[om-council] Council meeting April 21st follow-up [2]
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
bero at lindev.ch
Fri Apr 22 19:44:00 EDT 2016
On 2016-04-22 14:36, rugyada wrote:
> 1) It has been remarked that we lost around half of manpower.
Already answered in the older mail
> 2) With all my love to Bero :) I'd like to know which KF5/Plasma5
> distro he uses for doing what, to state that it works well.
I'm using cooker for everything I use computers for -- mostly
development, email and web browsing, some office work, presentations,
video playback (I don't have a TV. If I want to watch anything, it's on
the computer), annoying stuff like doing my tax declaration and
bookkeeping, etc.
Of course I'm not much of a graphical person, so if there's some issue
in doing something with a graphical tool where a command line tool does
the same thing 10 times faster anyway, I wouldn't notice (which is not
to say that those graphical tools aren't important -- just stating that
I'm not using them and therefore I wouldn't notice if they had any
problems).
> I think that I can gather a list of issues, not blocker for Beta stage
> but unacceptable for a stable release.
Please do.
> I don't know the exact data, but can anyone tell how many distro have
> been officially released till now with Plasma5, and which ones?
> Please attention: I mean KF5/Plasma5 -> without any other alternative
> choice!
That would be few because most distros support more than one desktop
(and it has been like that forever, so it's not like they just started
adding something new because people weren't happy with Plasma5).
KaOS would be the obvious example of a distro released with only KF5.
Distros that have dropped KDE4 in favor of KF5 while also providing
gnome, unity, lxqt, xfce or whatever would include just about every big
distro, for example:
OpenSUSE
Fedora
(K)ubuntu
Debian
Arch
Manjaro
Mageia (starting with 6 - so pretty much at the same stage as OMLx3)
Gentoo (like Mageia and us, currently only in upcoming release)
> 3) By proposing to the users a "jump" to 3 without guarantee support
> to 2014.2, are we not risking a loss of users even more big?
> I guess I'm not alone, if I was put in front of this kind of choice,
> without any guarantee that I'll have everything I have atm well
> working and I need, personally I'd be tempted to look around for a new
> reliable distro.
Well, as always, we have to make sure the update from 2014.2 to 3 is a
smooth one that won't break things.
At some point we have to drop support for an older release. The point
you're making will still be valid a year from now, 2 years from now or
even 3 years from now for people who for some reason don't want to
update, so if we follow the reasoning, we have to support 2014.x
forever, at the same time support 3 forever (for those who came in after
2014.x but for some reason don't want to update to 4), and support 4
forever, etc.
Chances are Lx4 will have Plasma 6 -- and chances are also that by the
time Lx4 comes out, Plasma 6 won't be 2 years old already (like Plasma 5
is now), so the "but it might be unstable" claims might be even stronger
there.
Also, let's not forget that compared to 2014.2, 3 contains several
thousands of bugfixes (not exaggerating here, just counting all the bugs
fixed in upstream projects where we just bumped the version).
Sooner or later 2014.2 users will run into some of those thousands of
bugs - should we be expected to fix them too if the people could just
fix them by updating to something we have already released with the fix
(after 3 is released, of course)?
> Users needing a SO for their work or for their important things, they
> do *need* safety.
Agreed - but the way to provide it is by having a nice way to update to
3 safely.
This is hardly unique to us either. Last time I checked, Apple force-fed
updates to users (without even giving them a lot of control over when to
do it) and Microsoft seems to have a nag screen about updating to
Windows 10 for people on older versions.
Despite having tens of thousands of developers, those companies are so
scared of having to maintain old versions that they even give away free
updates when a large part of their previous business model relied on
selling those updates for insane prices.
Yet somehow we're expected to keep supporting old stuff indefinitely,
and even provide people with new features on old branches (something the
competitors have never done).
ttyl
bero
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