[Feedback] What did you do with Amarok?

[Nicolas Will]

I believe that there is a bit of a failure to communicate around here.

I'll give my opinion (yes, another one!) and I'll try not to flame
anyone (good luck with that).

The way I see it, purely as a user, the main problem here is the lack of
transition.

One day Amarok 1.4 was supported and 2.0 in development, the next day
1.4 was not supported anymore and 2.0 was the de facto thing to use if
you wanted any support.

Guess what the distros package: 2.0, as 1.4 was officially unsupported.

Unfortunately 2.0 was a great base, but not yet a great product. The way
I see it 2.0 was in-between a tech preview and a beta, in any case
relatively far from a preview.

I understand that the devs needed to get users on board at some point,
that helps get momentum.

However, with 2.0 lacking quite a few features, lacking a lot of polish
and coming with a lot of dramatic changes from the baseline, the shock
is great for normal non-geek users.

Take me, with my iPod Touch and no possibility to use Amarok to manage
music on it once I upgraded my distro that was then only providing 2.0.
I'm a bit of a geek, so I came here, asked around, tried some 2.1 beta,
etc... But still, after a while, I have found a way to use 1.4 again.
The issue I have today is that I have a working functionality, but no
support and no hope that I will ever get a 1.4 that will work with iFuse
of a future release of libgpod. I have no guarantee that that a 2.x will
provide that in time either... That is my pet issue and is not
completely relevant to the whole issue at hand, though.

So my opinion is that 2.x could have been introduced to the masses while
still providing a bit of life support to 1.4. That way distros and
packagers could have had the option of safely providing both. That has
the disadvantage of taking a bit of dev bandwidth and defocusing the
efforts from both devs and users from 2.x. What I see is that there are
a number of users that are quite angry, and tat is not very good either.

Nico