During the past week or so, I got two radically different impressions of the state of [tag]KDE4[/tag]. Now keep in mind that I am a big fan of the KDE4 approach in general and wrote a big hype article for tectonic nearly a year ago to talk about some of what was then just really cool vapourware and is now approaching a real system (so now you know my biases)
Uwe mailed me with a link to one tester’s blog. This tester believes that KDE is simply nowhere near release ready. More specifically the complaint appears to be that it lacks a sufficiently functional desktop environment right now. KDE has touted the very nearby 4.0.0 release as not ready for mass consumption but intended to be fully frozen for the sake of application developers.
The complaint seems to be that such a ‘release’ should not be marked with a stable version number like 4.0.0. Uwe has stated that he agrees in principle.
On the other side is this ARS-technica article. Which (granted) is (slightly) more recent and refers to [tag]KDE4 Beta 2[/tag].
Troy Unrau states that he finds KDE4-beta2 t be very close to usable. He does point out some lingering bugs and the fact that some parts of the desktop are not yet as feature-rich as their 3.x.x counterparts but does not seem unduly worried by that (at this stage). On the other hand his general belief is that KDE4 will reach a general (or at least mostly) user-ready state no earlier than December.
So the question perhaps is – should the promised October release be called 4.0.0 at all ? Perhaps it should be call 4.0.0rc or something – something that clearly indicates that this a [tag]developers[/tag] release and not a final general-use product.
Personally I haven’t made up my mind on the issue, but one thing does seem heartening to me: that is Troy’s belief that as of Beta2 the general unwillingness of KDE4 developers to start actively using the new [tag]desktop[/tag] is likely to end since there is enough of a desktop in place to make it usable (at least for developers). This is a remarkably different point of view from that of Apaku - but I suppose that such a statement must always be at least somewhat subjective.
Ultimately I think the ARS review did make one decision for me, once I am back in town next week, I will take a day somewhere and build my first KDE4 desktop (in parallel somewhere) and have a look, something I haven’t done before.