[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“The recent history of the Amarok music player is like
a scaled-down version of KDE’s recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok
2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually
quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who
preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok
1.4.“The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar
claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are
described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better
feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?“An examination of basic features suggests that reality — as
usual — is more complex than the claims. For one thing, Clementine
is only at version 0.4 — hardly, really, out of alpha release. Its
feature set is incomplete, so it is handicapped in a comparison
from the start.“For another, despite Clementine’s unfinished state, both music
players fulfill their functions extremely well. In fact, although
each has details that the other lacks, their feature sets have yet
to diverge in many areas. What a feature by feature comparison
shows is not radical differences so much as differences in
emphasis, and in what users are assumed to want.”