Currently I'm running KDE 4.2.1 on Opensuse, which is known for making one of
the best KDE packages.
Even though I'm really sad about the stability of KDE these days. For
explaining why, i want to describe a common use case for me an many many other
users.
The first thing I notice, after booting up, is the quicklauncher-bug which
makes a very often-used part of the desktop nearly unusable because you cant
see the small icons.
Next thing is checking my E-mails and the calendar... The week view in
Korganizer is gone (I know its just hidden. But for any normal user its
completely broken).
Then i maybe get a message in kopete. That looks very unsmooth, if your panel
is aligned to center and not over the whole screen, cause the appearing
message button in the systray moves all other plasmoids in the panel around.
Once when it appears and once when it disappears (very often).
Now I want to hear music... When starting Amarok I often get a message: The
device M-Audio***** (My sound card) is not working. Which means for any normal
user, who don't know how to fiddle around in systemsettings, that he can't
hear music in KDE. At least not with his favourite player.
When I'm done and want to shut down the pc the last thing that always happens
is a plasma crash these days. (last month it was a Kontact crash) which
prevents the computer from shutting down. Which is also annoying because you
often don't notice it before you return to the pc after hours or days.
(That are just actual and very obvious bugs but there are much more small
ones)
Overall its partly no smooth experience to use KDE these days and I really
don't understand why such things happen. I see the point in releasing KDE 4.0
so unstable and i don't want to talk about the past. But now we have 4.2 and
that release is meant for end-users. Furthermore this release is feature
complete for most of the normal users. So why isn't the focus on bug fixing
now? KDE 4.2.1 should just be a bug fix release. But for me it contains more
bugs than 4.2.0. and much of them are really obvious.
I think we just CAN'T release KDE with so much bugs if it should be taken
serious. Just stop a second, try to be honest and imagine what would happen if
MS would release Windows in such a state... You would laugh at them, and blame
them for releasing such a buggy piece of software.
Or take the success of Ubuntu. It's mainly because most things just work.
Overall I think there are things that really need to be changed. The focus has
to be on bug fixing. And when it can't be done timely, releases have to be
delayed. What about a real QA Team which has to make sure that there is no
release before all obvious bugs are squashed?
Please don't get me wrong. I love KDE4. I'm with it since the 4.0 betas. It's
a damned cool peace of software and has sooo much potential. And I really
love to use it because of the very much genial things it offers. Kudos to all
developers for that.
The only things to complain about are the bugs.
I try to spread KDE in my family and to my friends. But, tell me, how should I
explain the many bugs to them? They are no experts so they don't need special
features! They just want it working. Just like over 90% of the normal users,
too.
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