F9alpha and KDE4

[John Summerfield]

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 07:22 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> John Summerfield <debian <at> herakles.homelinux.org> writes:
> > It's widely held that parents deplore their children's taste in music; I 
> > suggest that the same's somewhat true wrt aesthetics. I think it's 
> > important that the themes aren't all targeted at people in their mid-20s 
> > to mid-30s, and that they make allowance for people who don't really 
> > want all that eye candy.
> 
> If you think of me as an eye candy addict, you got the entirely wrong picture 

No general rule applies equally to all member of the set. Not all of my
generation deplore their children's choice of music, an my than my
generation's children enjoy some forms of music their peers claim to
enjoy.

> of me. ;-) I have most eye candy stuff turned off, am still using Bluecurve 
> etc. The reason I want KDE 4 in Fedora is because that's the current version, 
> where all new development is going to focus, many apps are already getting 
> great new features etc. Unfortunately, there's also some migration pain 
> involved. Redoing all the desktop was an upstream decision and I'm still not 
> convinced it was a good one, but with the decision being what it is, it is 
> clear we will have to migrate to the new version sooner or later, we can't ship 
> KDE 3.5 forever (and a KDE 4 port of Kicker would be suicidal, there would be 
> essentially zero third-party applets for it, as all the old ones would still 
> only run on the KDE 3 Kicker and all the new ones target Plasma, not to mention 
> the huge maintenance overhead for the port itself). So, Fedora being about 
> current technologies, why not now? Fedora 8 will stay on KDE 3 and still get 
> updates until 1 month after the Fedora 10 release, so if you're not ready to 
> move to KDE 4 yet, that's your option. If you're scared by KDE 4, chances are 
> the many other huge changes coming up in Fedora 9 (GCC 4.3, Perl 5.10, Tcl 8.5, 
> Upstart replacing SysVInit, TeXLive replacing teTeX, Hunspell replacing Aspell, 
> gio/gvfs replacing gnome-vfs etc.) are also going to scare you anyway. :-) I 
> also think the libraries could have used less incompatible changes, but there 
> again it's an upstream decision, and relying on old software isn't going to be 
> a solution in the long run. But kdelibs3 is still available so you don't lose 
> your many third-party KDE 3 apps.

I don't criticise the decision to include KDE4 in Fedora, my comments
are directed firmly at KDE4. My problems _do_ lead me to wonder whether
it should be included _now_ - as I said I found it completely unusable
after an hour or two trying. It is with a user account that I previously
used on F8.

Root cannot use KDE4 at all, there's some config program won't start,
and then the session terminates.



> 
>         Kevin Kofler
>