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. Despite its misleading version number, KDE 4.0 was repeatedly described as a developer’s release — not for the average user’s desktop. Wade Olson, the press contact for KDE in North America, points out that most major reviews of KDE 4.0 clearly communicated its state.
However, starting in April or May — about the time that the first versions of KDE 4.0 were finding their way into distributions — that message seems to have been lost, and users started to react as if KDE 4.0 were a finished piece of software. Within that frame of reference, some of these reactions were justified, especially those about the loss of features and customization options in the available binaries. Other reactions, such as criticisms about the new menu or desktop manager, may have been indicators of a fear of change as much as legitimate complaints. Some, like the numerous complaints about stability, were as much the responsibility of the distributions as of KDE. Still others, such as the fear that the emphasis on Dolphin as a file manager meant that Konqueror would be slowly phased out, seemed to have little basis in fact. However, regardless of their validity, the negative reactions slowly became dominant, appearing on various KDE mailing lists and as comments on KDE.news and even as repeated thread hijacks in the middle of Groklaw discussions.
These reactions were accompanied by articles in the same vein by professional and semiprofessional writers. At one extreme, Linux Hater’s Blog zeroed in on KDE and core developer Aaron Seigo as continual targets for abuse. At the other extreme, veteran FOSS journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, after expressing his personal dislike of the KDE 4 desktop, suggested that the project needed a fork because the current developers had lost touch with users. Such writings both echoed user sentiments, and, perhaps, created them.
Having worked on KDE 4 for more than three years, KDE developers reacted with understandable anger. In particular, Troy Unrau, best known for his “Road to KDE 4″ articles, went so far as to say in his blog, “KDE and open source is not ever obligated to please users. We are not obligated to fix bugs. We are not obligated to implement things that you demand. We are not obligated to provide open forums for you to attack us personally.”
(Continued at source)
