It would be nice to see development on polish, fit, and finish, rather than dumping the old in favor of the new. I understand very well that sometimes the dumps occur in favor of underlying architechture decisions that will improve growth, implementation, extensibilty, etc., over the long term. But from an end user perspective, these descisions often seem half-baked and regressive. Especially at first.

Empathy is a perfect example of usage regression. It has most of the features and usability of Pidgin, but it is missing something. I don\’t have a specific example (mostly because I didn\’t keep track and I\’m done with trying out Empathy for now after test driving it for a week). I\’ll call it \”fit, finish, and polish\”.

Distributions should also consider the multi-platform feature of solutions when selecting new standards. The fact that Pidgin, OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc are able to run on Windows, Linux, and potentially other operating systems or devices in some cases gives them a higher chance of success. It eases the conversion process and acceptance if the application runs on more that Linux. Users can start using the application before moving to Linux or the user base that may never move to Linux can use it and the Linux users aren\’t left seeming to be difficult and different. Multi-platform support is something to keep in mind depending on the distribution\’s objective.

Why does this happen? The corporate entities behind the community distros. You don\’t see this sort of thing in Debian, but distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are the prime culprits.

There has to be a balance between bleeding edge and stability for the sake of sanity.

I want the latest and greatest and if it doesn\’t work for me (à la Pulse Audio) I just turn it off and move on. That\’s not really an option for new users and it just makes Linux look bad.

-c

Every software is written to satisfy a requirement and every user may have different requirements.

Hope Empathy will be \”polished\” in the coming months now that it is being given so much of importance.

But then again the next sentence continues: \”Thankfully however, <b>we have distributions to help make these decisions for us.</b?\” Huh? So.. users decide, … but distributions help them decide? uh?

We *are* talking about Pidgin here, Right? The project notorious for telling it\’s users that they are stupid for requesting that older features/functions be restored when the developers decide to change something no one wanted changed? Have we forgotten the sadly-lamented Carrier/Funpidgin fork? Nope, I can tell you right now that a move to Empathy will change nothing with the path Pidgin takes, even if no one follows.

It let you feel that\’s there\’s a community of fine guys that are working hard on our loved operating system, that they care, and that the goal is continous improvement, and, most importantly, you feel that YOU are important and that YOU can do something to make all these things better.

If you want some more \”polish\” you could just stay with your 6-month old distro for some time more. In fact, after something like an year of updates and backports, almost any distro will look very stable and efficient. For example, you just can stay with latest Ubuntu LTS release, or with latest Debian Stable.
But maybe if you though of some improvement to suggest, you suggestion could be useless, since in the mantime the project grew and maybe already resolved the problems you want to address with your suggestion.

If you want to stay on the razor\’s edge instead;-) you just choose some rolling release distro (someone Debian unstable?). They exist for a reason: to let the community know that there\’s something cool and new, and get as more feedback (bug reports, wishes, suggestions,…) is possible from the people.

Obviously most people just prefer a somehow less \”extreme\” way… so I think we are fine with our actual six month release cycle, so you can get something stable enough for your work, with still the possibility to participate.

But maybe we need to let some more people know that together with the new, bleeding edge release still exists that stable, fine, \”finished and polished\” release, for people that don\’t want to get risks and/or need an operating system that\’s as stable, usable and efficient as possible.