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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Open question to all developers.
From:       Malte Dik <malte.dik () web ! de>
Date:       2008-06-26 16:55:05
Message-ID: 200806261855.10183.malte.dik () web ! de
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Well, I'm not a person asked, but I'll add to the conversation anyway... :>

When I think of the times I started in Linux all I really knew was, which 
distro I was using, so the first boards I would go to were 
either "Linux"-boards or "SuSe"-boards (depending on the words I searched 
for). When I had a question/demand it was "ICQ isn't working in my IM. I'm 
using SuSE." (or similar).

So my point is: Where are those really unexperienced users drooling for some 
bleeding-edge-features going? The boards of their distro. And that's where 
those more experienced users - eager to help and who you need if you don't 
want to make communicating a fulltime job - are hanging around. And the 
distros are also the place where potentially exaggerated expectations are 
fanned - by the packagers who want to cut the edge and fanboys buzzing the 
boards.

Here is where communication (some would call it education) is needed. On the 
one hand between main-coders and packagers (who often are coders themselves 
why communication in this direction maybe underrated) and on the other hand 
between someone and the people spreading the word in the boards and LUGs.

Pushing this task downstream (or just letting it flow) would also have the 
benefit of not having to deal with all the tayloring the distros apply to KDE 
which makes supporting a pain sometimes.


I wrote the above in the morning. The reason I didn't send it was the 
missing 'someone' between KDE and the users spreading the word. There's 
PlanetKDE and The Dot, fullfilling their task almost perfectly (it was 
recently mentioned, that the Dot needs more editors, but I guess that's more 
a matter of trust than really recruiting someone), but there's also the third 
party media and that's where it gets difficult, because we don't necessarily 
get feedback about that, so there might be authors generalizing overexcited 
or - much more dangerous - comments to this articles stating false facts. 
While on boards those false facts are often being corrected by other 
observant users, they more likely just remain uncorrected in the 
comments-section, because who has the time to read the comments on /. and the 
like? Unexperienced (young) users searching for the bleeding-edge! 
Experienced users know where they get their latest and clean(!) fix.


And to the wiki-idea: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE4
It was last edited december 2007. Forget it. It won't work.



Malte

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