[Feedback] What did you do with Amarok?

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

>
> 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.
>

I agree fully with this! For many users, the transition from 1.4.x to 2.0
was very abrupt. I really don't want to point any fingers here as that is
not going to accomplish anything but I feel that we did what we could to
make it very clear what Amarok 2.0 was and especially, what it was not. Let
me quote a section from the 2.0.0 release announcement:

"It is important to note that Amarok 2.0 is a beginning, not an end. Because
of the major changes required, not all features from the 1.4 are in Amarok
2. Many of these missing features, like queueing and filtering in the
playlist, will return within a few releases. Other features, such as
visualizations and support for portable media players, require improvements
in the underlying KDE infrastructure. They will return as KDE4's support
improves. Some features, such as the player window or support for databases
other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable
programming problems, or they didn't fit our design decisions about how to
distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players."

I feel that we made it very clear that Amarok 2.0 was not a drop in
replacement for Amarok 1.4.x yet. I think we had more faith that the
distros, especially on top of the KDE 4.0 backlash, would be very mindful of
how best to serve their particular user base. Some distros could easilly
have included Amarok 2.0 as an optional install, but likely, most should
have kept Amarok 1.4.x around a bit longer. But really, our job as Amarok
developers is to do whatever we thing is best for the project overall, and
the distros exists to filter our efforts so one the best parts ever reach
the users! :-)

- Nikolaj
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