Linus Torvalds Switches to Gnome

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 09:54 -0700, James Finstrom wrote:
> I would say kde4 was the vista of kde. To many changes and to much
> flair pushed on people with no real classic mode. I got kde4 working
> 90% the way I wanted but there were still some things that I would
> look cross eyed at.
> 
----
I believe that the saying goes...if you want to make an omelet, you have
to break some eggs

They had to move from QT3 to QT4 at some point. This definitely broke a
lot of code and they decided that KDE 4 had to be a complete re-write
from top to bottom. They decided to re-write the rules of a Desktop and
everything including the desktop itself is a Plasmoid.

I suspect that most of the negativity comes from two things...

- expectations and most of them are the habits acquired from years of
using GUI based systems and dropping files on the desktop. This is only
supported in a very crude way.

- early, often release...the only way to get bugs fixed is to get people
using it. KDE developers decided that the only way forward was to
concentrate solely on new development and abandoned the KDE-3 codebase
because updating it would severely drain their resources. This left
packagers on the various distro's with the choice of going with the new
KDE-4 or hanging on with KDE-3 with no new development.

Clearly the concept of release early and often is a mainstay of Linux in
general so yes, there is growing pain and it would have been smarter of
Linus not to turn it into a popularity contest because if anyone should
understand the concept of release early and often, it should be Linus.

Craig