KDE4 release discussion, Was: KIO::NetAccess static methods question

[Torsten Rahn]

On Thursday 25 October 2007 20:54:27 Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> On Thursday 25 October 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> >  i remember just how crappy 2.0 was on my machine then (a
> > PII 400 no less =): slow, buggy as hell, incomplete in many places,
> > relatively few apps....
> I have different memories.

I have also very different memories. Yes, it was pretty buggy (which meant 
that konqueror crashed about once every 1-2 hours), had slow application 
startups and took quite some memory on the machines back then.
 
But it still was totally  usable for a common user, had only little feature 
regressions and was shipped e.g. by SUSE with the second edition of SUSE 7.0 
as a default desktop.

Concerning you expectations that distributions won't ship KDE 4.0: I doubt 
that very much: 

- Journalists will be keen on reporting about KDE 4.0. If KDE 4 will e.g. will 
lack a volume slider they will report that no matter whether you tell 
them "Oh, this release is not meant to get used by people".

- Users will ask distributors to provide packages

- Product managers of big distributions are always keen on shipping brand new 
software. Given that I don't expect that after KDE 4.0 gets released there 
will be a second release KDE 4.1 within less than 4-6 months I'm _very_ sure 
that KDE 4.0 will get shipped by distributions if the release falls into 
their release cycle. Maybe not as the default desktop but still prominent 
enough that distributors will be able to have a selling point.

So we better make the quality live up to the one of KDE 2. I'm pretty much 
aware that there is no chance to fix all the feature regressions of plasma 
compared to kicker 2. I don't even think it's necessary though: 

Plasma should:

- enable the user to start every app available in KDE (works now)
- enable the user to easily access tasks (has issues)
- provide at least basic functionality: volume slider and a clock should be 
enough (I don't see a volume slider yet ..)
- have no obvious usability issues (like the plasmoids in the panel which can 
easily get accidently moved right now). 

If those are there, work in a stable manner at sufficient speed then I'd agree 
that we are ready for a .0 release. We seriously don't need all the fancy 
options (like moving panel or taskbars to different screen boarders) but the 
basic functionality should work without issues.

Torsten




   


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