BTW furthermore labeling dev a releases as 1.1 is as confusing for some users as releasing kde 4.0 as devleoper platform … For many if ther is no alpha/beta/rc in the name of release then they get confused and treat it as stable.

I’m quite sure you can find some people believing 1.1 is a stable wine release. If they get it with distro and from wine site how can they know ? 1.1 is a full number = stable.

They know because if you actually go to the Wine site you’ll see that every 1.1.x download is printed right next to the words “Beta” or “Development Release”. The top of the ubuntu download page, for instance, has a big bold warning.

As someone who works with both the distribution and the upstream, I can also personally assure that development releases don’t creep into a real version of Ubuntu.

I’m kind of wondering about the premise you made, though. Doesn’t the legacy baggage accumulate? As much as we ridicule Vista, they did have all kinds of crazy things going on in the Windows codebase, and they knew it and wanted to start from a clean slate.

I think you were right though, when you talk about putting the users first. If something is “legacy” it means that people are still using it, and removing it alienates them. There have been successful bandage removals, like Mac OS X and their Intel transition, and Palm’s preparing to make one with the Pre. But even in all of these cases, they went out of their way to provide legacy functionality with things like emulators, the Classic environment, and the Rosetta compatibility layer. Vista didn’t and KDE didn’t, and that’s why they lost users big time.

The worst example I can think of is Sony Online Entertainment’s total reboot of Star Wars Galaxies. They lost nearly all of their existing players, while still failing to attract people to what was now an inferior copy of World of Warcraft. Paul Graham says to always put the users first, and I can’t help but think that these moves are bad ideas for the sole reason that they don’t follow that principle.

OS X replaced the old Mac OS stuff, changed the whole systems’ fundamentals and layed new foundations. 10.2 was the “user ready” mac. 10.3 10.4 even better, and 10.5 they finished off on features for a while, like oh, idk kde 3.5 finished off on features and KDE 4.2 is “user ready”.

Oh, and this “let’s bash kde and glorify gnome” shit is so tiresome. Aren’t we past this?

Wine is a very different project from wine and comparing them at all means your opinion has been biased in an obvious and misguided way.

I’m quite sure you can find some people believing 1.1 is a stable wine release. If they get it with distro and from wine site how can they know ? 1.1 is a full number = stable.

Oh and if MS rewrote whole winapi concept into something new Wine project would have to do a rewrite too .. . KDE guys had the same problem with transistion from Qt3 to Qt4.