Plasma Applet Direction

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 15 January 2009, Jud Craft wrote:
> Well, true.  I suppose the only reservation is that such solutions
> like the Google Gadget/iPhone software stores require the development
> of a supported software delivery system, that I think should not be
> outsourced to a third party website. 

that's why we have Frank coming to Tokamak II in February =)

> I really do wish that all these upstream projects (Pulse, GNOME, Xorg,
> KDE) didn't all decide to do their revolutionary new releases at once.
>  (Pulse's...well, birth, GNOME's GVFS and nautilus refactoring,
> Xorg's...whatever the heck they did, and to a lesser extent KDE4.)  It
> seemed like everything was working so well back in 2006, when I got
> back into linux. :)  I was so impressed when I saw OpenSUSE 10.3 -- I
> thought maybe it really was time to give Linux a shot.  But then came
> Fedora 9 and OpenSUSE 11, and then KDE 3.5 bit the dust.  Dark times.

it happens in waves; i really think that distributions need to do a much, much 
better job of shielding the rank-and-file users from these natural cycles. 
they are far too caught up right now in competing with each other to prove who 
is the most cutting edge and most daring. this would be fine if there was 
_also_ a "safe and steady" stream of releases in tandem to that.

there are the enterprise and "long term" releases, but they tend to not be 
what people concentrate on and are often horrifically out of date, sometimes 
to the point of complete _uselessness_.

it's a maturation that has yet to really occur on the client side of linux.

> But KDE seems to be the earliest project to emerge from the
> often-regression-filled "evolution" that has occupied the last two
> years, and it's even better for it.  In fact, considering the problems
> the rest of the free software stack is having due to growing pains
> these last two years, KDE4 really does deserve a pat on the back for
> actually _emerging_ from this mess better than it was, whereas
> projects like Pulse and Xorg seem to be fighting to regain the
> functionality they previously had.

thanks for the kind words; i do hope that we, as a broader community, are able 
to steer our way through the other whitewaters that lay ahead of us.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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