Not sure if it’s still the same as it was back in my day, but KDE’s “release candidate” nomenclature was always a bit of a misnomer. You’d never see RC1 actually released as final. What it really means is that the alpha “feature refinement” beta “bug fixing” phase is over, and it’s the final testing phase for showstoppers. However, the definition of showstopper seemed always to be very wide. Thus, a lot of bugs still get reported and fixed during this phase, and RC really means “beta, but towards the end of the pipeline”.
Which is in contrast to the Linux kernel where a RC can be declared ship-ready and simply get renamed.
Admittedly there’s a fairly large impact difference between kernel level bugs, and say a bug in Okular…
The nomenclature is actually correct here, and a lot of other software use it, at least from everything I’ve seen. Release candidate means it’s stable and (usually) feature complete but could have bugs and needs testing before they launch it.
It’s still a misuse of the word - if your software needs testing it’s not a candidate you would release unless you’re a multi-billion gaming company or Cisco
Wiktionary: (software engineering) A version of a program that is nearly ready for release but may still have a few bugs; the status between beta version and release version.
Oxford: a version of a product, especially computer software, that is fully developed and nearly ready to be made available to the public. It comes after the beta version.
I couldn’t find more definitions from “big” dictionaries, but literally no definition I’ve seen agrees with you. I wonder why that is.
KDE has a predefined schedule for “release candidates”, which includes RC2 later this month. So “RC1” is clearly not going to be the final version. See: community.kde.org/…/February_2024_MegaRelease
This is at least somewhat common. In fact, it’s the same way the Linux kernel development cycle works. They have 7 release candidates, released on a weekly basis between the beta period and final release. See: www.kernel.org/category/releases.html
In the world of proprietary corporate software, I more often see release candidates presented as potentially final; i.e. literal candidates for release. The idea of scheduling multiple RCs in advance doesn’t make sense in that context, since each one is intended to be the last (with fingers crossed).
It’s kind of splitting hairs, honestly, and I suspect this distinction has more to do with the transparency of open-source projects than anything else. Apple, for example, may indeed have a schedule for multiple macOS RCs right from the start and simply choose not to share that information. They present every “release candidate” as being potentially the final version (and indeed, the final version will be the same build as the final RC), but in practice there’s always more than one. Also, Apple is hardly an ideal example to follow, since they’ve apparently never even heard of semantic version numbering. Major compatibility-breaking changes are often introduced in minor point releases. It’s infuriating. But I digress.
KDE5 is great and does everything I need it to. I feel like upgrading is just going to introduce issues while bringing nothing new to the table.
The only thing I would like to change are bigger scrollbars or have the ability to easily resize them. Something tells me this isn’t going to be included in KDE6, though.
On Neon in Wayland it moved the application launcher and notifications to the center of the screen. I saw an issue opened for it just now, so hopefully it will be fixed soon. But I’m expecting it will likely just be a thing until Plasma 6 because that is likely where 100% of their resources are right now.
And yes, Plasma6 is usable now, it seems like everything is just working and I am close to rebasing. There is a Fedora Kinoite variant which is in my experience way better than Neon Unstable
I started using Plasma 5 a smidge before devs were saying it was ready for primetime. That was my conversion from Gnome (which I was very happy to leave by then) and it's been nothing but positive.
I will wait for the full release of Plasma 6, but I'm super excited for it. I still <3 Plasma 5.
Maybe windows rules will now work properly instead of being buggy and delete themselves…fingers crossed Imho KDE is too big, there are so many cogwheels they miss the opportunity to actually polish each and every aspect.
Running surprisingly well for a beta. I really hope to find some free time and help some more with reporting the minor bugs left during the end of the year vacation time and help polish for the final release.
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