Just so it’s not conspicuous that I, am now even mentioning KDE after it’s major release 4.0
Even months, even a year before KDE 4 was supposed to be out, we were all hyped, from brainstorming to I don’t know what.
At some point, it was around when dolphin was out, talks started that new KDE is actually crap, that’s it’s not worth anything, bla bla. And then as the time went on, it got to the point where it was impossible, those who claimed they had KDE under their fingers were only saying the bads things. It got so bad, that at one point, it was around time Gnome 2.20 was released I reached to test out new Gnome. I was a sworn Gnome user, back in the day I used to swear in name of RedHat :)
Around this time, as far as I can remember betas were out, I tested every single beta, and I was … demolished. I couldn’t believe they could release something that buggy, that something that buggy could even be in beta. In meantime, I ditched Gnome :)
KDE4 RC’s were already out, basically the same story, and it went throughout RC’s.
For all of this, I used live cd’s which I got from Debian KDE maintainers site and Kubuntu KDE 4 announcement, Debian was shipping completely vanilla flavored KDE4, while it was pretty much the same with Kubuntu.
Problem with bugs, was definitely a persistent one, but looking from other side, it’s a known fact that KDE project is largest open source project there is, and certainly most ambitious. KDE 4 release day came, KDE got released, bugs got released with it. Although grave bugs were eliminated, and it’s actually … well quite usable for everyday usage. Best comment I read on Slashdot day KDE 4 was out, is “what matters is that beast is out”. I couldn’t agree more.
If it wasn’t released, bugs would remain, new ones would be found but not submitted, it’s really good to know that they had ~5000-6000 commits in first week after 4.0 release! I still haven’t installed KDE 4.0, for those who know I’m on Debian Testing. And this is my philosophy regarding installing KDE 4 release. I like testing out new things, but I also like stable things. Right now KDE4 is in Debian experimental respiratory, till it reaches testing respiratory, months will pass. Till then KDE 4.1 may be out, but till then I’m perfectly happy with 3.5.8.
I didn’t mention anything about looks or anything, nor provided any screenshots, I really don’t thing there’s a need. I see “change/velimir” talking about it constantly on forums, so if he wants to add some of his own input … he can.
My final words would be that, in the end all the noise about KDE4 release that was followed for more then a year, simply fell down. It didn’t come out as a big event as we expected it, at least that’s my impression. Yes before I worked, one major thing that’s good about KDE4 is qt4, which put simple mean that Amarok may sound appear on other platforms, like Windows maybe. This would definitely be simply great.
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