Is this possible?

[Larry Hartman]

I agree that KDE 4 needs some work, but after all the multiple warnings  I 
have read prior to 8.10 release, KDE 4 needing work was not a major surprise.  
I was well-prepared for regressions and idiosyncrasies.  I will not blame KDE 
or Kubuntu for my failure to heed warnings and sound advice.

I can live with a certain amount of uncertainty on my machine, so I took the 
chance with the upgrade.  My wife can not, that is why I did not upgrade her 
from 8.04.  8.04 has another 12 months of service life...if as my wife you 
need that "rock solid" dependability--why not continue with 8.04?

I do not support forking--not that I have any management authority in the 
Kubuntu project.  Two really excellent options are already available--8.04 
with KDE 3.5.10 and one more year of service life or Ubuntu 8.10 LTS.  Adding 
another option only serves to stretch limited human resources that are more 
needed elsewhere.

Some rough calculation suggests that KDE 4.3/4 should be released by Kubuntu 
9.10.  The software ought to be fairly well tuned by then.  As many folk have 
suggested, KDE 3.5.10 had the benefit of years in development.  When KDE 3 was 
first released it had its own problems.  While there are some glaring bugs in 
KDE 4, I have not found these show stoppers.  A couple of those glaring bugs 
were solved when KDE 4.1.3 was added to the repositories in the last 24 hours. 
I read somewhere today that a bug fix release is planned for KDE 4 on a monthly 
basis.  I suspect that as Kubuntu 9.04 approaches KDE 4 will be a bit 
smoother.

I remember the days of Kubuntu 6.06.  I worked three days to get the hardware 
set up--almost ditched the idea of Linux.  I was 99% unproductive.  Kubuntu 
8.10 does not have those major issues.  At least not for me.  My LAMP server 
is running, I am reading, writing, sending emails, opening/saving documents, 
generally getting my most important things done.  Still vastly better than 2.5 
years ago.

My plan is to wait for the KDE/Kubuntu community to move KDE 4 forward.  I 
think it will be a good show.  I want to be a part of the effort, even if it is 
only in some very small way.  We must exercise some patience during the 
transition.  There is lots of work for developers to do, but it is way too 
early to lose hope and call it an outright failure.

Larry