Demand a KDE Experience from your Distribution !

If you are reading this blog you probably know how things work in the GNU/Linux Desktop, some people develop software and then some other people distribute that software. This usually works quite well since the people distributing the software (In this case KDE software) work with us, and together we make sure that the final product is awesome.

This system works as long as both, upstream (KDE) and downstream (Distributions) work together, but some times collaboration does not happen and problems appear. In those cases the experience that the user gets is not the experience we designed from KDE.

This is quite similar to what happens in the Android world, HTC/Samsung/LG do their own versions of it containing a different set of applications, configurations, services, etc. Google then releases what their think Android should be. In the same way Kubuntu/Opensuse/Fredora/Chakra do what they think is correct when it comes to updates, default applications, modify our software etc, meaning that in most cases the software is delivered in a different way from what we envision.

This is why I want you to demand to your distribution to offer a full KDE Experience, this means:

• Not patching our software.
• Upgrading to all minor releases.
• Not using software that is no longer supported by us.
• Offering all pre-releases as optional.
• Use the latest supported middle-ware and libraries (bluez, networkmanager, udisk, Qt, virtuoso...)

In order for distributions to do this we need to build some infrastructure we currently lack; what is the latest supported virtuoso? or the latest supported BlueZ? Currently only the respective developers know about these things.

While we work on setting up those bits of infrastructure there are things you can already demand from your distributions - minor upgrades, no patching, or making all pre-releases available.