interesting comment from a poster on phoronix

[Hussam Al-Tayeb]

On Thu, 2015-08-20 at 17:02 +0200, O.Sinclair wrote:
> Am not sure why you keep dragging Microsoft into this but I can
> safely assure there are users (I know cause I support quite a few of
> them) who have no inkling of the difference between Microsoft Windows
> and Microsoft Office. If I start talking about upgrading to Windows
> 10 they might very well assume I mean Office and catch a shock when
> the whole system has changed. And they don't give jack about what
> version of Skype they have so long as it works.
>  
> The issue being raised via the forum post and later comments is
> rather that the current versioning system can be confusing even to
> some of us who have been around since KDE 3.
>  
> kind regards,
> Sinclair 
> ___________________________________________________
> This message is from the kde mailing list.
> Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
> Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
> More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.

Microsoft Windows was designed from the beginning so people simply have
to learn how to turn on a computer and they are ready to go.
This made it less than necessary to learn computer literacy.
I've dealt with Windows issues since before the Windows 95 days.
While the situation is different now than it was 20 years ago, a large
portion of Windows users don't care what version of software they use
as long as it works and can open their files.
Why did Windows XP take so long to die? No one cared to upgrade unless
software required new versions of Windows. They waited till their old
computers died and bought new ones with new versions of Windows pre
-installed.

Microsoft did try to keep Windows and Office versions synchronized at o
ne point with Office 2000/Office XP but that was just a marketing
strategy and was abandoned later.

With regards to KDE, I think the major versioning change was due to the
restructuring of the platform.
A large portion of the duplication between kdelibs and Qt was "fixed".
A lot was upstreamed. The frameworks turned into basic Qt add-ons.
Above that are the 'applications' and the 'desktop'. Since those two
components don't necessarily require each other but instead depend on
the frameworks, they don't need to keep the same versioning pattern.

Note that it would imply that everything is ported to KF5 if
'applications' version also started with a 5.x which is not the case
yet.

I think users will feel better once everything is ported to KF5 and
regressions are fixed.

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.