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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] My rant against Red Hat again.
From:       Eduardo Sanchez <csanche2 () calvin ! edu>
Date:       2002-03-11 7:44:29
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Hi people on the list,

I've just visited the Dot and saw this excellent newsitem:

"Florida School Deploys KDE/GNU/Linux On Thin Clients"
http://dot.kde.org/1015251670/

which surely makes for excellent news. However, there is something that keeps 
bugging me.

The two big, high profile deployments of KDE I am aware of (City of Largo, 
and now this school) had been using one or another form of Red Hat as their 
system with KDE. And this could be potentially disastrous to the initial 
reputation of the KDE project.

The reason is that Red Hat's KDE is, as Moritz Moeller-Herrmann said in his 
post in this same story:

"Until this day the Redhat KDE is always a neglected, badly compiled and 
buggy part of their distribution and it is also the reason why in Europe 
nobody is seriously considering Redhat for desktop use. SuSE and Mandrake 
rule here."

(quote taken from 
http://dot.kde.org/1015251670/1015275884/1015279887/1015290551/1015313193/)

Indeed, RedHat's KDE is just what Moritz said. Once more I point to this 
egregious bug in qt2.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54220

This bug has been present since pre-7.2 RawHide up to this very day and 
*nobody* cares to fix it in Red Hat.

Now, I am afraid that as Red Hat keeps being chosen as the platform for 
running KDE desktops, their buggy and crooked KDE setup will cause 
significant damage to the image of the KDE project. How many people, right 
now, might be evaluating RedHat/KDE for deployment in their 
companies/institutions, with the danger of being turned off because "KDE is 
too buggy, seems like half-finished software?"

Many people (and I remember Navindra on this list) point out that Red Hat is 
now server oriented, and that is true indeed, but it is also true that Red 
Hat has the desktop as a key component of this initiative:

http://www.redhat.com/opensourcenow/intro.html

For these reasons I think that the present bugs in Red Hat's KDE poses a big 
image problem for KDE and this must be addressed effectively if we are to see 
more KDE penetration in markets different than US and Germany 
(Spanish-speaking South America, for example). The KDE community should 
firmly keep Red Hat accountable for their bad KDE setup and strongly suggest 
a better implementation.

Ok, enough for my rant. Thanks for your patience.

Eduardo Sánchez
 
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