Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

They forgot because it wasn’t sold that way.

This whole thing reminds me of the whole KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition. “We never said 4.0 would be usable, but also it’s a big major public release, please use it, but also don’t complain about it being unusable”.

It seems that some developer communities always want to have their cake (the flashy marketing / sloganeering) and eat it too (faster ship cycles and shipping beta quality software as production ready because that’s faster).

EDIT: to clarify in Ruby’s case I’m not saying 3.0 was beta quality. But TFA goes through all sorts of gymnastics to try and avoid admitting that they tacitly let people assume there’s be a revolutionary speed bump, and smells a lot like retreating while declaring victory.

View on HN

Although KDE 4.0 was a disaster, it wasn't that developers were greedy or something.

KDE is mostly driven by volunteers. During KDE 4.0 time, KDE didn't have any releases for a long time. That meant some volunteers were losing motivation, things were getting too long, etc.

As an example, KDE's Games collection was in a fantastic shape and ready for a very long time. Should they all have waited until things were polished? That would've taken 1-2 more years. KDE Games developers were not gonna keep waiting for that long.

While releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake, the biggest mistake was distro's rushing to ship it by default. KDE 4.0 should've been optional/sideloaded. That would'v been the right balance.

However, the hype around KDE 4.0 was so much that distro's rushed it and the rest is history.

KDE 4.0 was pretty bad. For example, the Plasma desktop which provided things like the taskbar and application launcher menu was rather unstable and liked to crash. On its own, that wouldn't be a problem - it just automatically relaunched after the crash and that was that. Unfortunately, there was another bug where if you set your desktop wallpaper during the first launch (you know, like a new user of KDE 4 probably would) and then Plasma crashed, it would corrupt its own configuration file in such a way that you lost all the things it provided like the task bar and the application launcher, and there was no way to fix this except manually finding and deleting the configuration file because although the existence of the task bar etc was part of the configuration there was no way to actually modify this from the GUI at the time. Made for a pretty terrible new user experience.

It’s amazing the trauma that can be carried.

If you have children, and they have children, I hope that those grandchildren of yours grow up hearing stories about what a travesty the roll out of KDE 4.0 PLASMA Desktop was.

I know you’re being sarcastic but these kinds of stories are well worth passing on to future generations. Managing expectations isn’t about not hurting people’s feelings, it’s about preventing blowback that will at best distract and at worst demoralise the team. You can bet the plasma team wasted a lot of energy on dealing with all the hate they got. Energy that would be better spent improving plasma.

I was only sort of being sarcastic. I also remember the switch to KDE 4.0 very clearly.

Here’s my entry into the annals of KDE 4.0 Plasma Desktop Release circa 2008:

It basically worked for me. I was a sysadmin, so abused my authority at work to sudo apt install kde-desktop on my mandated Ubuntu work machine. My personal machine was a Gentoo thinkpad running fvwm2, but I did use the excellent Kate editor and AmaroK media player. I was a glutton for punishment at the time.

I think more than anything, seeing how salty people were about the transition taught me the psychology of the downstream user, and how a classic “politics of power” narrative can be applied to almost any situation for rhetorical effect, appropriately or not.

It’s kind of an impossible quagmire. The developers were mostly volunteers working on what they thought was interesting and worthwhile, most users were probably fine and silent, and a percentage of very loud users felt very personally wronged, as if something immoral had occurred. They’re not wrong to give feedback, but the situation is that they basically have to beg volunteer strangers. And, broadly speaking, most of the people complaining didn’t come from a background prone to begging or being told no.

Another thing I chuckle to reflect on, is that iOS has been shifting towards a “KDE 4 AIR” look and feel since 2015. The latest iOS innovation: KDE4 style “Widgets” ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com