Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How's the openrc update going for everyone?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 17:06 on Thursday 12 May 2011, Indi did opine 
thusly:

> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 04:40:02PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 16:00 on Thursday 12 May 2011, Indi did
> > opine
> > 
> > thusly:
> > > I had 8 users on kde before 3 was deprecated in 2009.
> > > Now I have zero. It was a harrowing time, switching
> > > everyone to gnome, finding that is not so hot, finally
> > > putting them on xfce. If xfce gets a wild hair and changes
> > > my plan is to dumb down the fluxbox or openbox
> > > configs I have for my own use, add some scripting and call
> > > it a day.
> > 
> > So why didn't you just leave the users on KDE3?
> 
> For the same reason I didn't leave them on windows 98 se.
> Yes, it technically "still works" but is far less useful
> than it was when it was enthusiastically supported by its
> creators and still considered one of two default choices
> for DE duty.
> 
> I'm sorry if this discussion has offended you, Alan.
> That was certainly not my intent.

No, you didn't offend me. I usually talk and type like that.

> However, admins with stories like mine are not at all uncommon,
> and the bottom line is that kde4 lost a lot of users to other
> DEs. The kde devs clearly bit off more than could chew, but
> obviously that's water under the bridge now. But to deny it or
> make excuses now does no service to anyone. "Oops, better not do
> that again", is what we all hope they learned. We all make mistakes,
> just don't make the same ones repeatedly! :)

Your first three sentences above contain huge sweeping generalities disguised 
as facts, but all they really are is "what Indi thinks". If you are going to 
make comments like that, you have to back them up with some kind of 
independant unbiased metrics, otherwise you are talking through a hole in your 
ass.

I have what I think might be an interesting exercise. One of the machines I 
admin is an enormous ftp server that serves an entire continent. It hosts 
every major (and many minor) distros, including gentoo and it's distfiles. One 
day when I'm motivated enough to do it, I might just draw download stats per 
distro for packages with kde in the name and plot this going back to before 
KDE-4.0.0 was released. I feel the numbers might prove very interesting.

I won't be doing it today though, the motivation is not there (in the same way 
that the authors of KDE didn't have the motivation to maintain kde3 anymore).

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com