KDE 4 release delayed to January

[bash]

The KDE 4 release has been delayed to January. Phoronix reports:


KDE 4.0 was planned for release in time for Christmas, but the KDE community has decided to postpone this much-anticipated release until January. There are still some issues to be worked out with KDE 4.0 when it comes to visual glitches and other areas that do not currently meet KDE's quality standards. Next month is also the KDE 4.0 release party at Google (which we will be covering), so hopefully there are no further delays. The KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 1 was released two weeks ago. This delay was mentioned at KDE News.

Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjIyOA

[ComplexNumber]

i seem to remember this being announced perhaps a month or more ago.

[hanzomon4]

Thank God....

[bash]

Don't know where you read that. Topic check before posting found nothing similar. And I just quickly googled it. The delay before this one that pushed the release to december 20th was announced in August. Now they moved it from December to January something.

[samir85]

Don't know where you read that. Topic check before posting found nothing similar. And I just quickly googled it. The delay before this one that pushed the release to december 20th was announced in August. Now they moved it from December to January something.

http://dot.kde.org/1196525703/

[-grubby]

just like vista.......

[Nekiruhs]

Thank God....I'm hoping that that was because you want them to fix bugs, not because you want to see one of the oldest opensource DEs fail.

[Vadi]

I think they shot too high. So, let's just hope they iron everything out.

(silly people refusing to use compiz)

[ComplexNumber]

Don't know where you read that. Topic check before posting found nothing similar. And I just quickly googled it. The delay before this one that pushed the release to december 20th was announced in August. Now they moved it from December to January something.

yes, come to think of it, this is indeed the 2nd time so far that it's been been pushed back.
i seem to remember that the final release was originally planned for october.

[bruce89]

Better than a GNOME 1.0.


I think they shot too high. So, let's just hope they iron everything out.

(silly people refusing to use compiz)

The hype is probably making it difficult to make KDE4 live up to its expectations.

I don't use Compiz, not usable enough.

[bash]

http://dot.kde.org/1196525703/

Yes that is from today and from a month ago.

[Mateo]

They should take their time. What I've seen looks like a big improvement over 3.0, but they must have a few kinks to still work out.

[cookies]

I knew they'd already done it... they just hadn't done a dot release of it.

Personally, I'm glad, there are some bugs to work out in KDE 4. (Big bugs)

[DeadSuperHero]

In any case, it'll be awesome when it goes stable. I seriously can't wait for it, every demonstration I've seen and every LiveCD I've tried have been thoroughly enjoyable.
Does anyone remember the old mockups? It's clearly beginning to show the great ideas and look behind those...

[maniacmusician]

Indeed. They also need more time to finish up Plasma nicely, get a few more usable applets for it, finish the menu, and redesign the taskbars. And there's also the bugs that need to be ironed out. It's definitely a good idea for them to push back the release.

To help with the bugs, Aaron Seigo came up with krush day; http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/11/krush-day-saturday.html It occurs every saturday, and it has really accelerated the rate of bugfixing in KDE4. If you have the time and skill, please build KDE4 from SVN and join the bugfixing craze.

[cookies]

In any case, it'll be awesome when it goes stable. I seriously can't wait for it, every demonstration I've seen and every LiveCD I've tried have been thoroughly enjoyable.
Does anyone remember the old mockups? It's clearly beginning to show the great ideas and look behind those...

Ah yes those. I noticed that the tab bar now does what is shown in the mockups.

[ComplexNumber]

i think it's a good thing that they have chosen to postpone it. it should be released when it's ready, and not before. perhaps they should stretch out the release date to the middle of 2008. deadlines are only a rough guide in this case - it's not like there is a multi billion pound contract or anything.

[maniacmusician]

i think it's a good thing that they have chosen to postpone it. it should be released when it's ready, and not before. perhaps they should stretch out the release date to the middle of 2008. deadlines are only a rough guide in this case - it's not like there is a multi billion pound contract or anything.
January's a reasonable deadline. They have most of the features and high priority bugs ironed out. They just need finishing touches and some sort of cohesiveness to bring it all together. 2 months should be good for that. Originally, 4.1 was supposed to be the release where the "finishing touches" were applied, but if they get some of that in before 4.1, then more power to them.

[GeneralZod]

This delay is a good thing but, with volunteer software which does not have the budget for a QA team, you get diminishing returns when you delay a "proper" release: comprehensive bug reports come from extensive user testing, and people simply don't test Betas as much as they should (this is one of the informal reason why the last release was labelled a Release Candidate: it's a real abuse of the term that angered a lot of people, inside and outside the KDE developer community, but bug reports spiked because people are, ironically, more likely to "test" what they think will be a final release than a Beta). "Release early, release often", as the saying goes, and IMO this should really be the last delay they make: they should release 4.0 when it is complete enough to be at least usable as a desktop, suffer the bad PR and jeering they are bound to receive, and reap the rewards of bug reports that will hopefully result and get everything hammered into shape for 4.1.

Incidentally (plug plug, again :)) my own project, KDE4Daily (http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html), is a good companion to the Krush (http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/KrushDays) initiative for people who want hassle-free updates to bleeding-edge KDE and don't mind running KDE in a VM. Someone approached me in IRC the other day and informed me that they had gotten it running in a chroot environment, which is quite exciting as now it should run natively and using your X server, so testing kwin_composite should be possible, too! He said he'd write a HOWTO over the next couple of days, so let's see how it works out!

[SunnyRabbiera]

I too like the fact that KDE is taking its time, this way more bugs are fixed so fewer issues will occur.
of course on a personal note I will wait KDE4 out a bit, maybe a year or so or till kde4.1 comes out.
I never had many issues with the latest out of the 3.5 branch tough, 3.5 had a really rough start in my opinion (and really kde3.4 was miserable for me)
I really like 3.5.8, its the best one to come out in my mind since 3.3..
3.3 was solid as a rock for me but anything after that was touch and go, especially 3.4...

[Arathorn]

with volunteer software which does not have the budget for a QA team, you get diminishing returns when you delay a "proper" release: comprehensive bug reports come from extensive user testing, and people simply don't test Betas as much as they should (this is one of the informal reason why the last release was labelled a Release Candidate: it's a real abuse of the term that angered a lot of people, inside and outside the KDE developer community, but bug reports spiked because people are, ironically, more likely to "test" what they think will be a final release than a Beta).
Maybe so, but they're shooting themselves and other open source developers in the foot in the long term. A few "release candidates" like these and people don't expect more of a rc then a beta any longer and start waiting for the final release before testing (and filing bug reports) en-masse. Then beta releases will have degenerated into alpha releases, rc into beta and maybe even final releases into release candidates.
People who are coming from other DE's or even Windows and are willing to try KDE4 will experience a half-assed DE and think it'll suck, never to come back. That can't be what we want to happen.

[Incense]

As far as end users go, I don't really think it matters if it is released in December, or January. Most people are not going to really start using KDE 4 until it is released on their distro of choice. Even if they do include it in 8.04, that's still five months down the road. Besides, maybe this will give someone time to do a port of kcontrol. (crosses fingers)

[LuisAugusto]

As far as end users go, I don't really think it matters if it is released in December, or January. Most people are not going to really start using KDE 4 until it is released on their distro of choice. Even if they do include it in 8.04, that's still five months down the road. Besides, maybe this will give someone time to do a port of kcontrol. (crosses fingers)

Kcontrol is already ported, it's just very very buggier, because there was non one wanting to maintained it.

Though, systemsettings it's a best tools for end-users.

[maniacmusician]

This delay is a good thing but, with volunteer software which does not have the budget for a QA team, you get diminishing returns when you delay a "proper" release: comprehensive bug reports come from extensive user testing, and people simply don't test Betas as much as they should (this is one of the informal reason why the last release was labelled a Release Candidate: it's a real abuse of the term that angered a lot of people, inside and outside the KDE developer community, but bug reports spiked because people are, ironically, more likely to "test" what they think will be a final release than a Beta). "Release early, release often", as the saying goes, and IMO this should really be the last delay they make: they should release 4.0 when it is complete enough to be at least usable as a desktop, suffer the bad PR and jeering they are bound to receive, and reap the rewards of bug reports that will hopefully result and get everything hammered into shape for 4.1.

Incidentally (plug plug, again :)) my own project, KDE4Daily (http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html), is a good companion to the Krush (http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/KrushDays) initiative for people who want hassle-free updates to bleeding-edge KDE and don't mind running KDE in a VM. Someone approached me in IRC the other day and informed me that they had gotten it running in a chroot environment, which is quite exciting as now it should run natively and using your X server, so testing kwin_composite should be possible, too! He said he'd write a HOWTO over the next couple of days, so let's see how it works out!
That was you? Nice job! I was really impressed by the scope of that project and its apparent success. I would love to try it, but I've never used qemu (I started out on VMWare and moved to VirtualBox), so I don't know how much of a hassle it would be to set up, and I don't exactly have loads of free time at the moment (though I will in a couple of weeks).

Just out of curiosity, would qemu images work with VirtualBox? I know that it borrows heavily from the qemu codebase.

[hanzomon4]

I'm hoping that that was because you want them to fix bugs, not because you want to see one of the oldest opensource DEs fail.

No, I don't want to see it fail that's why I'm glad they delayed it. No way would they be able to ship something by mid Dec. I'm more then willing to wait awhile then push for a subpar release.

[thx11381974]

As far as end users go, I don't really think it matters if it is released in December, or January. Most people are not going to really start using KDE 4 until it is released on their distro of choice. Even if they do include it in 8.04, that's still five months down the road. Besides, maybe this will give someone time to do a port of kcontrol. (crosses fingers)

yeah I'm probably not going to upgrade until 8.04. from what I've read KDE4's first release is going to be more the base for where they want to take KDE than any radical changes anyhow.

[luca.b]

Just out of curiosity, would qemu images work with VirtualBox? I know that it borrows heavily from the qemu codebase.

You can convert them. AFAIK there was a tutorial on liquidat's blog about it . ( http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/howto-transform-a-qemu-image-to-a-virtualbox-image/ )

@GeneralZod: I didn't know you were the guy behind the Daily Image.... anyway good job! I compile from SVN weekly, but yours was very nice idea to get more people involved in testing.

[bailout]

yeah I'm probably not going to upgrade until 8.04. from what I've read KDE4's first release is going to be more the base for where they want to take KDE than any radical changes anyhow.

AFAIK 8.04 wasn't going to be based on kde4 even if they had kept the dec release because 8.04 is going to be a LTS release and kde4 wouldn't be stable enough. Althugh I think kubuntu is talking of having packages available.

[RAV TUX]

The KDE 4 release has been delayed to January. Phoronix reports:



Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjIyOA

This is awesome news since I will too busy in December to try it.

[marsmissionaries]

As a user of KDE4 full time, i can tell you that it is a wonderful experience....Sometimes i stare at my desktop and am in awe of how put together it feels, it's just amazing.

It is pretty stable right now as well, (there are minor bugs obviously.)

Plasma has some issues to work out, but other than that everything is good (and plasma crashing isn't the end of the world because all it takes it restarting it, and even then it rarely happens as of lately)

The december release would have been possible, but due to the huge progress made DAILY I am very excited about the january release.