A few words about the Quality of KDE 4.2

Mon Mar 16 19:13:15 GMT 2009

On Tuesday 17 March 2009 03:30:44 Samuel Kage wrote:
> Currently I'm running KDE 4.2.1 on Opensuse, which is known for making one
> of the best KDE packages.
> Even though I'm really sad about the stability of KDE these days. For
> explaining why, i want to describe a common use case for me an many many
> other users.
>
> The first thing I notice, after booting up, is the quicklauncher-bug which
> makes a very often-used part of the desktop nearly unusable because you
> cant see the small icons.
> Next thing is checking my E-mails and the calendar... The week view in
> Korganizer is gone (I know its just hidden. But for any normal user its
> completely broken).
> Then i maybe get a message in kopete. That looks very unsmooth, if your
> panel is aligned to center and not over the whole screen, cause the
> appearing message button in the systray moves all other plasmoids in the
> panel around. Once when it appears and once when it disappears (very
> often).
> Now I want to hear music... When starting Amarok I often get a message: The
> device M-Audio***** (My sound card) is not working. Which means for any
> normal user, who don't know how to fiddle around in systemsettings, that he
> can't hear music in KDE. At least not with his favourite player.
> When I'm done and want to shut down the pc the last thing that always
> happens is a plasma crash these days. (last month it was a Kontact crash)
> which prevents the computer from shutting down. Which is also annoying
> because you often don't notice it before you return to the pc after hours
> or days. (That are just actual and very obvious bugs but there are much
> more small ones)
>
> Overall its partly no smooth experience to use KDE these days and I really
> don't understand why such things happen. I see the point in releasing KDE
> 4.0 so unstable and i don't want to talk about the past. But now we have
> 4.2 and that release is meant for end-users. Furthermore this release is
> feature complete for most of the normal users. So why isn't the focus on
> bug fixing now? KDE 4.2.1 should just be a bug fix release. But for me it
> contains more bugs than 4.2.0. and much of them are really obvious.
> I think we just CAN'T release KDE with so much bugs if it should be taken
> serious. Just stop a second, try to be honest and imagine what would happen
> if MS would release Windows in such a state... You would laugh at them, and
> blame them for releasing such a buggy piece of software.
> Or take the success of Ubuntu. It's mainly because most things just work.
> Overall I think there are things that really need to be changed. The focus
> has to be on bug fixing. And when it can't be done timely, releases have to
> be delayed. What about a real QA Team which has to make sure that there is
> no release before all obvious bugs are squashed?
>
> Please don't get me wrong. I love KDE4. I'm with it since the 4.0 betas.
> It's a damned cool peace of software and has sooo much potential.  And I
> really love to use it because of the very much genial things it offers.
> Kudos to all developers for that.
> The only things to complain about are the bugs.
>
> I try to spread KDE in my family and to my friends. But, tell me, how
> should I explain the many bugs to them? They are no experts so they don't
> need special features! They just want it working. Just like over 90% of the
> normal users, too.
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I think this is the nature of much of what OSS has to offer and as a long time 
user of GnuLinux I have gotten used to the fact that software is often released 
with no certainty that it is 100% functional and that it is up to the users to 
accept it, report it and perhaps even help fix it. Most of the folks developing it 
are not doing it as a day job and we who use more than contribute cannot be too 
fussy with what others give for free.

However, I personally feel that you do have a point in that if this was truly a 
commercially competitive piece of software, then it is a little rough around the 
edges.

That being said I also believe that distribution packagers should take some 
responsibility for what they package for their users, especially if their users 
have purchased their initial install disks and then upgrade to newer software from 
a officially sanctioned repository expecting it to run as it was 
intended/expected.

I have been using GnuLinux for 8 years and it seems there has alsway been two very 
different demand paths from the user base. One is stable and secure the other is 
new and shiney, perhaps one might say "more eyecandy please"

Some of the leading distros, SuSe included, have always been quick with the new 
versions, especially in the case of KDE, but perhaps now that more and more less 
technically minded/inclined users take up Linux it is time for these leading 
distros to make it very clear to the user base that a new version of the distro or 
packaged software is not yet ready for general use.

Case in point are the truly commercial distros that can't be downloaded for free 
or the highly customised version going into netbooks and such. hey use tried and 
proven stable software AFAIK.

I used Mandriva when it was Mandrake after starting out with SuSe but later 
switched to Slackware which prides itself on speed security and stability. KDE-4 
just came out of /testing in Slackware /current and into /kde which means it will 
be included in the next release. Anyone running /current with KDE-4 is welcome to 
discuss problems they are having with it on a Slack list but they will not get 
much support at all if they start complaining about this or that not working 
correctly. They are running /current which is the unstable branch and if they 
don't want to accept and/or report the problems encountered then perhaps they 
should be running stable which was released in Dec '08 with KDE-3.5.10.

Since KDE-4 is now in the main directory of /current I can say that the next 
stable release of Slackware will only happen after KDE is deemed ready and stable 
enough to satisfy Pat Volkerding not the user base asking for it.

Other distros have may have a different design/release philosophy and users should 
accept that and not be to hard on the upstream developers of the software included 
which may not be 100% ready and may often have been modified by the distro 
packagers before inclusion and release.
-- 
Cheers,

Rick Miles

Written on Sweetmorn, the 3rd of Discord, 3175 
http://turtlespond.net
http://rickmiles.com.au

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