a DynamicObjectDataSource that does just that.
I'm not saying that. I am saying that the vast majority of linux software is pre 1.0, which by its version number means the DEVELOPERS WRITING IT do not believe it is production ready.
And just so you don't think im just bashing linux, I also think by and large the GUI apps on windows leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability, consistency, and esthetic, especially when compared to mac apps. And that if you ignore tooling, free software really sets the bar on infrastructure stuff and protocol specs.