Thursday, May 28, 2009

KDE teams needs to rethink versioning

They did it with KDE (the desktop) and now they've done it with KOffice: released a product not ready for the public as a new version number. In their defense they have made it clear that the initial "dot oh" release is not meant to be a fully featured or functional product and so is not for end users for both of these packages. But...

This is utter stupidity. I'm not sure how else to describe it. Every other product on the planet uses a new version number to signify a significant update to a product that is stable and an improvement over the old product. The KDE people do not seem to get this system and all it is going to do is confuse users in the end. Yes, power/advanced/guru users can understand this but the intermediate to beginner will not get this at all. If Firefox 4 came out without the ability to manage bookmarks or, in a more direct analogy, if the next MS Office shipped without PowerPoint (to be added later in a patch) NO ONE WOULD USE THESE PRODUCTS.

Come on KDE, just follow the conventions, use betas and release candidates, etc.. You're hurting yourselves and the Linux/open source community at large; confusing your users is not the way to build a community.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Great video game wallpapers

Found these somewhere, thought I forget where now. I want to say DFCKR. Anyway, unlike most fan art, these are beautiful paintings of some classic video game scenes. Way to go Orioto!