New sport, Plasma bashing

By einar

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First of all let me make some disclaimers :

  • This is **not **a Plasma bashing post (so that aseigo won’t commit suicide, should he ever read this);

  • I’m not a KDE developer, just someone who tries out SVN and reads mailing lists;

  • UPDATE: These statements aren’t meant to bash the collective group of the KDE developers, just to outline a bad “mood” in my opinion.

As you may know, KDE 4.0 Beta 3 was released a while ago. With it came the usual number of criticisms, some sensible, a lot of others not. Most of the latter fell into the category of “it’s an alpha, not a beta” and “Plasma sucks”. Well, one can ignore most of them since they rarely provide anything constructive.

What worries me instead is this thread on the kde-core-devel ML, where other people have (probably out of concern) been questioning the state of the workspace and some even proposed to go back to kicker + desktop for 4.0. It worries me because (at least as my non-developing eyes see) some people just jumped on the bandwagon. Plasma is one of the most important aspects of KDE4, but also of KDE 4.0, so proposing such a move would:

  • Confuse users, especially as the beta live CDs have shown the current workspace;

  • Be a big PR hit, much more than the “alphas non betas” mentality, because all of a sudden the workspace would be pushed away (and not everyone reads the MLs);

  • Show inconsistency in KDE’s release policies. I know that the philosophy is “who codes, decides”, but a minimum of coherency, at least public, could be used.

Last but not least I’m wondering why all the criticisms arrive now. It’s not like Plasma appeared out of nowhere one night… This might just drive people away, rather than give an advantage to our favorite desktop environment.

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