On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 11:10:03PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Apparently, though unproven, at 17:06 on Thursday 12 May 2011, Indi did opine > thusly: > > > On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 04:40:02PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > > Apparently, though unproven, at 16:00 on Thursday 12 May 2011, Indi did > > > opine > > > > > > thusly: > > > > I had 8 users on kde before 3 was deprecated in 2009. > > > > Now I have zero. It was a harrowing time, switching > > > > everyone to gnome, finding that is not so hot, finally > > > > putting them on xfce. If xfce gets a wild hair and changes > > > > my plan is to dumb down the fluxbox or openbox > > > > configs I have for my own use, add some scripting and call > > > > it a day. > > > > > > So why didn't you just leave the users on KDE3? > > > > For the same reason I didn't leave them on windows 98 se. > > Yes, it technically "still works" but is far less useful > > than it was when it was enthusiastically supported by its > > creators and still considered one of two default choices > > for DE duty. > > > > I'm sorry if this discussion has offended you, Alan. > > That was certainly not my intent. > > No, you didn't offend me. I usually talk and type like that. > > > However, admins with stories like mine are not at all uncommon, > > and the bottom line is that kde4 lost a lot of users to other > > DEs. The kde devs clearly bit off more than could chew, but > > obviously that's water under the bridge now. But to deny it or > > make excuses now does no service to anyone. "Oops, better not do > > that again", is what we all hope they learned. We all make mistakes, > > just don't make the same ones repeatedly! :) > > Your first three sentences above contain huge sweeping generalities disguised > as facts, but all they really are is "what Indi thinks". If you are going to > make comments like that, you have to back them up with some kind of > independant unbiased metrics, otherwise you are talking through a hole in > your > ass. > > I have what I think might be an interesting exercise. One of the machines I > admin is an enormous ftp server that serves an entire continent. It hosts > every major (and many minor) distros, including gentoo and it's distfiles. > One > day when I'm motivated enough to do it, I might just draw download stats per > distro for packages with kde in the name and plot this going back to before > KDE-4.0.0 was released. I feel the numbers might prove very interesting. > > I won't be doing it today though, the motivation is not there (in the same > way > that the authors of KDE didn't have the motivation to maintain kde3 anymore). >
You might be correct, but I very much doubt it. I will say though that it's almost a certainty the *type* of user who uses kde4 is probably different from those who used kde3. As I mentioned before, IMO the forte of kde3 was making migration to linux easy for windows users. I don't think anyone can say that about kde4 with a straight face. On this list we constantly see pretty advanced users having trouble keeping kde4 running. My own experiments with it were extremely frustrating. -- caveat utilitor ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫
