WOW. . .those screenshots of 3.1Alpha are fantastic

[Andreas Pour]

James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> 
> Terry wrote:
> > Who is forcing you to use 3.0 or higher?  If your happy with 2.2.2 then
> > great. Meanwhile let the rest of us enjoy being on the bleeding edge. You
> > try to have a good evening.

[ ... ]

> My point again is that before more is done to pretty things up that the
> more basic foundation needs work.  And, it appears to me that we are
> loosing ground.  Stability in 3.0.2 is still not as good as 2.2.2 and
> yet people are working on 3.1 rather than making 3.0.3 work better.

I don't agree about your stability assessment, but, even if correct,
*developers are not fungible*, which is something people seem, for
whatever reason, to have a terribly difficult time understanding.

For example, the people working on themes, cannot just fix bugs in
KHTML, just like you can't just fix bugs in KHTML.  So what should the
theme people do, stop contributing until KHTML gets bugfree, which will
be *never*, as the specs are constantly changing?

Also, I am getting awfully tired of hearing all this criticism against
developers for not doing more, while most of the people doing the
criticizing are doing nothing.  Let's not forget that this is supposed
to be a community, and hence, a group where everyone contributes, not
where only some contribute and everyone yells at them to do more.

A classic example is this.  On the one hand, developers are yelled at
for adding more features.  On the other hand, if they don't add new
features, they are yelled at.  So, no matter what they do, they are
yelled at.  Frankly, if I were a developer, I would just tune you all
out, b/c all this yelling is ridiculous.  Particularly, when it comes
from people who themselves have nothing better to contribute than
yelling (not talking about anyone in particular, but there are a lot of
those folks around).
 
> And, no, you are correct that no one is forcing me to use it, I (and a
> lot of other users) can go back to Windows.  But, I don't think that
> that is really what you want.

I personally don't care.  You should go where you are happy.  For me,
the freedom of Open Source more than makes up for any inconvenience, b/c
I value freedom more than convenience.  Others may differ.  But all this
yelling and negativity is making this community far less joyous to be in
than it used to be.

People, who should know better, keep arguing that the developers have
changed.  While some have - every person is different than every other,
and there are different developers now - I see a far greater change in
the user community.  The demands get higher, and the contributions
fewer.  Well, that does not work in a "free" society.

Just like it takes individual participation and contribution to make a
democracy work, it takes individual participation and contribution to
make free software work.  Certainly not by everyone, but by a large
enough "core" that cares.  And what I see is the percentage of people
contributing gets smaller.  There are so many things anyone can do, and
if you took all the reams of emails and articles critical of people who
are doing their best, and converted it into meaningful contributions to
the project, KDE would be a lot better.  Yelling, does not make it
better, and in my opinion, makes it, and the community, worse.
 
> If I submit bug reports, will someone work on them or just tell me that
> this will be fixed in 3.1?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with fixing it in 3.1.  There aren't
so many developers, that they can maintain everything.  There's even
people yelling, that KDE 1 isn't being maintained.  It's a "who can yell
the loudest" contest, with the view that if you irritate enough they
will gratiate your particular desires.  Since obviously, there is no
possible way to gratiate everyone that is yelling.

>  I am willing to do my part by testing, but
> previous reports I submitted fell on deaf ears.  Actually worse, I was
> either told that there was nothing wrong,

Sometimes, that is the case.  If the developer can't reproduce the bug,
there is no way to fix it.  Happens to me too in software I code.

> that it was a Qt issue,

And sometimes it's an X issue, sometimes a Linux issue, sometimes a
compiler issue.  KDE is only one project out of many needed to run a
complete system.

> or it would be fixed in 3.0. 

Some things were, but sure bugs remain.

> If KDE expects to become widely accepted, this
> atitide, as well as the atitude in your reply MUST BE CHANGED.

Quite contraire, for freedom to succeed, the attitude of the community
must be changed.  Freedom, as we have always known, requires effort,
vigilance, education, participation. 

If you want to live in a world, where one man controls all the machines,
can watch all you do, can tell you what you can read, watch and listen
to and what you can't, where you can drive and where you can't, who you
can talk to and who you can't, and where that same man can turn
everything off if you don't pay him enough, then go back to Windows, and
one day you will find, that all the freedom you cherish is gone, and you
will have noone to blame but yourself.  Or, find more ways to contribute
to the projects and movements that try to preserve or increase your
freedom.  The choice is yours, but remember, that freedom is never
cheap, nor is anything else that is so precious, dear, and necessary.

And, more to the moment, as there are more users, there need to be more
developers, more documentation writers, more bug hunters, etc.  In
short, more contributors, and less complainers.
 
> And making it pretty while having Konqueror crash at least twice as much
> is not the bleeding edge of anything.

Do you really, really think, that whoever added the eye candy, would be
effective at fixing Konqueror bugs?  Do you really think, that a
Konqueror developer took time off Konqueror work, to write that code?  I
don't know, maybe that happened, I haven't checked, but, I very much
doubt it.

Ciao,

Dre
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