I feel with the OP.

KDE3 was clean, in today's view lightweight (altough it was considered bloated at its time) and extremely stable.

KDE3 has been replaced by KDE4 and reached a usable level of stability after 3 years of development.

Gnome2 has been replaced by Gnome3 and Unity which are received less than enthousiastic by the Gnome users community.

I have tried XFCE, which was lean, fast and stable, but was just not "it". I mean I couldn't show it to a Windows 7 user and tell him this was a slick desktop with its Windows95 look.

I too have felt betrayed by the KDE developers community which obsoleted an excellent product and replaced it by something monstrous and buggy. (Although I am using KDE 4.4.5 now as declared stable by Debian and which is quite stable albeit on a huge resource footprint)

But then again, and previous posters have stated this already, it is FOSS. No one can decide for the developers which direction they choose. You could join the team an try to influence decisions, altough your chances are slight as a newcomer.

And it being open source, you are free to adopt KDE3 and continue supporting it, or fork KDE4 and slim it down as much as possible.

On the other hand, I am running 7 or 8 computers at home at nil costs for the software. Some of them are frozen considering software versions, for others I enjoy monthly upgrades to the latest and greatest software.

There advantages and disadvantages to everything is this world, most advantages come with their disadvantages as well. Look at the bright side: if you were running iProducts, you'd have to buy new hardware every year not to be embarrassed when you open your iDevice in a meeting.

jlinkels

jlinkels,
kind thanks :sigh:

:.-}
made me crying (almost, I'm just kidding )

Yep, the story goes like this:
All great things go lost if One didn't have a right goal set to achieve:
There where great engineers who made UNIX.
Then came great ing.s who made X
Then came excellent ing.s who started KDE, and made QT (in Germany) and KDE grew
but the goal was (IMHO) to outperform NT series (again I stress IMHO)
Goal met with KDE2
Then the stick was risen (or was it a limbo dance- lowered) to outperform NT_5 (w2k)
Beaten hands down by KDE3
Enter XP (NT_5.1)
Beaten with KDE 3.5 release hands down again
Enter Limbo:
Vista vs. KDE3.5
Enter compiz; Enter Win7; Enter KDE4
and
... _BUMP!
all devs fell over their "respective bottoms"
footprints (RAM that is) all over the place, resources are blowing their "bells and whistles"

And "we", most users who "just work" on computers got blown by the road side.

Imagine they "updated" busses this often?

Get the point?

Now don't get me wrong,
I don't mind developing a candy crazed slickness/madness, but that was reserved for off mainstream environments like E17 and enlightenment, and their use was primarily for motion pictures (remember "copycat" and chat on the laptop with 8x4 characters on a 14" screen? the bathtub scene?)...
IMHO
And pulling the whole KDE dev team to a never ending resource craze will certainly look a bit silly in few years from now. IMHO

I just frown for not leaving a "golden" release, with just few maintainers for bug-fixes behind. That's all?
Like the excellent trinity package actually is.

Look what happened to Gnome
The same happens aparently to KDE now...
dev's got in touch to code and partially (but ever more) got lost touch with user base.
User base grew, and by doing so, lost touch with dev's, and it all collapsed to two opposite side roads IMHO.

BTW XFCE4.4 I like a lot:
in the first glance it looks so "Gnome", but it isn't really:
The functionality is not pruned away - it is cleverly hidden like in spy movies: Until You click the "hidden button" (read ctrl-sequence or like) and there they fade in.
I'm just afraid they will(have?) loose touch with the new releases?

Best regards,
Stevan C.

Maybe you (we) have better luck here.

Altough both Gnome and KDE IMHO have broken with excellent releases to develop something new and less good, the did adhere to there policies:
- KDE to offer a desktop as full-fled and cutting-edge as possible
- GNome to offer an as simplified and dumbed down interface as possible (*)

XFCE OTOH tries not to implement what most users dislike in KDE and Gnome: bloatedness and oversimplification. So maybe, just maybe, if XFCE stick to their policy they simply can't spoil a good desktop.

jlinkels

(*) This is not troll and no flame wars please. I didn't say Gnome was bad, I just don't like it. Matter of personal taste. Gnome classic as such was good and served purpose.

So, how come they didn't leave a "golden" release when abandoning the 3 series in KDE?
Didn't the Kernel dev's leave a "stable" each time when branching.
Even more so, didn't they even back<-port (<-pun? ) features for a while before leaving it for good?
I think we have a case of >less than good< project management?
Luckily there is the trinity team

Just got this in my inbox. Trinity mirrros are back.

Btw:

You're completely right. I always missed this so much with Gnome/KDE. I understand Qt was under a type of non-free license and they (Trolltech) changed the license often, but I don't understand Gtk+/Gnome. Ok, Gtk2 brought many improvements (better font support, nicer theming, etc), but Gtk1 was still the choice for resource limited systems for years after. Unluckily, there was no stable/old-stable branch. They just jumped to the next version. Same is happening to Gtk2, now that Gtk3 is out.

Not only that:
The OSF and GNU are touted that they are consistent to a model
to a design
to a specification:
They have the good release practice guidelines
But who is adhering to them?
Is corporate capital (no matter who's!) swallowing yet another good project?

It should be somehow be made mandatory to leave a "golden" before going up a major notch?

This is not a "bump"
the development is as this:
sources
development
so anyone interested is welcome (i guess) i download mine already...
maybe a slackbuild surfaces in a while?

http://trinity.blackmag.net/trinity/slackware/13.1/
http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/sdeg/kde_3_5_10.htm
http://humanreadable.nfshost.com/sde...ty_desktop.htm