Hendrik Sollich posted on Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:50:45 +0200 as excerpted:
> I read a bunch of news about the discussion going on about the
> improvements to kde for people like "Raj" and "Carla" and that things
> were going to become "more useful".
> After what happend at gnome I've become a bit anxious about "improving
> usability" so I'm just asking for some reassurance.
>
> Will I be able to use KDE5 the way I'm using KDE4 today? Meaning: n-by-n
> workspaces, panels, window-rules and most of all 'configurability'?
>
> I know this might seem a bit premature, I just want to know whether I
> will have to stop updating my system at some point with kde ?
Please don't post in HTML when posting to the list. If it's not worth
reading in plain text, it's not worth reading... or sending. (FWIW, you
posted in both.)
The following is my own understanding based on what I have read as a
regular here and in various articles elsewhere. Hopefully Kevin, a real
kde dev (which I'm not, I'm just a regular here), will post his answer as
well, with a closer "inside" track tho I don't believe he claims to speak
for kde as a whole in this regard either, it's just his own thoughts and
observations of the process.
FWIW, I've had the same concern, and the kde 4 history, insisting even
4.2 was ready for normal use on the one hand while in bugzilla, they were
still answering "that's not ported to kde4 yet", or "that's buggy on kde4
ATM", just doesn't cut it. Personally, I believe 4.5 was what should
have really been 4.0, 4.4 was release candidates, 4.3 betas, 4.2 still
very broken alpha, by definition (classic definition of alpha, the
features aren't even there yet, beta, they're mostly there, but not
always working...).
That said, the kde devs have made it /quite/ plain that they don't intend
the jump to 5.x to be the break and roughness that the jump to 4.x was.
The technologies are said to be there, now, and they've done a first
implementation. Now they intend to do them better, and the switch to 5.x
gives them the opportunity to get rid of some mistakes that they have had
to keep for compatibility reasons thru 4.x.
Additionally, kde5 aka kde frameworks, is going to continue the trend
toward loosening up the lock-step between the components a lot. Already,
while kde3 and early kde4 was shipped as a handful of huge monolithic
tarballs with a bunch of packages in each (kdegraphics, kdebase,
kdemultimedia, kdegames, kdepim, etc), the sources are breaking up and
individual packages are often shipped in their own tarballs, now.
Frameworks is supposed to continue that trend, splitting up much as x.org
did into individual tarballs, but not just that, actually shipping them
at different times instead of all together as now, but then having
occasional milestone releases where everything syncronizes so that each
piece is known to work with all the others at that specific point, once
again.
Meanwhile, there /are/ disruptive technologies coming down the pike,
including wayland perhaps supplanting x.org. That will take some time,
but qt5 and kde5 should be the timeframe, and they're already preparing
for it. However, it should be emphasized that such changes are not of
kde's doing, but that they must cope with them just as everyone else
does. KDE5/frameworks is planned to continue running on x.org, however,
as well as wayland, assuming wayland does supplant x.org, and for kde5 at
least, it's quite likely that you should be able to run kde on either,
depending on which your distro chooses, of course. Where technology and
kde goes from there, presumably with qt6 and kde6 some years from now,
remains to be seen, but the preparations are already being made to be
able to run on either xorg or wayland, natively, for qt5 and kde5 aka kde
frameworks.
One more thing: I believe they're actually planning to support kde4 thru
the transition a bit better than they did with kde3. It remains to be
seen how that actually works, but I don't believe anybody, user or dev,
wants to relive the early kde4 disaster, and it's in everybody's interest
that there's a MUCH smoother transition, this time. Time will tell.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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