Yesterday we had a blog post on planetkde about issues with Plasma 5. There is one aspect which I want to pick out:
The bugs are so obvious that I’m sure they are all reported.
Don’t ever do that. If you think they are obvious that implies that also the devs see them. If the bugs are embarrassing to look at (like in this blog post mentioned not updating digital clock) you can be quite certain that the devs haven’t seen them. We use the system as well and come on if the clock doesn’t update we would notice. This implies now that the “obvious” bugs are not “obvious”. The devs are not seeing them.
Thus report them! Even those which are so clear to see that you ask yourself what the KDE devs have done to release software in that quality. Report your bugs, all of them. They are not obvious.
Maybe you should add that folk should see if it’s been reported first, then create a bug only if it hasn’t been already
The bug reporting wizard (which I linked) implies these checks.
Martin,
Thanks for handling yesterday (as all days) with class. I think the attitude that the kde developers have is a definite plus. While things are not perfect, you guys are the reason I have faith that it will get better; and I don’t think that you get enough praise or recognition for it.
So this explains why I seemed to get the time right only twice a day! (And all those appointments missed…)
I don’t report bugs to KDE anymore. Often they didn’t get responses for years (no that’s not a typo) when they did they would ask if they could still be reproduced. I know of bugs that were reproducable that hadn’t been fixed a half a decade later (why I don’t use PIMS).
KDE is a huge community. I’m sorry that it didn’t work well for you. In Plasma we try to answer each bug report in 24 hours.
Martin its not the result the problem, its the process.
in 2008 when we went to KDE4, the option to have multiple wallpapers/widgets on virtual desktops was removed because it ‘couldnt be done on the new and improved framework’.
in 2015 as we are going to Plasma 5, the very exact problem appears again.
now having a regression appear twice in a decade is frustrating especially one that is very important to how people work and also is a very differentiating factor to other DEs.
but what is more frustrating is when you read the bug reports from 2008 and 2015 is that the response is EXACTLY the same: it cant be done (on what is supposedly always a better infrastructure tahn the previous), we dont think its important, you can do something else (which of course in no way does the same thing) and so on.
I remember the frustration of 2008 so to have the same problem and especially response to the problem is often enough to get people to the boiling point.
More than a few people I know have changed their ciomputers and those of family members to Kubuntu 14.04 because its an LTS and will be supported until 2019.
This gives A) time for the problem to be fixed and B) not have to worry about the desktop for 4 more years.