Well, but you can only squash so many. Introducing Galaxy-kde on Feb 20, IIRC, and expecting to make it the default style and go gold in less than a month is just really a bad idea (just an example). It would have been far better to spend the next six months developing it for 9.2.
Agreed. Also, the complete overhaul of the DrakX UI was completely unnecessary, and I think, a huge waste of time. If we had just spent this time improving the 9.0 installer, I think it would be damn near perfect right now. I don't understand doing such major changes when staying in one major branch (9.x).
Now back to the press. If Mandrake 9.1 comes out with bugs like the Galaxy-kde ones which haven't really been improving at a very fast clip (understandably -- widget styles don't get built over night!), I will -- if I do my duty to be honest to my readers -- be forced to give Mandrake 9.1 a serious thumbs down. Not that I want to. The reason I take this so seriously is that I personally don't want to be in the position where I have to tell my readers again "Mandrake 9.1 just isn't a good choice for the desktop, stick with 8.2 or go somewhere else."
Yeah, 8.2's getting to be a bit old, and of course there's the new support policy...yeah, given that, it's so much more important now that *every* release be in top shape, as with every release now, a large number of users are going to be forced to upgrade to it to retain support. Given that, it better work!
The amount of serious bugs indicates that the deadline for final is far too soon. Either Mandrake needs to start the beta process SOONER (i.e. maybe two or three months earlier) or make it go on for longer (rather than releasing in March, release in April or May). I'm not so sure if Mandrake execs told the publishers "If we are forced to follow this deadline we'll end up with a distro that gets bad reviews and won't sell as well" that they couldn't work something out.
Wasn't 8.2 released May 10th? Why the heck are we where we are in March?
On the other hand 8.2 was an extremely responsible release. As much as I myself complained, the developers refused to try to get KDE 3 included because they couldn't adaquately bug test it in time for release. But now, we have a version of XFree that was only released last week and a widget style that still has bugs all over the place. 8.2 was hailed as Mandrake's crowning achievement by many. 9.0 was not, and my fear is that 9.1 might not be either.
And even 8.2 could have been better. About 3 months of further stabilization happened in Cooker after it. It's too bad nobody cut a release out of it. At some point with no warning the switch the KDE3 was made and real development started again (aka bug-time).
