Why KDE4 is called KDE?

[Michal Svoboda]

Patricia Max wrote 1945 bytes:
> I wanted to upgrade my Fedora system, but I wound up with KDE4 which I
> probably can upgrade now to a later version.  However, it does not
> function the way KDE3 does, and I don't want to try to sort out the
> issues.  

Yes, that's exactly the problem with KDE4 being a KDE. It replaced KDE3
when it should not have. KDE3 and KDE4 are two different products, and
were supposed to be installable side by side, just as with any other
window manager (or "software collection" if you will -- by the way I
believe the whole SC name thing is a step in the wrong direction too).

And indeed back when 4.0 was out, KDE people got away with the infamous
"you can still use 3.5.10, it is extremely polished blah blah". But then
at some point, suddenly, distributors marked this polished thing as
obsolete and people were *forced* to abandon it in favour of a new and
immature and completely different KDE4.

The 4>3 thing is deceiving people, and had it been called "The new KDE,
version 1.0" and had it been less ambitious than a total yet incomplete
replacement of KDE3 (why? most of the apps still work fine), perhaps the
distributors would not bury KDE3 alive and perhaps there would be less
FUD, ranting and disappointment on both sides. The Perl6 people realized
this already and while they used to call it "the next stable version"
just as KDE people did, the perl6.org page now says "Perl 6, the spunky
little sister of Perl 5".

And I agree that what's happening is not the UNIX way, not by a long
shot. Because you can not simply take the compositing kdewin4 and
install it in kdewin3's stead, as you can replace tcsh with bash. In
fact, a lot of bugs get dismissed right away just on the grounds that
one does not use the latest&greatest version of everything. Maybe the
young developers need to be enlightened.

Regards,
Michal Svoboda
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