Meme 1: What is the future of 3.5?
This year, as with most years since KDE3 emerged, there have been huge deployments of KDE 3 based software. These deployments will not shift for years to come, no matter what KDE4 is. This is because large institutional deployments (government, corporate, educational, etc) typically have 3-7 year cycles (sometimes even longer) between major changes. Patches and security fixes? Sure. Major revamps? No. This alone ensures that KDE3 will remain supported for years. Why? Because there are users. That is how the open source dev model works: where there are users, there are developers; as one declines so does the other. The developers tend to be a step ahead of the users for software that is progressive, but you'll also find that they have a foot in the here and now too (as well as the past, often).
KDE3 is still open in our svn so that bug fixes, security fixes, etc. can continue to be made. KDE 3.5.x is a rather solid desktop system and really doesn't need a huge amount of work given what it is today; the work to move it to the next level is what we refer to as KDE4, of course. This means that the efforts needed to put into it aren't huge to keep it viable. However, efforts that do go into it are welcome.
While the core KDE team will continue to concentrate our work on KDE4 since that is the long term direction of things, it is fully expected that our partners (which include some KDE core team members as employees/members) will continue supporting and even developing on KDE3 issues. The central project will also be around to lend a helping hand with advice and what not; I did that for a person the week before I left for holidays in December, actually, so it's not wild hypothesis but solid theory.
For those familiar with the open source method, the above probably sounds .. well .. obvious. That's because it is .. for those familiar with the open source method. We will find in this blog entry that many of the concerns people raise come from not acknowledging how Free(dom) software is created via the open source method.
Meme 2: KDE 4.0 isn't what a business would do
I've read exactly this statement with those literal words, but I've also read and heard what are essentially the same things put slightly differently. Well, not to play Captain Obvious too much here, but: KDE is not in the business of proprietary software. There are two parts to that statement:
KDE is not a business: we are not selling a product to the mass market. We are a development team creating the resource which can be sold to the mass market. This is an important distinction since we go through an R&D process that is very open, something that a business would have a hard time doing. We also don't pay volunteers per hour, commit or line of code. There are many things, you see, that we don't do that a business does, and vice versa. The fact that people are getting confused on this point shows how well we've done presenting KDE to the world, but we're not a business and we're not about to start pretending to be one to satisfy chin-waggers at the expense of what works for us.
... and that's a salient point: By asking KDE to behave like a proprietary company these people are asking KDE to abandon what has worked for us all these years. They are asking us to abandon our identity, to cease doing what resulted in the Free software desktop going from non-existent in the mid-90s to parity in just over 10 years. Remembering that we started 15 years (and multi-billions of dollars) behind our competition that's a pretty impressive success story.
At the same time, KDE works with business. We have relationships with companies at many levels, technical and otherwise. In order to provide good guidance to our partners we've been pretty blunt about what 4.0 is. That is because while KDE itself isn't a business, we have a large business ecosystem around us. We are a good business partner, even if we ourselves aren't a business. I know, this is rather paradigm shifting for a lot of people out there, but that's what makes it fun and enjoyable for so many of us.
KDE is not a proprietary software product: this is another obvious statement, but it's one people seem to forget. While there is proprietary software that gets written using KDE technology, KDE itself is not and never will be proprietary.
In the open source method you release early, you release often. By doing so, a progression is presented that people can follow with fairly blunt (often overly pessimistic) guidance along with it, e.g.: "foobar v 0.0.1: will eat your children". In theory you can't do that with proprietary software due to the distribution mechanism and economic repercussions (though many companies do anyways), but with open source it is exactly what one must do to get the production wheels turning.
KDE 4.0.0 is our "will eat your children" release of KDE4, not the next release of KDE 3.5. The fact that many already use it daily for their desktop (including myself) shows that it really won't eat your children, but it is part of that early stage in the release system of KDE4. It's the "0.0" release. The amount of new software in KDE4 is remarkable and we're going the open route with that. Which brings us to the next meme:
Meme 3: Just keep releasing alphas until it's ready
Ah, the "until it's ready" idea. Some would say 3.5 isn't ready; software never really is from a perfectionist's standpoint. It's so complex and full of ever springing promise that one can never reach that point of perfection; usually we are just happy with "better than good enough" and call it a day at that point.
KDE 4.0 isn't yet "better than good enough"; so why don't we just release more betas? When one perpetually releases alphas/betas a few things happen: people don't test it aggressively enough, third party developers don't get involved, core developers continue doing blue sky development rather than focusing on release qualities.
Between the rc's and the tagging of 4.0.0 the number of reports from testing skyrocketed. This is great, and shows that when I assert "people don't test when it's alpha or even beta" I'm absolutely correct. This is not about tricking people either: people seem to forget that the open source method is based on participation not consumption. So testers look for a cue to start testing; that is their form of participation. "alpha" and even "beta" is often not enough of a cue, especially today when so many of our testing users are not nearly as technically skilled with the compiler, debuggers, etc as the typical Free software user was 10 years ago.
The KDE4 libraries are ready for application development, as testified to by the quality KDE4 apps that exist today. However, third party application developers tend to be a conservative lot, and rightly so. They wait for user base migration, they wait for stability in the APIs, etc. They want to know when to start working with the new awesomeness, and for most of them that isn't "alpha" or "beta". The libraries crossed that stage in quality and reliability many months ago and so it is only fair to mark them as such.
Finally, the amazing maturation at all levels of KDE 4.0 software that has happened since the last beta shows just how focusing developers off of blue sky development and onto release quality code is important. The delta speaks for itself.
Meme 4: KDE doesn't do time based releases
When I hear this statement, I know I'm either dealing with someone who has been around the community for less than 2 years or has a long term memory problem. KDE has traditionally done time based, not feature based, releases: the project would set a target date, people would create a list of expected features they can do in that time, features that didn't make the target date would get punted to the next release.
In my time with the project we have done 2 feature based releases: both for major overhauls of the entire system. The first one resulted in the pedigree that would become KDE 3.5. The second one is KDE 4.0.
In that same time period we did 8 time based major releases (2.1, 2.2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5) and countless time based minor releases (8 for 3.5 alone). In each of these releases a target was set and in the overwhelming majority of these cases that target date was hit.
With 4.0 behind us and marching towards 4.1, we'll be back to these time based releases.
Meme 5: What's the quality of KDE 4.0?
KDE 4.0 rocks in a number of ways. Whether one looks at the new frameworks (solid, phonon, akonadi et al) or the revamped existing ones (kconfig getting multiple back end support, the UI-less kdecore), or examines the apps like okular or kdeedu or the games or dolphin or ksnapshot or konsole (ok, I won't list every app) or many of the new workspace features like composite and widgets or the new artwork or ... you get the picture. There's a lot that is just amazing.
What leaves people wondering about quality is that there is a disparity between our stated end goals and 4.0. This is, to be blunt, due to a lack of experience on their part: most people have never been involved in the creation of something great. We're involved in making something great that will end up spanning a decade of effort and be used for even longer than that. To be able to accomplish such a thing one requires the ability to see beyond today and into the uncertain future. They also need to be able to adjust and shift that vision as things evolve (ergo the shift from tenor to strigi/nepomuk, even though the end result is essentially the same ideas). It is simply not possible, without extreme luck similar to winning the lottery, to create something great without that vision. This is not my idea, this is the result of pretty much every bit of research and practical analysis from the business operations world.
More on the concept of vision
To re-affirm: our stated goals for KDE4 remain and they haven't gone anywhere. In fact, KDE 4.0 is the first proof that this is not only vision or, worse, vapour: we're putting it into action. However, long term vision is not met in a short term effort. Vision of the end is what directs immediate efforts into mid-term and eventually long-term successes. We will get there, and probably beyond what we currently imagine, with the releases that will follow. Each stop along the way will rock harder, and none of them will suck. Importantly: nont of it would be possible without the vision.
So it's ironic that some would see the vision we are committed to as reflecting on us in a bad way, since it's what is enabling us to deliver a great product not just today but in the future. Companies usually keep this vision internal and you never really get to see it from the outside. Sure, the ghosts of the vision get communicated eventually through marketing slogans (if they do their job right, anyways =), executive communications, AGMs, etc. but generally it's internalized.
KDE is an open project, however, so we can't talk about our vision without it getting "out there". There is simply no way for us to "keep our light hidden beneath a basket". So while it's ironic, it's not an unexpected consequence: most of our audience is simply used to being on the outside. They are not used to freedom, they are not used to openness, they are not used to being privy to the internal world of others.
For better or worse, there is no way we can shield them from being able to see our vision. As a project we need to talk about it with each other a lot: openly, loudly, even argumentatively at times. So everyone gets to see it, and some mistake the vision creation and maintenance process for marketing effort or spin; they are unrelated. What's funny is that community news sites will actually pick up the evolution of our vision as news events; it's undeniable that people find it interesting, which is pretty cool.
So to achieve what we want to, I've come to realize that I'll take it on the chin, so to speak, from some people who aren't able (yet?) to internalize what this process is all about. I can't in good conscience suggest we divert in response to this particular set of feedback, though, as it would cripple the project in the long term.
Many companies in Europe and North America have been criticized by the business management community for a couple decades now of not investing enough in mid-term (let alone long-term) projects. They have trouble doing so due because they allow themselves to be led by the nose by the financial and consumer markets copuled with vision-lacking internal assignment of resources. Yes, you're reading that right: listening to the short term consumeristic demand of the populace has been a major component of the march towards much of the stagnation and crappy products and services we get to deal with today. Ignoring the short term is foolish, but not investing in the mid-term is equally so.
I don't expect the populace to suddenly get long-term vision; I do expect serious organizations to stop setting their agendas by the flawed clock of the short term thinking that (inevitably?) dominates large societies of people.
To bring it into high-relief: KDE3 is our current product line for production, and KDE4 is our mid-term production line. For there to be any KDE worthy of succeeding KDE 3.5, we needed a mid-term project. No short-term project would cut it. We're at the beginning of where we can bring KDE4 into "current produce line" condition, which is to say that KDE4 is that transition period from mid-term to short-term project. That's exciting, and one more reason 4.0 rocks.
Prologue Epilogue
To close I'd like to recognize that KDE as a project is not perfect; we are made of fallible humans engaged in an amazingly complex process. All the same, the people involved are pretty amazing and competent. We're on a good path right now as a result of those people. If you find this process hard to understand that, try to adjust your assumptions and deeply internalize the concepts of the open source method since that is our guiding light. In spite of some of you finding it hard to understand this process, we won't betray you by switching to an inferior plan just because it fits your assumptions better. Even those who are most concerned today will thank us further on down the road.
Ok, enough about that. I've said what needs to be said and won't say more about it from here on out. I have a huge backlog of blog topics to cover that are more interesting and positive in nature. I'll do my best to keep them shorter than this one .. but no promises there ;)
88 comments:
Really nice blogpost...
Thank you for this
Thanks for writing very clearly what was also on my mind :)
This was a good post. It addressed quite thoroughly the major assumptions made about KDE4. I was thinking, wouldn't it be useful for the release to be tagged as "developmental," preview or something of that sort. Observing the posts on social news sites, I noticed most people aren't aware of the reasoning behind the decision to release KDE4.0 in its current state - and I do not feel they can be depended on to inform themselves of the decision behind it. The end-user is only going to judge the product that is given to them, and if they aren't educated about it in some way from the developers (keep in mind that the casual user doesn't follow developer blogs), then it may leave a bad impression of the project.
I totally agree with you! And I want to add that most people forget, that kde4 is not a distribution! So it does not need to take care that a version is 100% usable and non-children-eating. The distributors have to decide such things and expand or fix their software. I am absolutely sure that Kubuntu 8.04 (probably the first major distribution with KDE4) will do a good job providing a usable desktop environment.
Meme 0: Wait until KDE 4.1 (or 4.2, etc)?
Shouldn't the last part be called Epilogue, not Prologue?
I just want to congratulate you and the entire KDE team for your hard work and dedication. Though I haven't yet had the opportunity to test out KDE 4.0, I can tell just by the information I've heard about it that KDE 4 is going to become a revolution of the desktop! I full well expect even Apple to be afraid of KDE 4 within a few years! Don't let any negative press get you discouraged; press on instead. After the rough transition period is over, I'm hoping that everyone else will be able to clearly see the mature form of KDE 4 as your team saw it in its infancy.
Wow, that explained very well what's been going on with release cycles and whatnot.
I seriously can't wait for this to go stable (and to use Plasma-based apps, like Amarok 2.)
The best part is that alot of apps will be cross-platoform, meaning it will eventually draw MORE users into the Open World.
@guymac: "Meme 0: Wait until KDE 4.1 (or 4.2, etc)?"
when to make the jump is really up to each individual. i think it's completely valid for many to wait until 4.1, but it's also completely valid for others to jump into 4.0.
it all depends on who you are and where you'll be using it.
@I: yeah, epi- not pro-. i do a lot of things in reverse; e.g. i often read text such as email and articles from the bottom to the top. it seems to work better for me, but the results are that things sometimes get swapped about in my head =)
Thanks for the post, it really makes some of the points (release early, release often, etc) much clearer.
But then there is one other question - at least for me:
On techbase I found the infos how to install from svn, with little extra infos if some things don't work. But at the moment I'm having troubles the build kde from svn, there are some problems for example in build kdepimlibs.
For me as a non-developer these errors are hard to understand, do my question is, is there any place I can ask such questions and also post infos if I find problems in programs or have some suggestions, infos, etc?
OK, I can wait till my choosen distribution - Kubuntu - releases packages, but this can take some time ;-) So I would really like to compile KDE from SVN, and test ist, and test it, and test it, end ... ;-)
Maybe this is an idea - to have a website, mailinglist, forum or whatever, to discuss problems, sugesstions, recommandations - users and developers. And I think it would be a good idea to make the info about this place availabe on the techbase-site where one can find the how-to on building KDE from SVN.
Regars,
Ralf
"For me as a non-developer these errors are hard to understand, do my question is, is there any place I can ask such questions and also post infos if I find problems in programs or have some suggestions, infos, etc?"
For help on compilation, #kde4-devel on irc.freenode.net is probably your best bet. For "problems in programs" (i.e. - bugs ;)) and suggestions, bugs.kde.org is probably best.
"OK, I can wait till my choosen distribution - Kubuntu - releases packages, but this can take some time ;-)"
If you're happy to test in a VM, KDE4Daily is updated every day, although there looks like there's some doubt as to whether the project will continue past 4.0.0:
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html
"Maybe this is an idea - to have a website, mailinglist, forum or whatever, to discuss problems, sugesstions, recommandations - users and developers."
The weekly Commit Digests comments sections on dot.kde.org seem to have informally filled this niche, with plenty of user & dev comments each week.
will 4.1 eat other peoples children.... please?
I liked this post. That was clear and correct and wasn't rude. You've said a mouthful! Keep up the good work!
I tried KDE4 rc2... pretty unusable. So much is missing with regards to just simple desktop functionality. Little things here and there. And even though it's touted as being lighter/faster than KDE 3.5, with compositing, 4.0 is significantly heavier than the rudimentary compositing in 3.5... and I mean really heavy (like 25 times the resource use heavy). So... 3.5 does still have a purpose. Lower end 3D cards with 16M of dedicated memory for example.
With that said, this is OSS, and we're talking about 4.0. Remember the early days of KDE? :) So... good to see the release, but most will be happier IMHO with 3.5 right now. Gnome users might like 4.0 though, since Gnome is featureless out of the box (insert rim shot here).
"i often read text such as email and articles from the bottom to the top. it seems to work better for me, but the results are that things sometimes get swapped about in my head =)"
This explain a lot :) Sorry I can't resist .
Anyway this is a wonderfull post, and remerber me why you've been chosen as "KDE E.V. director" :D
As always with KDE, I'll switch with the first release packaged with my distro.
BTW, it would be cool the oxigen, appeal, plasma, ... webs sites gets an update for the official release date (as tagging is already done). They haven been updated since their creation. And they are still very use by the big web site as reference...
@Ralf: Try the kdesvn-build script. You can download it . Follow the guide on techbase to install the dependencies and create the kde-devel user, and you're almost ready to go; as the new user, edit the ~/.kdesvn-buildrc (read README) and run the script.
As for KDE4, I think the problem is that the obvious visible parts seem to be a step backwards instead of some might expect, "a revolution". One example is Plasma - I can get a pretty clock in KDE3 with Superkaramba. Stuff like dataengine, phase/animator, "Dashboard view" etc. aren't the first things the user discovers. And I think we all agree that the first impression is important.
I want to write more, but at the moment I'm too tired. I'll keep follow the KDE4 development from SVN, and eventually become part of it. Thanks to everyone involved!
"""
Meme 4: KDE doesn't do time based releases
When I hear this statement, I know I'm either dealing with someone who has been around the community for less than 2 years or has a long term memory problem.
"""
Well i'm not a kde user but, usually when someone says timed based releases, it's implied that the development process is similar to the one used by the linux kernel people (2.6.x).
So one of the characteristics of this release process is that you don't do major overhauls of the entire system that result in a stable branch that falls so behind that you have to do backports, there is more than just setting a release day target.
Which seems to be the case here, though i could be wrong since i don't follow KDE too much. Did i get what you meant right?
anyways, good luck to everyone.
This post was so much needed..
Thanks again, Aaron
Thank you Aaron for this post. Refreshing in fact.
Derek
"it's implied that the development process is similar to the one used by the linux kernel people (2.6.x)."
that's an incorrect assumption. =)
I tried KDE 4 RC2 yesterday on old hardware, P3-700, 512MB RAM and 9200SE (R280). It works fine, but needs some (relatively minor) polish.
Still, support for 3.5 will be good. Perhaps a feature freeze on the 3.5 will do good.
This was one of the best post I've read about KDE4. Congratulations. I believe that you and the rest of KDE4 developers are in the right way. KDE4 will become the future of computing desktop. It's go beyond Aero/Aqua.
Thank you very much, ;).
@Anonymous: "Perhaps a feature freeze on the 3.5 will do good."
we actually do have a feature freeze on 3.5. it's bug fixes, critical issues (which can come in the form of features occasionally), translations, etc. only.
PLEASE DIGG THIS STORY!!! The hype that has been built up on Digg.com is enormous - publicizing this announcement could prevent THOUSANDS of negative comments from being thrown at KDE!
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Addressing_Some_of_the_Common_Memes_About_KDE_3_and_KDE_4
http://digg.com/linux_unix/KDE_4_0_0_will_eat_your_children
Aaron, I really think parts of this blog entry should be incorporated into the KDE 4.0 press release. You're freaking awesome at spokespersoning, by the way.
Very eloquent and interesting post. Not that it ever bothered me, but it's great to see you taking the effort to capitalize the first letter of each sentence :)
The detractors can't complain about your grammar or the KDE 4 vision, so what can they whinge about now? I guess they're getting worried :D
First off, Nice article.
Are there any improvements on the speed and memory footprint front with KDE4 compared to 3.x? Would it feel "lighter" or "snappier"?
It is a Prologue!
It feels like one.
Aaron,
I think that you cut your blogpost.
=(
Thanks for writing!
=)
Best read in planetkde in a while. Very to the point, and as you said, blunt. It is nothing but truth though, and it sums up a lot of things that people need to pay some more attention to.
I agree with your ideas on mid-term vision, seeing as there is no future when you only look at the present.
Can't wait to read that stuff on the backport of blogs ;)
Take a breath, dude! Rock on!
Two issues that confused me, and I suspect, others newer to linux and not close to the KDE developers:
Even numbers are linked in my mind with stability - basically due to the way the kernel is numbered. The idea of 4.0 being a developer-oriented release and 4.1 being production release seemed odd.
KDE 4.0 and KDE4 look very similar. If instead of KDE4, KDE 4.x had been used everywhere, a lot of goals wouldn't have been implied as for KDE 4.0.
What the KDE team has done is fantastic, and I will be upgrading in about a week. But what the use of 4.0 and KDE4 gave the impression of (vs. the reviews of implemented features) was worrying - I was interpreting it to mean the the developers thought it was a highly polished all-bugs-done release. I'm glad to discover I'm wrong, but if it wasn't all run by volunteers and such I'd be very angry with the marketing teams.
You've hit the front page of Digg!
lol.
big:
http://ocrap.org/snapshot24.png
and smaller:
http://ocrap.org/aseigodigg.png
Congrats!
Aaron Seigo,
Nicely put.
That is really all I can say, after watching the flamefest aftermath of the RC releases, it is refreshing to see nearly every post (mine included) handled in this one blog post.
Again nicely done. Dugg! Heavily too.
And just in case no one has said it to you and the guys recently:
Thanks for making my desktop, Usable, Beautiful, and Free.
"The idea of 4.0 being a developer-oriented release and 4.1 being production release seemed odd."
In the case of KDE, the important part is not the odd-or-evenness of the release number, but the significance of the ".0.0". Thinking a .0.0 release will be production quality and thinking a .0.0 will, as aseigo said, "eat your children" are both perfectly understandable, as there is plenty of precedent for both: Firefox 1.0.0 was the result of massive amounts of polishing to the *existing and well-tested 0.9.x releases*, and so the ".0.0" meant, in this case, "Firefox is even better than the already good 0.9.x releases - switch to it!".
In many other projects, though, a ".0.0" release presents a massive *break* from the existing and well-tested previous releases - it's not a refinement of already excellent code, it's a big and unproven leap which will lead to plenty of breakage. GNOME, KDE and the Linux kernel are good examples of this: KDE2.0 sucked. GNOME 2.0 sucked. KDE3.0 sucked [although not as much as 2.0, as it was largely a straight port to a not-too-different API]. Linux 2.6.0 sucked and was not expected to be used by the mainstream, etc.
So I can see why the confusion would arise in those that do not know the history of KDE, GNOME and Linux releases :)
Very well written!
Oh, and thanks for the Caps. ;-)
Nice post
Keep up the good work KDE4 team!
I cannot wait until KDE4 is stable - i have seen an RC - the magnifier effect is like taking L.S.D (was a grunge kide in the 90's ...)
If there was no KDE I would probably still be using Windows....
Thanks everybody who helps.
ked 4 kicks ass, is it true that version.5 will be out the end of this year? I also posted this on my blog with extra comments, www.opentopix.com/topic/tech-news/talking-bluntly-about-kde3-4
> Kubuntu 8.04 (probably the
> first major distribution
> with KDE4)
Don't forget Fedora 9, scheduled for the same month. And unlike Kubuntu, we're not going to ship a KDE 3 version of Fedora 9.
Aseigo, couple years ago I sent you an email rant about you not blogging and being a black box. A lot seems to have changed since then xD
Nice, well thought-out post, Aaron!
(Now for a bit of off-topicness.)
Kevin, if nothing goes wrong, Kubuntu is going to ship (as in ShipIt) a KDE4 desktop with some KDE3 apps (Amarok, Kaffeine, Kontact and others that are not ready yet).
Which is more or less what you guys are doing in Fedora 9, right? At least the spec says so.
What you meant is that we'll also have a KDE3 CD available for download, and that's true.
kde 4 is more stable the vista
1. too many words
2. no clue that (this type of) software is for users. All the bla about KDE development not being like a business would do it shows very clearly that you did not get the idea of that statement.
Release candidate? way off.
I do open source sw since '93 so no way to put me off as a newbie.
Continue hacking on your 4.0 ego and WONDER later why USERS (!) will complain after the release. (This type of) Software is about users, not an API beauty contest.
At least, generating wrong expectations by calling the current state 4.0(rc) may do harm to the project over all.
You will not be able to explain your complete blog post to every disappointed user. And there are people like me who understand what you say and strongly disagree.
Nonetheless, many thanks for creating 3.x and working on 4.x to sometime replace 3.x
(sincerely, no pun intended)
Really good to see this release coming even it's not still a full one.
KDE4 will be great.
Congratulations!
what insightful anonymous can post something like this:
"kde 4 is more stable the vista"
Neglecting spelling,
[ ] you know the difference between an OS and a desktop environment
[ ] you have used both systems
[x] you live on another planet
or, just maybe
[x] it is not air that you're breathing, right?
Please Aaron, no more "vision" talk please. That's oh-so BillGates-ish. Let the marketing crap to M$, please.
As for KDE4. I tried the Suse RC2+ LiveCD and it failed on obvius stuff. KNotify4 crashing dozens of times, removing stuff from kicker's bar left just half of it drawn on-screen, the rest disappeared (!!). And more...
I can understand a "developer-oriented" release with somewhat less features, but *please* pretty *please* at least try to fix the obvious "crash-out-the-box" stuff before asking users' help to identify bugs.
It seems the bugs are so evident that a developer can find about 8-10 of them in ~30 minutes using the code.
So, first you do your 30 minutes job and reach a *minimal* stability, *then* ask people to try the codebase and identify more subtle issues you can't find on your own. We can't give any useful feedback if we all we get is crash after crash after crash just by starting KDE4 for a test-ride.
@anonymous: "1. too many words"
reminds me of that scene from Amadeus where the king, after having dozed off half way through one of mozart's operas, offers as criticism: "too many notes".
"Continue hacking on your 4.0 ego"
it has nothing to do with ego. if you perceive it as such, you're reflecting your own misconstructions upon my words.
"generating wrong expectations by calling the current state 4.0(rc) may do harm to the project over all."
that's why we're communicating on the issues clearly. this is the 4.0 release, and it is precisely what it is meant to be. that it doesn't line up with other's expectations is their problem; it will result in what they want eventually. if we bow to their perceptions now we'll never get there. that is the entire point.
is that too difficult to understand?
@anonymous: "what insightful anonymous can post something like this:"
your sort of poisonous bile is not welcome here. go somewhere else until you learn how to communicate with civility. thank you.
@algernon: "Please Aaron, no more "vision" talk please. That's oh-so BillGates-ish. Let the marketing crap to M$, please."
alrgenon, it's not about marketing. it's about direction. large organizations require vision to direct them. this is not hypothesis, this is solid theory that is borne out with scientific study after scientific study.
two books i could recommend that provide such scientific studies along with commentary on them: Built to Last, and The Leadership Challenge.
this is about driving direction not marketing. in fact, as you can see, it's not great for marketing because by not lieing to people like yourself we end up having to deal with exactly this sort of feedback: off base, irrelevant and discouraging. if i wanted to deceive you, please, trust me, you wouldn't even know it was happening.
no, this is about leadership. and our enthusiast user base is getting in the way thinking that the leadership is for them. it isn't. it's for the participants creating kde.
"I tried the Suse RC2+ LiveCD and it failed on obvius stuff."
thanks for trying it out and finding issues. btw, the things you note: all fixed in the final release (and more). see?
"fix the obvious "crash-out-the-box" stuff before asking users' help to identify bugs."
the phonon devs weren't aware of this issue because they hadn't run into it... until we did these releases.
i'm not a moron spouting crap here: this is how it works. just because you ran into it right away doesn't mean the developers did.
maybe you're operating under a mistaken set of ideas of how Q/A happens in a pure free software project.
"We can't give any useful feedback if we all we get is crash after crash after crash just by starting KDE4 for a test-ride."
you're absolutely wrong. how can i say that? because many, many people did *exactly* that during the rc's: provide useful feedback.
we deal with not just one person here or one person there, but whole populations. we don't reflect upon the singular experience, but the summed experience. i know it is not easy to achieve that perspective from the single user experience.
this is one of the challenges we as a community have to face: there is a cynicism among certain users that prevents them from simply accepting what we say at face value. i don't think that kde has earned that, but i think that the world in general has created such a situation and kde simply gets blind sided by it.
a solution would be to somehow find a way to share our broader perspective with our user base to be able to share a common perspective that blends both.
i don't know how to do that, however, as it sharing context is very hard when there isn't a base level of trust and comradre.
so perhaps we need to start there: find a way for people such as you, algenon, to step by step find a way into the circle of trust and agreement that the contributors enjoy.
until then, your perspective on matters is, while valid for yourself, runs counter-grain to what we experience within the project.
this may also explain why people who have been involved with open source since '93 (as someone above claims) can't see the forest for the trees either.
honestly, it's pretty frustrating to watch well meaning people stumble with blindfolds on through our world.
i'd love to find a way to solve that.
Aaron, I understand what you mean by "direction" and the need for creating a robust, future-proof platform. I'm a programmer myself, those are the basics of our work.
I'd just try to use some different wording, because you're looking like a marketing guy when in fact you aren't. Books about leadership or big words about vision and the likes ain't cutting it. I just prefer an honest talk about desktop features and development goals.
As for the crashes: the fact that you haven't run into the (huge) issues I've stumbled across imho clearly shows that some more testing was needed before putting the packages out in the wild. Especially since I'm definitely not the one who has run into serious issues.
That's not really a (bad) single tree and a (good) forest. More like two forests.
(on a related note: the livecd apparently didn't have debug info built in, since all my stacktraces were empty/unusable... so, no chance to be helpful and file a bug report. Something to improve for the future I guess, SuSE guys are you hearing me?)
I've contributed code to OS projects myself and I know how sometimes it's easy to say "here's the code snapshot, just test it and shut up" with none or minimal testing done. Unfortunately OS devs tend to fall on the reasoning that since it's free, no one has the right to complain if a poor Q/A job is performed. That's IMHO wrong, very wrong, and I'm not certainly claiming that I've never made that mistake myself.
There's a given level of "brokeness" that testers can accept from a beta/rc release. My personal opinion is that this threshold has been surpassed with the 4.0.0 development process. I keep hearing this from a bit too much sources and witnessed it myself.
I must admit that seeing the state of RC2+ just three weeks prior release made me think "these guys have a party at google already booked for mid January so they're gonna release it in such a unstable state just to avoid the shame of delaying it".
Ok, ok, my apologies for that thought, I realize maybe that's just a pointless insult, but just consider me an Average Joe (with a few years of KDE experience) working its way on the new environment.
And one thing's for sure: I didn't feel like tampering too much with the RC, because I felt that the general stability of the snapshot was just so poor.
What's the point of testing out the latest improvements in KMail's IMAP handling or the new corner features in Dolphin when you have half of your taskbar drawn on the screen, and a damn crash handler popping up every minute?
What happens when a large portions of your early adopters get burned? They fade away. Beware of that, Average Joe's time is as precious as that of the developers and wasting it will have long-term consequences on the project, too. We invest time in testing as you do in coding.
I remember voting on bugzilla on the infamous and well-known "align icons to grid no longer works" bug together with hundreds of people. IIRC The bug entered KDE in 3.4.1 (or .2?) and was fixed in 3.5.1 and was largely ignored by the devs for... how much? 1 year? 1.5 years?
All of that just to show that, as a programmer - both used to closed-source and open-source scenarios, I consider KDE a project which definitely *has* some longstanding Q/A problems... what about solving those, before asking us to "step by step find a way into the circle of trust and agreement that the contributors enjoy".
Believe me: you don't get any enjoyment in seeing your bugreports ignored, or prealpha-quality "RC" releases. So don't just blame the users for not seeing your points and pretend to be right even when, in fact, there *are* mistakes which are not on the users' side.
@algernon: "voting on bugzilla on the infamous and well-known"
first, thanks for the reply. very informative, very well thought out. =)
i'm going to address just the above point right now because i think it's a great starting point for the general issues:
bugs get prioritized. sometimes it's due to the developers available at the time, sometimes just to the amount of total devel manpower available.
in the case of the align to issue that was because it was a tricky problem requiring some creative thought and co-op between a couple apps to fix without breaking other things.
not fun for anyone (users included). communicating why bugs do or don't get prioritized takes even more time and energy, something that it would be awesome to find a way to address. again, that's one i don't have an answer for.
there are many open questions, which does make this all a bit fun.
that said, proprietary companies and free software projects alike either completely ignore this issue or deal with it even worse i think. it's an opportunity for us to go beyond and provide a new solution ("innovate").
btw, as for "not being a marketing guy" i admit that is where i get confusing at times:
i'm involved with marketing as well as tech as well as bizdev as well as .... people tend not to confuse when i'm wearing which hat. in part that's because i forget to say which hat i'm wearing a lot of the time (i'll try and do better there) and part because people don't believe me when i do say which hat i'm wearing ;)
i wish there were many of my so i could have each clone do one thing .. ;)
so it comes to balance and communication, on both my part and yours.
i'd like to continue this conversation further (i'm about to pop out for a bit); please email me if you'd like to do the same. perhaps we can grow the user/developer bridges we both seem to recognize as being necessary.
I've been using KDE as my main desktop for a few weeks now. There is lots of work to do on KDE4 and it's hardly feature complete as far as a desktop environment goes, but the direction is clear and glorious. I'm okay with where it is and enthusiastic about where it's going. The future will be great and the present is pretty impressive.
don't worry Aaron, I won't further flood your comments area :-)
I just posted some honest views, and I really hope not to have sounded too much harsh. I also saw very promising things on that RC2+ CD too, so I don't want to sound catastrophic at all costs.
...and yes, I still see you as a techie even when doing some marketing. In my view of the world techies are better than marketeers so take it as a compliment... ;-)
KDE 4 is the Vista of Desktop Enviromnents. It looks good at first but once you start using it you find it's not as good as it's less-attractive predecessor.
GNOME isn't so bad after all.
It's pretty, but:
Dolphin KDE 4 launches three windows - one titled Dolphin, one titled KDE, and one titled 4 - file not found.
KDE System Settings does not launch.
Konqueror can't find its sidebar targets - you know, like Home and Root and System.
Adept Manager asks for my *root* password, even though I'm on a sudo system and root does not have a password. It won't accept my password.
Other programs randomly fail to start, freeze up when asked to do the slightest thing like minimize, and crash.
This is clearly not a release candidate.
Great job KDE team. I can't wait to start using it.
As for stability, that's why the tech gods created virtualization.
I really don't know why everyone seems to have this horrendous problems and crashes everywhere and complaining about the stability...
1- I've just checked-out the svn version this morning, and it works FLAWLESSLY, if anyone doesn't believe me, I could open a vnc session or something so you get convinced. KDE4 is release quality, imho.
2- I would like to help make kde better, more polished, etc, but at the moment, all I can do, is fill bugs. If I could fix the problems, then I wouldn't have to complain, i would fix them myself. And if i cant do it, then i fill bugs, thats my way of complaining, making descriptive bug reports.
I dont expect that anyone will start thinking the way I do, but imo there is not third option, its either fix it, or fill a bug, there is not a 'complain' option.
pd: sorry about my poor english!
"I really don't know why everyone seems to have this horrendous problems and crashes everywhere and complaining about the stability..
I've just checked-out the svn version this morning"
that means that "this morning" revision worked for you. while everybody else tried different (earlier) revisions and got problems.
i had horrendous problems kde4 svn "3 days ago" revision. i hope 4.0 will be a bit more stable.
I think it's a mistake to have called this release 4.0. It should have been something like KDE Preview 1 or sth along those lines.
With 4.0, Joe Random will probably expect something feature complete especially with the amount of hype KDE4 got all those years. I hear the backslash already.
What will be 4.1 or 4.2 should have been called 4.0.
I really don't understand why it was agreed in KDE commnity to just call thse release 4.0.
However no doubt 4.x will be great!
@yOSHi314
"i had horrendous problems kde4 svn "3 days ago" revision. i hope 4.0 will be a bit more stable."
I had been using kde svn since two weeks, and three days ago it was working good nonetheless... I have to admit it wasn't *as* good as this morning's, but it was still good enough [the tagged version].
Whatever, the point its not if it crashes or not, is what are you doing instead of complaining and wasting everyone elses time.
Thanks a lot for this blog post. All persons doing doing a review of KDE4.0 or writing about KDE4.0 should read this before writing anything!
Keep up the good work!
Aaron, I respect your work very much and agree with everything you've said, except with the part "we are not tricking our users".
I've felt the KDE4 process did trick me quite a bit, in particular with the release candidates. A release candidate should be, by definition very similar to a release. And this hasn't been the case. There has been countless changes between RC1, RC2, and latest SVN. So I've felt that KDE tricked us with the RC so that we would do some testing.
I'm not saying that it was a bad idea. It seems to have worked. But many of us felt disappointed because of that.
We all anyway thank you for your work and the team's effort. looking forward to the release
@julian
It's simple: in KDE parlance:
beta = alpha
rc = beta
final = rc
see a trikcy pattern ?
@anonymous directly above: points for wit, but you've not stumbled upon any pattern tricky or not. i know not everyone will understand even after it's fully explained, but it is all in the blog post you are replying to.
For all the talk about Joe Random, the "average user", or whatever - who are these average users who will be doing an SVN checkout and compiling KDE 4.0? Any average user is going to get KDE 4.x when their distro puts it in. I would venture to guess that the majority of "average" users will never see this release in "production". For those going to Fedora Core 9 or Kubuntu with the KDE 4.x version as soon as they're released, they're most likely early adopters who are used to bleeding-edge software. And Fedora and Kubuntu should have to answer for the decision to include KDE 4.x instead of KDE 3.5.x (right or wrong), not the KDE project itself.
P.S. Thanks to the whole KDE team for your work!
LINUX NEEDS STRAIGHT TALK
Linux needs straight talk like this. It's about time Linux devs start talking directly, instead of playing the "Linux hype" game.
Furthermore, Linux devs need to take computer science courses to learn project management, etc. The "community" is now working at the 4th grade level.
I wouldn't trust a 4th grader with a PHP book to write an app, and neither should you. Let's be real and start producing quality free software for Linux.
they don't teach project management in comp sci courses ;) many people in the community have both schooling and experience with proj management; interestingly, though, many of the situations we find ourselves in have no real analogs in many places. 1500 people, 6 continents, decentralized, dozens of teams producing hundreds of products ... not many places to go to learn how to manage that.
*that* said, most of the high level free software projects are better managed than most of the proprietary projects i've been in.
and there's a lot of very high quality software in linuxland.
otherwise, i agree with your sentiments.
THANKS!!!
Great post!! We need more people, who talk frankly like this.
The problem with Linux and/or KDE is that it's trying to please everyone. That doesn't work. Everybody with a degree in marketing will tell you that. It's the reason behind Apple's success lately. They try to please a niche market, and they do it with the precision of a LASER. KDE needs to do the same.
It needs to be cutting edge (at the risk of stability for a few 4.X.Y releases.) Only then will people notice. That's part of the marketing.
There also needs to be more buzz about KDE 4.X.Y . Only if people know about it, will they embrace it.
3rd'ly (yes that's a word.. :p ) Please write an article about Compiz fusion vs. Kwin. A lot of people are going to be pissed off if a) fuctionality of compiz fusion will be missing in KDE 4.0 b) Kwin will have less features, and/or less updates than Compiz fusion.
Compiz was the whole reason I embraced Linux and took a few faithful followers with me. If it wasn't for the hype about the eye candy nobody would have followed me.
The difference to Vista was, that the eye candy didn't cost speed/resources, like Vista.
People need to know that KDE 4.X.Y has more eye candy AND MORE SPEED, SMALLER MEMORY FOOTPRINT, than the previous version.
As soon as a distribtion offers KDE 4.X.Y included "out-of-the-box". People and I will deem it good enough and start using it. (hopefully the compiz debate will be settled by then. :D )
@max said:
"The problem with Linux and/or KDE is that it's trying to please everyone. That doesn't work. Everybody with a degree in marketing will tell you that. It's the reason behind Apple's success lately. They try to please a niche market, and they do it with the precision of a LASER. KDE needs to do the same."
No, we don't need to do and be the same, we are different, we are new, we are Linux + KDE.
Apple and Microsoft both sucks.
Linux rules =)
"AND MORE SPEED, SMALLER MEMORY FOOTPRINT"
This is a claim that I don't feel even remotely comfortable with making, largely because so far it seems to be false [yes, I've seen the so-called "study" that "shows" that KDE4 uses 30-40% less memory and no, it wasn't even remotely correct[1] - in fact, it uses more![2]. Also, Qt4 has very noticeable speed issues with redrawing windows[3]]. Please don't perpetuate these myths without citing *verified* studies that back it up, as you are just setting uses up for disappointment!
[1] Thiago and Lubos: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3138
[2] http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-3-5-vs-4-0-round-two.so
[3] http://nowwhatthe.blogspot.com/2007/12/performance-and-qt-44.html
Hm, however, I don't understand why not waiting for the release of qt 4.4? So speaking about KDE4 would mean always also at least qt 4.4 with phonon directly integrated and with webkit integrated and qtConcurrent...
I will ask my daughter to stay away from my box. Tomorrow I will get me KDE 4.0.0. To me its amazing how Free Software grows and even becomes the motor of software development.
someone wrote ..
"The idea of 4.0 being a developer-oriented release and 4.1 being production release seemed odd."
When Time, Inc, was putting out their second major "polished" release (Time.v.2) people took sides and huge virtual wars were waged by the factions. I could see that Time 2.0.0.0 was obviously a huge step for whoever has to switch the little numbers, but I had previously been programmed to believe that ver. 2.0.0.1 would be really utterly fantastic, with dramatic music and such ... to keep this short and sum up, um,
1. Sorry this was so off-topic.
2. What was the topic again?
Thanks for KDE4! This is going to be a great year!
KDE4.0 seems to me to be a paradox; on the one hand, technically, it's a great leap forward in free desktops while on the other hand it's plainly obvious that it is far from usable.
All the new stuff under the bonnet is great - developers will love it. Users will love it as well - being able to have a single entry point to the audio system for example rather than a multitude of acronyms to contend with.
It's obvious what a fantastic foundation this is for further KDE desktop development.
Users, though, need more time and I suspect the distros will agree. I spent a day trying the final 4.0.0 Kubuntu packages out and was very disappointed
* audio system crashed and wouldn't come back
* plasma doesn't seem to understand dual monitors very well
* rm -rf'd .kde4 a couple of times when things went really bad
* panel disappeared and never came back
* dragging an icon every now and again caused the whole plasma shell "desktop" to move showing a blank grey screen underneath.
* plasma crashed taking all my desktop changes with it
* the menu is hellish to use. I found the application launcher faster
* I get prompted 3 times on log out (Leave > Log out > Log out)
* kwallet crashing
* ... etc etc .. to much for one comment. In the end I purged all the KDE4 packages and reinstalled. It made the KDE3.5 audio system work again at least .. :)
Early adopters will most likely be KDE fans and long time users. When the distributions start packaging KDE for release in their distros targetted at non techincal users, hopefully a lot of the wrinkles will be ironed out.
For now though, I'll stick with KDE3.5 and be updating the 4.0 packages, having a look now and then to see where it is at and lodging the odd bug report.
Cheers
... For all your intelligence, for all your good will, for all your altruism, for all your work ethic, for all your kindness and hard work, STOP. STOP. TRYING. TO. IMITATE. OTHER. DESKTOPS.
You have a perfectly good mind, and a perfectly good will enough to sit down, think about what makes sense from an ergonomic and functional standpoint, and make it happen.
For the love of God, just STOP. You're condemning yourself, your work, and everyone's work which follows it, to perpetual flea-market knockoff status. That's the truth of it. If you want to know why the Linux desktop has never been accepted into the mainstream, to this day, 10 years of GNOME and KDE in, there's your answer. People can smell a knock-off a thousand miles away. Don't offend their noses.
Try. Stop, and try. Don't look at OS X, don't look at Vista. People will back you, and even help you.
@Bowie: i'd love some of what you're smoking. because every little thing i do that's different gets WAAAAAAAAAAY more pushback, anger and fighting than anything i do that is similar to other systems. so.. yeah.. you're promise of support and wonder are fiction. i wish they weren't.
that said, we ARE doing a lot of things different. and we have a long path towards weaning people from where we are in 3.5 to where we want the desktop to be in kde4. we can't do it overnight, it has to be step by step (see above) but we're going there.
and more than just talking about it in a blog comment, i'm actually doing it.
Hi, just wanted to say I really enjoyed your interview on the linux action show.
pz
@Bowie:
I don't know what specifics you mean by "imitating other desktops" since you didn't mention any examples, but there is also a difference between producing a "knock-off" and adding a feature that is probably a good idea, even if someone else included it first. If you want to see a knock off, go run OSX for a few weeks, then run Vista (if your computer can). There's even a good youtube video about that.
Adding useful features isn't necessarily creating a knock-off, and besides, as I understand it, a lot of the work so far in KDE4 has been behind-the-scenes in the underlying frameworks. Often, whenever open source projects do "knock off other desktops", as you call it, the final open source product often leaves whatever proprietary project it might resemble far behind in a prehistoric cave.
I liked this blog post - well thought out, no spin, just the current scene the way the author sees it, without any apologizing.
I don't use KDE as a desktop anymore, I switched to e17 two years ago. I do use konqueror, kontact, konsole, kopete and amarok constantly and I am very glad they exist. I have no idea what product would make me switch away from konqueror, but I know that it isn't written yet :-)
The KDE team needs to go ahead and do what they feel is right and ignore the naysayers. I can't comment on the code (it's still busy being emerged as I write this) but I can comment on how the team is going about their business:
I honestly admire the sheer guts it took to start this and get it to this milestone. As a casual KDE user I would like to congratulate the KDE team for coming this far, and encourage them to continue.
Hi, I am a constant follower of your blogs to know about the latest KDE developments. I am using KDE 4.0 (openSUSE) in one of my Desktop and GNOME in my Laptop (but i am planning to install KDE based Linux once I find my desktop crash lesser times than now - though it's not as bad as you believe that I believe).
There are couple of times it did crash (KDE as whole never crashed, just some apps) and i post the bugs.
Since I leave my desktop switched on 24x7 and use it to extreme when I am at home, I gotta tell ya... It's not rock solid, but it is better and will get even better as days goes by.
Basically I look for information regarding managing open source projects in your blog. Though you don't say anything as such, I do get clues since I am looking forward to develop Desktop based ERP (free - as in beer and open source) just for the fun and of course, a little help to lesser affordable people won't hurt my pockets.
Anyways, KDE 4 looks good (since I use Vista at work in office and I come across OS X often in my office whenever I pass by the graphic guy) and the first time I boot the live CD in my Office Desktop, I caught the entire office' attention (I am known for showing off my linux stuffs in office and converted at least 6 of them to full time linux users at home).
All the best for your fantastic efforts.
Adios Amigo.
Not to ruffle any feathers out there, but the biggest difference about when KDE 3.0 was released and the release of KDE 4.0 is the Windows Refugees. That isn't a bad word - Windows Refugees. It's a statement about new Linux users who realized that they have a choice and that they now appreciate and realize that fact by looking into Linux. HOWEVER, the success of Linux has always been that there are people who participate in the debugging, feature requests, programming, etc. which Windows never had to the extent Linux does. Windows made test releases on a small scale. That gives you a lot fewer opinions and suggestions. Linux is test releases are global. That makes for a lot more suggestions and opinions and a very strong and welcome system. As was stated in the blog, I'm not being rude, just straight forward. Those of us who have used Linux when SLS was released in October 1992 or since KDE began it's awesome trip through time in 1998, DO NOT WANT LINUX TO BECOME WINDOWS. This is not Windows. It is Linux. We have our way of doing things and Windows has theirs. Obviously with the number of Windows Refugees, the Windows way is not better and Linux has to maintain what has worked so wonderfully in it's time line. The casual user used to know that but the Windows Refugee does not. Welcome to our world, you wont be disappointed, but you have to be aware that Linux does things differently than Windows.
It's a bit disingenuous to the users to tag this as a final release when many of the features are clearly not in a release quality state. You don't want to end up alienating users.
@John:
You mean KDE (or Linux for that matter) has its own September '93?
I think your web site is very interesting.
My name is Sam, and my site is here
This article needs to be circulated! So much anxiety and bad feelings have been been caused unnecessarily because of uncertainty about the future of KDE3. Here is the answer, and if you're a KDE3 fan, the news is not bad at all.
Hey Aaron,
As I write this it is Jan 27, 2009: The release date of KDE 4.2. You guys have done a fantastic job over the last year of turning the vision of KDE 4.0 into a desktop that has superceded KDE 3.5... and to think you did it all in just about a year.
Thanks for sticking with it despite what trolls on some blogs might have said. I bet you wish you could have done a checkout of 4.2's code in January of 2008 :-) Keep up the innovation and 4.3 will be even better than 4.2!
I installed 4.3 yesterday, and it's madman! I still love KDE3 as a workstation, but let's face it, I don't do that much work, and KDE4 is going to be my desktop 90 percent of the time.
At this point I can't live without either one of these beauties. They're so ingenous, yet so completely different! I think I'm going to stop posting long meandering soliloquays in web forums about how I can't decide which Desktop to use, and start learning about running both KDEs in one system, and writing documentation to help others.
Talking to certain people about KDE3 feels like talking to certain people about the command line. Those folks just can't get it through their heads that you don't want to take their GUI away, that the CLI and GUI work together now. Like CLI vs. Command line, KDE3 vs. KDE4 is a false choice. Even when I hated KDE4 (I was a hard sell) I didn't want to take away anyone's desktop, and I couldn't if I wanted to.
And now, let me say it again, KDE4 is my main desktop, and I love it like a five year old loves Christmas morning. I've used that analogy many times installing the second KDE 4.3, yesterday morning, and it's absolutety not hyperbole. In fact, I never got any cool toys like this when i was a kid. These toys don't get old, and they don't break. On the contrary, they keep fixing themselves, and they keep remaking themselves into brand new toys.
But I'm still not giving up KDE3, with its incredible drag-and-drop. I still find it useful, that's all. Like the phoney CLI vs. GUI arguments, It's not about one tool being better than another; it's about two tools being better than one tool. Two really great tools.
Thanks for this article. It was a much needed oasis of clarity and information. And thanks for the awesome you-know-what. You guys are culture heroes who are changing the world, and I really owe you a donation. In fact, if I can use paypal, I'm going straight from here to send a few bucks.
Sent you fifty dollars. That's out of my social security disability payment, so that makes it enough to hurt. Usually I believe in giving alms in secret, but having recently been accused of "wanting to destroy KDE4" (Let's not go there. ) I felt that a public demonstration of support was called for, and if I could have afforded more, I'd have sent it. Best money I've spent in a while.
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