What went wrong with the KDE 4 release?
When KDE 4.0 was released in January, it was supposed to be the foundation for a new era of desktop development. But as 4.x versions began finding their way into distributions, negative reactions began to obscure other ones. With the upcoming 4.1 release due at the end of this month, it's hard to avoid wondering: what happened?
To a degree, the answer seems to implicate everybody involved, from KDE and the distributions that ship it to the free software media and users. In doing so, the answer highlights some of the changing relationships in the free and open source software (FOSS) community.
Finding answers matters because the user revolt -- or the perception of one -- that KDE seems to be facing is almost unprecedented. KDE took a giant technical leap forward in each of its other releases, but the reactions to the 2.0 and 3.0 releases were very different from 4.0's reception. Like the latest release, KDE 2.0 had early performance problems, and some applications were slow to upgrade, but users seemed largely content to wait for improvements. Similarly, although KDE 3.0 was greeted by accusations that the release was mishandled on the kde-devel mailing list, both user and reviewer reactions were generally positive. Nor has any other FOSS project received a backlash like the one facing KDE.
By contrast to earlier releases, what happened to KDE 4 is harder to make sense of. D
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