Re: KDE Community Working Group takes care of the community
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 74.60.28.190]
on September 06, 2008 01:28 AM
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same. Anyways, it seems that gnome has coome a long way since their early 2.0 releases that were just horrible. Yeah, they made the same mistake KDE 4 made and now they are the ones being critised which is only fair because you can be half the people "whining" about KDE 4 remember whate I'm talking about.
In fact, the mistakes that Gnome made in the early 2000s are still felt and even perpetuated today in Linux circles, but the fact remains that these memes are no longer true and Gnome has proven to be just as viable as KDE abiet it does have it's own flaws. However, it took a long time for the Gnome devs to get a clue... almost too long in fact. Had it not have been for the fact that Red Hat and Novell chose Gnome over KDE they probably would have been in the same position. But, when users started the switch over to KDE and when development on XFCE went throught the roof the Gnome team realised they had did something wrong by hiding and removing features. The developers realised "this is a bad idea", but you see the reason why they were able to make this turn around (somewhere around the 2.12 release) is because they were listening to their users and the critism that followed.
And that is what separates the Gnome dev team from the KDE dev team in terms of spirit. Where Gnome devs are gernerally repectful even when they disagree and are willing to ingauge in a dialogue about why they make their desicisions, the KDE team has the hubris to blow off any critism as merely "hating." This has been especially true with their 4.x realease where they have mistook valid critism and turned it into a "I think your new baby is ugly" type of comment.
Other differences in KDEs design philosophy has also made it a non-choice for enterprise level and power users alike despite it's amazing level of configurability and that is their refusal to split programs into their respective packages like Gnome and XFCE have done. Let's say you want Kopete, well then you have to bring in all of KDE-PIM. You want Krita, all of KOffice. You want KPPP, all of the KDE-Network packages, and so on. This is *BAD* for people who have limited space on their hard drives or have limited bandwidth when it comes to upgrades. In fact the problem is so bad that several distrubutions have even split up the packages in their own repositories: Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch has an unoffical build called KDEmod. Their has even been talk with the latter to replace the official vanilla KDE in arch with the KDEmod packages, though this proposal has been rejected several times because it would alter the original packages.
The problems within the KDE dev team are numerous, and their unwillingness to listen to users and other "members" of the open source community who are only trying to help them will be their end if they are not careful. KDE 4.x sucks, it should have never been released with all the hype surrounding it. The developers have been rude and arrogant when faced with *VALID* critism and have consistiently made statements that they are going to stay on course and that things will get better (G. W. Bush II must be their hero).
So as you can see, yes this mistake has been made before with Gnome, but the diferences surrounding their circumstances are vast. The KDE team has shown that they simply do not care about the user and that the developing the 4.x branch is more important than continuing to improve the 3.5.x branch. In doing that they have sealed their fate and the only way they can change the course now is by admitting they were wrong and plotting a new course for the 4.x branch, bringing it more in line with the 3.5.x branch. But with every other affiliated program (KOffice, Amarok 2) also trying to reinvent the wheel and try to have their first 4.x release hearld as the Second Comming that is doubtful.
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Re: KDE Community Working Group takes care of the community
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 74.60.28.190] on September 06, 2008 01:28 AMIn fact, the mistakes that Gnome made in the early 2000s are still felt and even perpetuated today in Linux circles, but the fact remains that these memes are no longer true and Gnome has proven to be just as viable as KDE abiet it does have it's own flaws. However, it took a long time for the Gnome devs to get a clue... almost too long in fact. Had it not have been for the fact that Red Hat and Novell chose Gnome over KDE they probably would have been in the same position. But, when users started the switch over to KDE and when development on XFCE went throught the roof the Gnome team realised they had did something wrong by hiding and removing features. The developers realised "this is a bad idea", but you see the reason why they were able to make this turn around (somewhere around the 2.12 release) is because they were listening to their users and the critism that followed.
And that is what separates the Gnome dev team from the KDE dev team in terms of spirit. Where Gnome devs are gernerally repectful even when they disagree and are willing to ingauge in a dialogue about why they make their desicisions, the KDE team has the hubris to blow off any critism as merely "hating." This has been especially true with their 4.x realease where they have mistook valid critism and turned it into a "I think your new baby is ugly" type of comment.
Other differences in KDEs design philosophy has also made it a non-choice for enterprise level and power users alike despite it's amazing level of configurability and that is their refusal to split programs into their respective packages like Gnome and XFCE have done. Let's say you want Kopete, well then you have to bring in all of KDE-PIM. You want Krita, all of KOffice. You want KPPP, all of the KDE-Network packages, and so on. This is *BAD* for people who have limited space on their hard drives or have limited bandwidth when it comes to upgrades. In fact the problem is so bad that several distrubutions have even split up the packages in their own repositories: Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch has an unoffical build called KDEmod. Their has even been talk with the latter to replace the official vanilla KDE in arch with the KDEmod packages, though this proposal has been rejected several times because it would alter the original packages.
The problems within the KDE dev team are numerous, and their unwillingness to listen to users and other "members" of the open source community who are only trying to help them will be their end if they are not careful. KDE 4.x sucks, it should have never been released with all the hype surrounding it. The developers have been rude and arrogant when faced with *VALID* critism and have consistiently made statements that they are going to stay on course and that things will get better (G. W. Bush II must be their hero).
So as you can see, yes this mistake has been made before with Gnome, but the diferences surrounding their circumstances are vast. The KDE team has shown that they simply do not care about the user and that the developing the 4.x branch is more important than continuing to improve the 3.5.x branch. In doing that they have sealed their fate and the only way they can change the course now is by admitting they were wrong and plotting a new course for the 4.x branch, bringing it more in line with the 3.5.x branch. But with every other affiliated program (KOffice, Amarok 2) also trying to reinvent the wheel and try to have their first 4.x release hearld as the Second Comming that is doubtful.
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