| While there were some bugs in early KDE 4, those were not the main problem. No amount of baking could have saved it. The main problem was caused by the completely different purposes of the new developers, who have removed all the outstanding customization features of KDE 3.5. For me, indeed KDE 3.5 has been the best graphic desktop that I have ever seen. Neither before, nor after and neither on Apple or Windows have I encountered anything as good. The main reason for this was that KDE 3.5 allowed extreme customization, so you could make your own graphic desktop that did not resemble at all the default desktop. After the shock of experiencing the garbage KDE 4, even if I had waited a half of year before making the transition, with the hope that any major bugs would be solved, I have reverted to KDE 3.5 for a few years, until it had become much to painful to make upgrades in such a way as to not damage it. Then I have switched to XFCE, which does not provide as much as the old KDE 3.5, but at least it does not get in the way of your work with undesirable and hard to remove features. Moreover, any useful KDE applications, such as Kate, work perfectly fine on XFCE, together with any useful Gnome applications. The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application has characterized the developers who have converted the Mozilla browser into Firefox, which is another unwelcome change that I have greatly hated. |
The more holistic view is that every customization path incurs a support burden.
If you have 3 options to support, you can engineer and test the heck out of each option. 15 options? Not so much.
So having those 12 extra options not only creates permanent extra workload, as dev time is finite you’ve effectively made the 3 aforementioned options worse off.