In order to double check that my update server had complete dependencies, I installed a freshly-built build from master a couple of days ago and ran it on a clean userdir - same experience anyone downloading it for the first time will have.
Issues: - Microscopic font sizes on a high-dpi screen and not antialiased (I submitted a pull request to fix this almost a year ago - https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/1446 ) - J2SE projects (Ant-based) are not recognized. On using Open File to open a file in such a project, I get the admonishment to install nb-javac - After installing nb-javac, J2SE Ant-based projects are *still* not enabled and such projects are not recognized (maven projects are) Basically, unless you're a netbeans expert, you are not going to know about, or easily find information on - Adding -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd_hrgb to $NB_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf - Adding --fontsize nn to $NB_HOME/etc/netbeans.conf - Manually enabling J2SE projects and dependencies in Tools | Plugins - a new user doesn't know what a plugin is. Are we just producing builds for NetBeans experts, and we don't care if anyone else uses it? Because this is a recipe for "I installed it and I couldn't read the text and couldn't open anything. It's junk. Don't bother with it." If we have the slightest ambition of releasing professional-quality software, failing to fix low-hanging-fruit problems any new user is going to encounter in the first five minutes using it and have no idea how to fix is totally, totally unacceptable. Do *not* reply with "Well, some nice vendor is going to create their own distribution and fix the user experience." It's a cop-out and in fact nobody is doing that. -Tim -- http://timboudreau.com
