On Monday 13 April 2009 19:02:06 Philip Webb wrote: > I'm quite willing to try new things, but KDE 4.2.1 is definitely a beta.
It's more than that. It's an experimental approach to a new way of thinking about desktops. KDE-4 is NOT a "New! Improved! KDE-3.5.x". It's so different that still calling it KDE is itself a point of confusion. But that's a different point altogether (and the name is not likely to ever change). To have the features and stability of KDE-3.5, one must run KDE-3.5. To move from KDE-3.5 to KDE-4, one must ignore the superficial similarities (apps do kinda look the same) and see the underlying truth - that migration requires as much of a shift in your thinking as moving from KDE to Gnome or XFCE. It's not so much that the KDE-4 code is a beta. The very ideas about how KDE-4 works at all are still in alpha. No-one knows the future and no-one knows what users want from their computers in the future, so the KDE devs made a considered best estimate about what would be useful in the future and built a platform that will (hopefully) prove useful. KDE-4 is scarcely a year old, it's a marvel that it works at all considering the deep invasive changes that were necessary. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
