On Fri, 13 May 2011 07:19:35 -0700 (PDT), BRM wrote: > KDE did seem to drop the ball a bit with their management of the > transition from KDE3 to KDE4.
There's no doubt it could have been a lot better. The problem was that it was based on their prediction that 4.0 would be a dev release while 4.1 would be usable, it wasn't. > Okay - that's not entirely KDE's problem; though it would have helped a > long way with the KDE4 transition if they kept a few people working on > those issues. How would you feel if you were a KDE dev told "we're all going to play with the cool new toys now, but we want you to stay here and look after the boring musty old stuff."? It would be bad enough if you were being paid for it. > The big issue is that in moving to sole development of KDE4, distros > started to drop KDE3 and replace it with KDE4. For example, Kubuntu > 8.04 TLS dropped KDE3 and used KDE4 long before KDE4 was really user > worthy - long before KDE was calling it user worthy. I think that says more about Ubuntu than KDE, after all ,they'd done a similar thing with GNOME/Unity now. > But KDEs actions > of moving sole development to KDE4 prompted most distributions to do > likewise. Many distros, especially the enterprise focussed ones like SUSE, kept 3.5 around for quite a while. > Had they kept a small team working on at least the build issues until > KDE4 reached 4.3 then the transition would have likely gone a lot > smoother. True, but no one expected it to take that long to get ready, and diverting resources to look after 3.5 would have meant it taking even longer. > > So install a distro that still supports KDE3 if that's what you want > > or need. KDE 3.5.10 is still there, it hasn't been withdrawn from the > > shelves. You're hardly likely to use Gentoo for such users, so lack > > of core support for 3.5 in Gentoo is not an issue either. > > > > While I am not personally interested in it, please name one. > > Gentoo doesn't support KDE3 any more. You have to go to Trinity to get > the newer, forked KDE3 series. Last I heard they were equivalent to a > 3.5.12 or so; but I haven't seen anything on the Desktop list for a > while about Trinity. > > Needless to say, you may be very hard pressed to find a modern, > up-to-date distribution that offers KDE3 support. If it defaulted to KDE 3.5, it would be neither modern nor up to date. But at the time of the transition, when KDE4 was still too flakey for many, there were several - openSUSE for one. -- Neil Bothwick Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
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