KDE 4.3.0 was released today after six months of diligent efforts and a lot of individual passion poured into artwork, translations, bug triage, community efforts, release management and, of course, code. The release announcement and Jos' screencast cover a lot of it, but the code name for the release also reveals something important: Caizen.
Kaizen (spelling it "Caizen" is a little KDE tongue-in-cheeck humor ;) is all about continual improvement in all areas of an endeavor. It's a daily activity (something the SVN repository and bugs.kde.org certainly attests to!) that includes everyone. It's an all-encompassing and all-inclusive philosophy of reaching towards perfection one step at a time.
KDE 4.3.0 is a great release, packed with improvements on every front: features, bug fixes, stability improvements and optimizations. We wouldn't have achieved this in the 18 months since 4.0 if we didn't eat and breath continual improvement. It's very rewarding and enjoyable to watch that progress happen day by day as those around you add their incremental improvements to your own.
I've been watching an archeology series recently and I'm reminded of the great, and small, monuments in the past that were created by communities coming together. Barns raised, barrows dug, stones erected, villages growing outwards. It's such a natural human thing to create great structures together, it touches somewhere very deep.
That's the creator/contributor side of it. For our users, they can simply enjoy the ongoing improvements. They may get involved and join us in building this thing on day, but even if they don't it's great that they have tools that work for them.
Of course, we're not done. That just wouldn't be very kaizen. We're already hard at work on KDE 4.4 and looking constantly at ways of improving our processes as well as our code.
I hope you all enjoy KDE 4.3.0. (And the upcoming bug fix releases, one per month!)
Personally, I'll be laying down in a sleeping bag tonight as my house is now essentially packed up so that I can get to cleaning things out nicely before I leave for the coast and our new abode on Friday. S. booked her flight out the other day as well, so that's all figured out. The changes in my non-KDE life feels very concrete at this point, very real .. and all in good ways. :)
Love and hugs, aseigo.
10 comments:
Hi Aseigo,
I followed your post to decouple the plasma dashboard from the desktop in KDE 4.2, but after upgrading to 4.3, it just stopped working. It only shows the current desktop when I click "show dashboard". When I zoom out, and click "configure plasma" choose "use a separate dashboard", and zoom in back, click "show dashboard", it shows nothing. Any advice on how to fix it? Thanks.
when you select "use separate dashboard" it creates a new activity (containment) just for that. if you already had an activity associated with your dashboard in 4.2, it _should_ have picked that up and used it.
Got it to work, thanks! BTW, 4.3 is awesome!!
Yes, indeed! 4.3 is an amazing release. Thank you for your vision, your persistance and the immense amount of work you spent on something we are able to use to so much satisfaction!
Nice one. There's still a long way to go in a lot of areas but for the first time you can see a desktop that feels like a platform and feels like a structure of togetherness where you can see what can be built.
It touch my heart. Since kde 4.2, kde is very good, but with 4.3 kde is amazing.
Thank you all.
Kde guys rock!! Thank you guys for an amazing release...
Hi Aaron,
You were mentioning about a survey you wanted to do to find out where each developer wants to go in the future with their projects and you wanted to combine/allign them across KDE. Can ou tell us how this looks? I am really interested to know.
Thanks.
"a survey you wanted to do to find out where each developer wants to go in the future"
yes, and it went rather well. Sebastian Kugler used it as source material for his keynote presentation @ Akademy, which is why i haven't release a report on it yet: would have spoiled his presentation a bit to release the results before Akademy and i've been too busy with the moving thing since.
Sounds great from what I've read so far. Looking forward to testing it!
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