Critics everywhere are saying it, KDE4.1 rocks.

However, some aren’t. Some, like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, are saying that “4.0″ must mean “100% complete”. In fact, he goes on to attack Aaron Seigo for not making it clear enough that 4.0 isn’t a user-ready release.

For those confused, here’s some quick background info. Long before KDE4 was first released, the powers that be decided that to prevent development stagnation, they had to push a release of KDE out to the world. That way, it would get some visibility, and everyone would know all the new technologies that were going to be in the complete KDE4 series. Technologies such as nepomuk, plasma, strigi, and kwin compositing. Those technologies weren’t going to be feature-complete as one would think a x.0 release would be, but they were going to simply showcase the building blocks that developers would be building on in the future. Aaron repeatedly said that even Plasma’s API wouldn’t be stable until KDE 4.1 was released. Even so, some users found that KDE4.0 was a usable desktop. More users are finding that 4.1’s beta release is almost on-par with KDE 3.5.

However, Steven is taking Aaron’s implications that 4.1 would be “the big one” word for word. 4.1 isn’t the big one, it is a big one. When comparing 4.0 to 4.1, you see a few huge differences, both in terms of stability and features. As Ars Technica writer Ryan Paul writes,

I have used both GNOME and KDE extensively over the years, but have been mostly committed to GNOME in recent times. When KDE 4.0 was first released, I was extremely skeptical about Plasma. I saw a lot of innovation under the surface, but didn’t see anything at all to impress me in the parts that were visible to the end user. The work that has been done in the time since the 4.0 release is very compelling and has completely convinced me that the strength of Plasma’s underlying architecture can be translated into very real and tangible improvements to the end user experience.

The critics are wrong: KDE doesn’t need a fork - Ryan Paul

Ryan is right. KDE4 wasn’t meant to be like Vista, where you first turn it on and are supposed to get the “wow”. Even Steven himself admits that Microsoft doesn’t get their releases right. If a huge corporation with some of the best programmers in the world can’t push a finished product out the door for the big 1.0 release, why should open source developers be criticized for not getting it finished when everyone else wants it? Open source has a totally different view for the importance of releases. Open source depends on fresh developers and insight to stay alive. Microsoft depends on people buying their products. When the money goes low, Microsoft needs to scramble to push out a new product, regardless of how complete it is. Once its out there, they can still keep tacking on new features, which is why Vista’s SP1 is in the pipeline.

As for open source, when the developers think they have reached a certain point where they think others can start building on their work, they push it out to the public. New ideas come in, and get put into later releases. Its the same thing, really. Just a different currency.