> I think it's a little early to pass judgment. Many devoted users and
> developers have spent many hours of their personal
Not sure what you mean here Roman as we "pass judgement" constantly,
making decisions about what software we use. If we hadn't "passed
judgement" on Linux, and decided it was useful for us we wouldn't be here.
> If we don't want the beta releases than so be it. We have to start some
While I do think we need to educate newbies about what beta software is
and what can be expected from it, I think when companies start
shrinkwrapping it and selling it in KMart there is little we can do but
conclude that they have lost sight of what a beta is, who their
prospective customer base (in Kmart) is and whether or not releasing a
"This is Linux...it's great" package with KDE2 in its current state and
LM7.2beta is the best way to move onto the casual user desktop.
> time. The software must be released. New users may prefer the visual aspect
I'm more concerned about new users trying to install products like LM7.2
or RH7.0 and saying "_They're right...this is a lousy operating
system." I don't think a bunch of broken shells does much to sell the
otherwise rock solid OS that Linux is. For instance, LM could have just
as easily release 7.2 with KDE1.1, XFree3.3, etc. but with all the new
hardware support and they'd have had a much better entry product to sell
the notion of Linux. This, in fact, would have been more consistent with
the 'point' upgrade they've applied to the version number. Then, once
KDE2 and XFree4.01 got the bugs wrung out of it they could release
v8.0.
In short, many of us have complained that Microsoft releases buggy
software. Why should be be pleased to find that the distro people are
doing exactly the same thing? They would do well to follow the example of
those developing the kernel....slow is good.
Cheers --- Larry
