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Well, you can write plugins for Konqi, be they DCOP based service menus ala konqil.icio.us, or direct C++ extensions ala Digg.com plugin for Konqueror.

"My only real complaint is that the adblock feature needs a lot of work to catch up with the Firefox extension." You will probably like this http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=3 8915

My aunt and uncle just immigrated from Iran. He's a surgeon (this means he's quite intelligent), and she is a well-to-do housewife (with a highschool education).

Both are fairly intelligent.

Neither one speaks English (yet; they're learning.) Until recently, neither one knew how a mouse worked, or even what it was!

Both have started their computing careers with SuSE. Both currently read the BBC in Persian, both listen to internet radio, watch Iranian TV online, and both use KTouch in order to learn how to touch type. Both use KDE Translator for contextual translation and speech. My uncle browses the web, uses Google, checks his Gmail; the whole nine yards. My aunt is a little behind, but she only started last week (my Uncle started a month ago).

I don't know who you're average user is, but I guarantee you they have a great deal more aptitude than my aunt & uncle. I think you're overestimating the difficulty of Linux GUIs, and your underestimating "the average user". I do know that I've changed over my office's desktops to Linux, and everyone is (more or less) happy with it.

Furthermore, while I have living, breathing proof of the usability of desktop Linux, I'm 100% sure that my Aunt & Uncle would be totally unable to respond to a Windows spyware catastrophe; and worse, they're exactly the type of noob to fall for the "Click on this link to FIX your computer" type of ad. Do we have that kind of problem with Linux? Nope. They're happily getting on "all of the internets", without my help, and with no more instruction than it would have taken to get them started on Windows.

Hell, my Uncle (this is a man who has _never_ used a computer) takes his Linux Laptop to the library, and browses the internet wirelessly, using NetworkManager. People should really stop denying that Desktop Linux is here; it is, I know; because myself and my immediate family/friends/coworkers all use it.

Nobody is moving to Linux because the games aren't there

the thousands of cheesy little Windows applications people love aren't there

it's different (read: scary), and it's a pain in the ass for most joe schmoes to install

The user doesn't care about the neat things they can get from /proc /dev and the likes. Hide these.

Already hidden.

Coming from Windows all of my libraries are in windows\system32 or in the directory of the actual application. Linux could put them in /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /usr/share/lib/, etc, and my application is almost certainly not going to have its own directory.

That's the reason, why we have a package management.

Permissions... In windows, if I want to give someone permissions, all I have to do is right click, go to the Permissions tab and add a user, tweak their access. In Linux, it suffers from the Owner/Group paradigm. I shouldn't have to change the user account (add a group to it) to access files.

Already there. It is integrated in KDE 3.5 and also available as a KDE add-on.

I have not tried it myself, but here is something that might work for you in the meantime.

It's like the Quake console, you invoke it with a shortcut (by default it's F12 but you can change it) and it slides from the top of the screen. You can make it transparent too. And it has tabs.

Yakuake is even better. Konsole in a Quake-like terminal that pops open when you hit F12. I always used one of my desktop for Konsole-only and was constantly switching between the different desktops. Yakuake is much better =)

The thing Gnome should learn from KDE is more flexibility. When using Gnome I constantly run into walls when I try to do something in a way Gnome doesn't want me to do it because someone decided doing it his way was "better". Gnome feels like Windows in this regard and I don't think that's a good thing.

The thing KDE should learn from Gnome is better discoverability. Having many features and lots flexibility is overwhelming for many users when you offer them five almost identically named options at once. The configuration of the kicker clock applet is imho the worst case scenario, some parts of kcontrol are almost as bad. In xine there's a dropdown where you can choose how many options you want from "Beginner" to "Master of the Known Universe". I think KDE desperatly needs something similar.

That said, I'm starting to get concerned about closed source applications such as Diamond Crush showing up on apps.kde.org. Some of these are much more appealing to geeks. Also, I have wondered what sort of peer review is done on packages at repositories such as www.slacky.it or www.linuxpackages.net. It's nice to be able to download precompiled binaries of open source products that don't come with your distro, but....when I download something from slackware.com or vectorlinux.com, I don't have the same sense of worry about unpleasant easter eggs.

Cheers.

They make a frontend to ClamAV already. The also make a few other ones as well.

Enjoy!

They make a frontend to ClamAV already. The also make a few other ones as well.

Enjoy!

SMART Package (meta)-manager is kind of nice.

Add in YaST repositories, APT, YUM, RedCarpet, or just dumps of RPMs, DEBs, whatever. Add in all the mirrors you can think of (it automatically prioritizes them by download speed). I find it convenient to also have a local "RPM" directory, where I drop random packages that I want to install. This is my local "repository".

It's slick, it handles conditional dependancies nicely, and it doesn't choke on "broken" systems the way apt does (sometimes you WANT to leave your system partially broken, the SuSE pygtk2 nonsense comes to mind). It's not _yet_ production quality, but its pretty damn good. I expect a lot out of version 1.0.

Oh, and if you want to install from source .... get checkinstall, and possible Kommander (latter is buggy). Checkinstall does ./configure, make, and make install for you, but does it in a chroot, and then builds an RPM. You can then manage this RPM like any other.

Pretty slick, huh? Kommander is a GUI front end, which relies upon checkinstall.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=13134
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

The other nice thing about smart: with basic options, its just like synaptic or kynaptic, but "slicker".

I digg it :)

B.

N.B. I am also not blind but have setup a box for a blind girl in our neck of the woods. Nothing stranger than a system WITHOUT a monitor.

B.

...blinded with rage and flinging FUD around like mad dancing monkeys.

Heh, funny that you mentioned monkeys flinging FUD. It is the Ximian primates (yes, they call themselves that) who are spreading FUD against KDE and paying Google to display GNOME sites when people are searching for KDE applications.

Nevermind the fact that other desktops are using gstreamer, it's GNOME's (got it?) multimedia backend.

Care to name which? KDE is building a backend-independent multimedia framework called Phonon which will be ready by the release of KDE4. This framework will allow KDE-based multimedia apps:

Kaffeine
AmaroK
KMPlayer

to work well with backends such as Xine, which are GPLed and which have copyleft protection against DRM. GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with DRM-crippled GStreamer.

...blinded with rage and flinging FUD around like mad dancing monkeys.

Heh, funny that you mentioned monkeys flinging FUD. It is the Ximian primates (yes, they call themselves that) who are spreading FUD against KDE and paying Google to display GNOME sites when people are searching for KDE applications.

Nevermind the fact that other desktops are using gstreamer, it's GNOME's (got it?) multimedia backend.

Care to name which? KDE is building a backend-independent multimedia framework called Phonon which will be ready by the release of KDE4. This framework will allow KDE-based multimedia apps:

Kaffeine
AmaroK
KMPlayer

to work well with backends such as Xine, which are GPLed and which have copyleft protection against DRM. GNOME, on the other hand, is stuck with DRM-crippled GStreamer.

Ever since a company called Fluendo joined the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board, GNOME is obligated to use GStreamer (a software product sponsored by Fluendo) as its audio and video backend. This wouldn't be bad, if it weren't for the fact that GStreamer uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to handcuff users and leave them at the mercy of the entertainment cartel. In order to do this, GStreamer is denying its developers the right to license their constribution under the GPL, so that Fluendo can sell closed-source, proprietary DRM plugins that let the MPAA and RIAA control the users' viewing habits.

GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from mature mutimedia projects such as Xine, MPlayer, and VideoLAN, all of which were started before GStreamer and all of which have strong copyleft protection by being licensed under the GPL. In other words, GStreamer further fragmented the Linux multimedia developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.

Ximian, a company instrumental in founding GNOME, sold out to big business in 2002 by switching Mono's license from the GPL to the weaker MIT X11 license. Instead of helping out the myriad of established multimedia apps such as Kaffeine, AmaroK, and KMPlayer, Ximian started a whole new app called Banshee, whose only claim to fame is that its license (MIT X11) allows linking to proprietary DRM plugins.

These are just some example of an increasing problem GNOME is experiencing: it is pandering (and in some cases outright selling out) to companies that don't necessarily have the users' best interest in mind. One can say that the whole reason GNOME was started was to allow proprietary software (including draconian DRM) to use the hard work of open source developers.

KDE, on the other hand, is licensed solely under the GPL because the toolkit it is based on (Qt) is also GPL. KDE is also committed to preventing DRM from infesting their user's computers: for KDE4, they are building a multimedia framework called Phonon that does not depend on GStreamer, but which can use any number of backends, including DRM-free ones.

Or simply move to Gambas

better screenshot: http://kde-apps.org/content/pre1/15621-1.jpg

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Good news all round, it would seem. :)

Indeed, here are some must-have KDE apps that are certainly going to help SuSE's popularity as a desktop operating system :
AmaroK music player -- Intuitive, powerful, good-looking music player. Supports transfers to/from iPods and many audio formats.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

BKSys environment for a complete replacement of the autotool chain (libtool

The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con

Some more must-have KDE/QT desktop applications:

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Cervisia -- User-friendly GUI frontend for CVS.

Some more must-have KDE/QT desktop applications:

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Cervisia -- User-friendly GUI frontend for CVS.

Yes $7/share is pretty tempting, but Novel's stock will only go up if they start being profitable. Novel had it coming to them when they bought Ximian, a gnome vendor that made a hodge podge of different products that are now dead (remember RedCarpet?). Novel should stick to SUSE/KDE and re-orient all its developers towards improving _only one_ application for each particular need (ie. YAST for installation/maintenance, KDE for desktop, etc).

Novel's premier Linux distribution, SUSE, is historically based on KDE yet the individual projects that they're supporting (Beagle, Evolution) are gnome apps. I think in the long run KDE will become the de-facto standard primarily because of the tight integration among its applications and excitement in its developer and user base about KDE 4. If you don't believe me, take a look at how many more posts there are in KDE-Look than in Gnome-Look. In fact, there is KDE-Apps for independent apps built with the KDE/QT framework, while there is no such place to aggregate gnome apps.

In conclusion, Novel should get their gnome developers to work on KDE so that they have a tightly integrated system with no duplicated functionality.

Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat.
I think these people must have missed Kopete.
Using a nifty script you can download the official icons from the MSN server and use them without a problem. It has had file transfer support for ages now, and has acquired webcam support quite recently.

Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser.
Mplayer-plugin is a Mozilla/Firefox plugin that lets you display Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis, and Real format movie clips in your web browser. Works perfectly for me.

Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support.
Moving from NTFS to ext3 or Reiser shouldn't require NTFS write support, should it? With that said, Captive has been providing this for a while.. never used it myself, but I hear good things about it.

Happy?

firstly Klik does pretty much what your asking.... http://klik.atekon.de/?from=profile Its quite hackish at the moment - But is under heavy development and works well - for me at least. Its probably a little easier than the Mac approach even. You click once answer one question in one dialog box - the program is downloaded to your desktop as a compressed filesystem image and run. A menu item is put in your menu.

Secondly the database approach is actually quite a good one. On my debian based desktop I relie quite heavily on third party apt repositories. These can be added very easily once you know how. It has the added advantage of letting you know when new versions of that software are available and gives you a universal interface for uninstalling the software. What I think is missing (on the systems I have tried at least) is an easy to use front end. I use Synaptic and while it is good for somebody who knows what they are doing its not something I would throw in front of a new user. I Think such an interface should look something like http://www.kde-apps.org/ and allow for easy adding of third party repositiories.

oh yeah, and I have to share this with the world:

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=2 9132

nokuake - awesome awesome awesome way to get to the Konsole, and it's a kde hack...not like the original kuake, if you ever tried kuake, and thought - gee that's be nice if it wasn't so buggy...check it out :)

kiolucene doesn't search the content of files, so comparing it to beagle is a very stupid attempt a trolling at best.

However, there also is kio_beagle, wich let's you use beagle from within konqueror.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=2 8437

And while we are at it, there is of course kat, which is roughly the kde equivalent to beagle right now. Kat will see a major redisign in the next version according to the developers and will work together with kiolucene.

Hey, checkout KDE apps.org if you want a good example of why rating systems for software don't work. Some of the highest rated apps are ok, but it starts to get random below the top 10-20.

e.g. Kommander is quite good, but it's an absolute bastard to do anything dynamic with (like a scanning com ports for modems and listing only ports where modems have been found) yet it gets into the top 10.

Gambas isn't bad either, but it's got some really odd quirks like all of the objects data isn't available in it's constructor or destructor, and the inheritance and even models are a bit weird.

Besides being a dupe, this story is a dupe of a what is essentially a lie.

This isn't the "world's first open source beer." That claim is so ridiculous it's amazing that this story got submitted twice. I myself have had "open source" beer recipes publicly available since 1995! And since 1999 under an FSF and OSI approved license! Take any of my recipes and copy, distribute, modify, commercialize, fold, spindle and mutilate my recipes. You have my permission.

Hell, if anyone has a claim to be first in this regard, it might be me! That's because to the best of my knowledge (I could be wrong) I came out with the first Open Source homebrewing software.It predates Vores Øl, and came with several recipes under the Free and Open Source BSD license. My CVS logs will attest that I was earlier than they.

Besides, recipes are quite unlike software. Hardly anyone copyrights a recipe, unless you're writing a cook book. You don't have to be exact with recipes, and the beer (cake, bread, chili, fruit salad) will still turn out fine. And they're trivial to reverse engineer. "Cloning" beers is done all the time, to the point that there's even a popular homebrewing book out there with recipes to duplicate your favorite commercial beer. Claiming to be the first open source beer is as silly as claiming to be the first open source peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Their claim that they were first is not only a lie, it's stupid.

Maybe you should give kompose a try

Find it at kde-apps

Out of all the Linux desktop distributions, I've found k/ubuntu to be the one distribution which seems to really "get it" when it comes to the desktop. Even people who have had issues in the past with systems like Linux-Mandrake and Fedora Core seem to like it. Even some hardcore Windows users that I know are seriously considering using it (partially due to software packages like Mozilla Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, GAIM, etc).

You *can* use the command line to do things with k/ubuntu. The nice part is that if you're an ex-Windows user, you don't have to ... there are nice guis for just about every important part of system administration, unless something goes extremely south. But then again, if it did, you'd be doing regedits on your Windows box, which are arguably more cryptic in many cases than the Linux command line could *ever* be ...

I don't use RHEL or Gnome, so I can't comment on that.

Now firstly with XMMS, that is a linux clone of Winamp with some new features. They say on their website "It was modeled after winamp from the Windows operating system." And now you're going "it looks a lot like Winamp"? If that bothers you use Amarok which looks nothing like Winamp.

Secondly KDE only looks like Windows if you want it to. Whether Linspire or Mandrake design their UIs to look like Windows is their problem, but most actual users of KDE don't have their systems looking that way, definitely not me. With a few simple downloads (which will probably be available in your distribution - it is in Debian at least) you can have it looking like Mac OSX. Now are you saying that KDE looks exactly like Mac OSX?

The main difference between KDE and Windows is that you can pretty much infinitely customise how KDE looks (can't say the same about Windows). My desktop, FYI, looks nothing like Windows.

I don't use RHEL or Gnome, so I can't comment on that.

Now firstly with XMMS, that is a linux clone of Winamp with some new features. They say on their website "It was modeled after winamp from the Windows operating system." And now you're going "it looks a lot like Winamp"? If that bothers you use Amarok which looks nothing like Winamp.

Secondly KDE only looks like Windows if you want it to. Whether Linspire or Mandrake design their UIs to look like Windows is their problem, but most actual users of KDE don't have their systems looking that way, definitely not me. With a few simple downloads (which will probably be available in your distribution - it is in Debian at least) you can have it looking like Mac OSX. Now are you saying that KDE looks exactly like Mac OSX?

The main difference between KDE and Windows is that you can pretty much infinitely customise how KDE looks (can't say the same about Windows). My desktop, FYI, looks nothing like Windows.

'It's only good if you never use them.'
Please elaborate, have you any experamental data to back up you findings, or are you using the 'feed a man patatoes' argument?

BTW, I prefer the hidden (or even funkier reording menus) but if you like 'But a better way to do this would be to emphasize the often-used features', please add some comments to my kde-app proposal that starts to facilitate what you are asking for

The entries aren't removed there only 'hidden' and as soon as you use them they will become visiable next time.

What's the time and thought process difference between mixing all the menu entries up so they wrap three time round the screen, or only displaying the three entries you ever used, with the option of displaying every entry available.

Well, my bookmarks looks like the first option (I have a few thousand) and I wish it'd look like the second.

Never brewed beer? Want to brew beer? No problem! Pardon my self promotion while I introduce you to QBrew, the world's premier Open Source homebrewing software. Available for Unix, Linux, Windows and Macintosh, QBrew not only helps you figure out a recipes, it comes with a brewing primer. So stop dreaming about it and start brewing!

Okay, end of advertisement. Gee I feel all cheap and dirty whoring myself like that...

Seriously, brewing is easy to do. It was probably the first "technology". With modern malt extracts, all you need is a pot to boil in and a container to ferment in. Oh, and bottles or a keg to store in. But I'm sure true geeks will want to mash from scratch. Some even make their own malt and grow their own hops.

Never brewed beer? Want to brew beer? No problem! Pardon my self promotion while I introduce you to QBrew, the world's premier Open Source homebrewing software. Available for Unix, Linux, Windows and Macintosh, QBrew not only helps you figure out a recipes, it comes with a brewing primer. So stop dreaming about it and start brewing!

Okay, end of advertisement. Gee I feel all cheap and dirty whoring myself like that...

Seriously, brewing is easy to do. It was probably the first "technology". With modern malt extracts, all you need is a pot to boil in and a container to ferment in. Oh, and bottles or a keg to store in. But I'm sure true geeks will want to mash from scratch. Some even make their own malt and grow their own hops.

firstly, I'm not sure I'd call the interface horrible. In my opinion KDE is the one with the fantastic interface, and Windows with the crap interface. Kicker is like a super-windows-start-bar and konqueror is easier to use and more powerful than Windows Explorer. It is also fully themable, whereas unless you buy Windows Blinds Windows XP is not (don't talk to me about the default theming packages, they suck to say the least). Especially mentioning some extensions, like the konqueror Quick Filter are brilliant to say the least and bring it miles ahead of Windows Explorer.

And standardisation? Free Desktop is doing that. Most important things are standardised already, and by the time KDE 4 is released I don't see that being a problem.

Yeah cool but please don't call till the Agamemnon is launched.

Goofing around aside. This is cool. Dangerous but cool. Let's face it. This will be the mode of propulsion that will take spacecraft around our solar system for many years to come.

"Many portable music players can do more than just play music. Some players have a built-in voice recorder, FM recorder, or stopwatch. And some come with extra accessories like high-quality headphones, a belt clip, or an armband. Because most of these features are included at no additional cost, make sure the device you choose is filled with these fun extras."

That's free as in sky giving me a 'free' satellite dish so long as I pay then £100 for the next ten years.

They don't even make many watches with stop-watch timers and calculators built in any more, so why would anyone want an mp3 player with one.

"3. You'll want a display.

When you have hundreds of songs on your player, you really need an easy way to select your music by artist, album, or genre. This is critical if you want to find that one song or artist you really want to hear. A display also comes in handy when you're looking for your favorite radio station."

I'm sorry, but do they make MP3 players that play songs you don't want to hear?

"Having an FM radio lets you put your player on autopilot as you mountain bike, cycle, or rollerblade. "

So does random and statistics based playlists. What's more, it will only play the songs you want to hear, and without advertising or payola.

"6. Don't get locked into one online store."
Well there's an easy answer to that one...

Yes it is. I'm not sure to what degree though.

KWrite is the intuitive answer...

KLibido

I use it almost exclusively now for my music-playing needs. It has an iTunes-like interface for music management, it can use MusicBrainz to generate info for your songs, it organizes them based on whatever criteria (author, album, track number, etc.) you like, and it's got dcop interfaces for everything, which means you can script anything you like. I like it more than any of the other players I've tried.

I use it with (shameless plug) Media-Detect and LinEAK to control it with my multimedia keyboard.

I use eSVN in KDE. Works okay for most of my SVN needs, but Cervisia wins, hands down. Probably the main reason I'm sticking with CVS for projects I have control over.

I manage the Tsukihime translation project, and there has been countless times it's saved our asses when someone edited something out of context and made no sense whatsoever. A quick look at a couple of revisons back allowed me to fix it in a few seconds, instead of wasting time contacting the original translator.

Theirs work to get better support for blind users in KDE/QT.

At the moments it's only intergration with things like festival and not full blown screen readers.

I've also offered to sort out the kde-apps and kde-look web sites (at least get them upto bobby standards) but no reply as yet.

here and here

here and here

Kommander has some really nice points too...

Evolution might be a nice example but that's the only example (maybe Gnumeric too). We are talking about real live applications for companies, industry and science and there is the biggest gap within GNOME. Only KDE is filling here.

KTurtle for Logo stuff.
Quanta Plus for Web development.
QTIPlot for plotting stuff.
Chemical equitation for Chemical courses at school and university.
NeuroScope for neurogic things e.g. in hospitals etc.
Klustersfor neurological stuff also for hospitals etc.
KMobileToolsfor cellphones.
Quantum GIS for Geographical stuff.
Umbrello for UML, Klass diagramms etc.

and many more applications like KDevelop, KOffice and so on. There are countless of usable and needed tools for KDE if you look on kde-apps.org a lot of the stuff available on KDE (with impressing quality) is absolutely missing on GNOME. So why should I use a Desktop Environment that lacks true usable applications while I can find everything on KDE ? GNOME is nice but needs years to solve all it's architectual issues and then offer programs with rapid development and maintainance.