Is KDE 4 Stable? (was Re:Linus on Gnome 3.2)

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 12/04/2011 05:03 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Pet peeve: distro releases seem to not be very good these days.  You
> are better off installing a distro, say, a month after release, and
> then applying all the updates.

You're right and that's usually what I do. Fedora 13 was dead enough 
that I was motivated to make the switch. I supposed I could have waited 
a bit longer but once the mood struck me, I was committed to doing it.

> That makes the release CDs only a starting place.  Even worse live CDs or
> USB sticks are doomed to be poor.

I used the live CD.

> I wish more distros were released when they got to a stable point.
>
> Alternatively, I wish more releases would let you download a .iso that
> reflected the current state of updates.  Or some state that folks
> discovered was a local optimum.

One of my rationales for installing Fedora 16 the day that the stable 
version started shipping was that after I'd finished downloading the 
live CD and installing, I wouldn't have to download another 300M of 
updates immediately thereafter since there presumably wouldn't be much 
to update at that point.

You see, it's 1995 all over again for Internet service where our sucky 
ISPs have forced us to start thinking about every last byte we're 
downloading to keep those "overage" charges to a minimum, and despite 
that, I managed to rack up $60 of "overage" charges on the piece of crap 
Internet service known as Sympatico. (I know this list is archived so 
I'm trying to help Sympatico with some SEO.) How did I manage that? I 
have no idea. My "generous" cap is 20GB, which of course is wholly 
inadequate since the other piece of crap ISP, Rogers, that I dumped 
after having been with them for 13 years, so "generously" gave me 60GB, 
which I'd blow past on a regular basis. My kids used to watch stuff on 
YouTube back in the days of "good Internet service", as my 11 year old 
daughter calls our pre-Sympatico days. I had cancelled Rogers before I 
went on vacation in August and neglected to place an order with TekSavvy 
before I left. By the time I returned, TekSavvy had a "stop sell" order 
in my area (York Mills) due to congestion on their network. They were 
waiting for Rogers to provision additional bandwidth to start selling 
again. It was provisioned but within days and before I got around to 
placing an order with them, the "stop sell" was reinstated because the 
network was, once again, congested.

I've been patiently waiting for TekSavvy to get their act together in my 
neighbourhood since late August so I've been using Sympatico as a 
stopgap measure since early September. Sympatico has to be the worst ISP 
I've ever used. I have outages multiple times a day ranging from 30 
seconds to a few minutes. I've been keeping an eye on the TekSavvy blog 
<http://blogs.teksavvy.com/> to understand why they still have a "stop 
sell" order in my area. While I'm sympathetic to TekSavvy and I really 
want there to be a vibrant independent ISP market, after following this 
issue closely for the last few months, I'm beginning to wonder if it 
will ever be possible for TekSavvy and other smaller ISPs to have a 
chance with the two incumbents in this area having such a stranglehold 
on the "last mile". Neither of the incumbents have any incentive to 
cooperate and in fact, have every incentive to make the lives of the 
incumbents as difficult as possible by taking forever to provision 
additional connections, consistently missing promised installation 
dates, dragging their feet in responding to serious issues like the 
Rogers network splits that affected DHCP for TekSavvy customers, 
"accidentally" disconnecting third-party ISP connections, etc. It's a 
system designed to put the third-party ISPs and their customers at the 
mercy of the incumbents who only begrudgingly allow access to their 
networks.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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