KDE 3.x was also in some ways more feature rich than a current KDE. 4.x was a huge mess due to some big ego trying to push his ideas on the world but I think the current Plasma releases are on a good path torwards mature and productive - however the applications beyond dolphin are quite lacking. It's also sad that a lot of ressources and energy goes to GNOME...
current KDE. 4.x was a huge mess due to some big ego trying to push his ideas on the world
That really wasn't the reason for KDE 4.X being a huge mess. I find it annoying that people who contribute a lot of their free time and life to a free software project are treated this way.
aseigo was a paid developer on KDE but what he contributed was far more than his paid time. Also he was a contributor before and after his paid development.
KDE was a mess because the Qt3 to Q4 change was a humongous change. KDE to decide to stick with Qt3 or move forward with a huge effort to rewrite the whole stack. And all it had was volunteers.
You underestimate the complexities of that situation and blame it on a single person and that's an unfair oversimplification of the situation.
> KDE was a mess because the Qt3 to Q4 change was a humongous change.
KDE 4 was a mess because in addition to the Qt upgrade they decided to jump on the semantic nonsense fad as well as develop a completely separate set of widgets for the desktop and the shoehorn those things into everything. Oh then there was the overengineered PIM framework that starts a MySQL server on your desktop system even if all you want is to have holidays being highlighted in the clock widget's calendar. Also they released what was still an alpha at best as 4.0 - version numbers for user facing releases do matter.
Solid, Phonon, Plasma, Nepomuk, Akonadi, Sonnet, and many others.
Some of them paid off well (eg Solid and Plasma), some were less successful. That's a very normal thing.
KDE 4 wasn't a mess. Later versions (4.7 afterwards) were very polished and usable.
The problem was that KDE 4.0 was hyped to no end. Distributions jumped on the hype and had a race to ship it first. Although KDE developers all warned that the .0 release is nowhere as stable.
They had to get it out though. It was already in the works for 2-3 years and some projects were losing volunteers because their working was not going to be released and were losing motivation.
I'm sorry - you are correct. I didn't want to blame a single person.
But the new concepts and metaphors for the desktop were just not well thought out IMHO - that widget stuff was the wrong direction - as well as the idea to abandon the classical desktop. That mandatory Desktop-Folder just drove me nuts.
SuperKaramba on KDE 3.x is still not completely possible in current KDE.
