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Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

They should have called it 3.999 instead of 4.0, or "4.0 BETA", or "4.0 (for developers only!)" or anything like that. Anything other than giving it a new major version number without a disclaimer that it wasn't ready for prime-time. When you give something a new major version number, distro packagers will either update to it or they'll be subjected to endless questions from users asking them why the package is outdated.

> There was good reason for them to release 4.0

What were those reasons? To me, it really seems like they rushed it out because the release of Windows Vista and iOS made them feel like they had to release something to seem current and up to date.

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The reason is that KDE is mostly developed by volunteers. Many of whom had branches that have been developed and ready for several years but not released. They were losing interest. KDE had to move the train to keep those volunteers around.

If you don't ship it and some point it's gonna die.

So use the beta version to integrate everything and make sure it all works before shipping it to users. That's the point of having a beta. But shipping what should have been a beta release to end users as though it were finished has ramifications in how your project is viewed and whether people keep using it.

There were many alpha and beta releases. The point was about finalizing API changes of kdelibs.

You can stabilize APIs in a beta, though? What am I missing?

Nothing, it was a mistake that some are attempting to explain away as everyone elses fault for misunderstanding.

I did the same thing as the other poster, went to 4.x with KDE then promptly left as I fundamentally disagreed with so many of the things they were doing. I ended up at i3 and haven't looked back. KDE is a lot better than it was back in those days, but i3 is so perfect for me I'll never be a full time KDE user again. Not because I hate them, but because they're not i3.

Back then there was just a single "KDE" release, instead of separate frameworks, desktop and applications that we have now. KDE 4.0 being released meant that the frameworks used to build applications were now stable and that initial ports of desktop and applications on top of those frameworks were now available. They made it clear that end users should wait with switching until the whole DE stabilizes.

That's just how their versioning scheme worked. The exact same thing happened with KDE 2.0 and KDE 3.0, but there was a different audience back then and 4.x took much longer to stabilize (as Qt3 -> Qt4 migration was much heaver that others, including Qt4 -> Qt5), so it became a bigger problem there.

It didn't happen with KDE 5.0 because there was no KDE 5.0 - now you have separate releases with separate versioning schemes of KDE Frameworks, Plasma Desktop and KDE Applications (and many apps were still based on KDELibs4 on initial release anyway and only gradually ported to KF5 afterwards).

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