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If they jumped to KDE4, you wonder what else is not being tested before packaged and released.

I think we should just all admit, we are continually beta testing, because the platform is always evolving.

User testing is part of the way that open source is developed. It is an integral part of the whole FOSS scene.

If you don't want to be involved in the initial testing and bug shakeout of new cutting-edge functionality, then don't use .0 versions but instead use the stable, older versions.

In the case of KDE, here are a couple of very nice distributions (with liveCDs to trial them before you commit) that allow you to do precisely that:

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05372

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05344

However, given that Kubuntu 9.04 and Mandriva 2009.1 are both just around the corner, and KDE4 has now passed through its early testing stages, you would have to question if those two distributions had perhaps been a little too conservative.

I think there is more of an agenda here than meets they eye.

It possibly has something to do with the fact that KDE 4.2.1 (and presumably later) is faster than GNOME, at least as functional as GNOME, the underlying library (Qt 4.5) is licensed under LGPL, it doesn't include Mono at all, and it is way sexier and more innovative than than GNOME.

I can see where certain parties (perhaps who have made deals with other desktop vendors) possibly wouldn't like that at all. Who knows? There may even be a desire in some circles to unfairly smear the reputation of a new and innovative competing desktop software.

I guess anything is possible, but it's pretty childish, and doesn't seem to be coming from the Gnome guys themselves.

http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/71412.html

Jason D. Clinton, devloper of the Gnome games modules, says

Based on my own personal experiences, I'm guessing that these pundits played with KDE 4.0.x or 4.1.x, and the system didn't like their machine very much (it was pretty finicky about hardware), and therefore decided that it was garbage.

I have KDE 4 installed on four computers, three of which work flawlessly. One of them has a crummy SiS card and presumably because of its drivers, Plasma has a severe memory leak where after 24 hours its using 512 megs of RAM. A friend of mine asked me to put KDE 4 on his machine, replacing Gnome, but after countless glitches and random lockups, he decided that while KDE 4 is brimming with promise, it just isn't there yet, for him. He grudgingly asked me to put Gnome back after the 4.2 upgrade didn't solve any of his problems.

It's entirely possible that for these people, KDE 4 simply doesn't work right, and they haven't had the pleasure of seeing it when it's working the way it's supposed to.

The thing everyone needs to remember is this isn't an Us vs Them battle, it's different strokes for different folks, and we're all one big community looking for software that works the way we do.