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Both KDE and Gnome have session management features. Note that the applications you are using have to support them though..

don't you understand anything about how slashdot works? i mean, they cover the usual geeky tech things, but there are are number of things that always get the spotlight.. they are:
1. linux kernels
2. debian news
3. kde news
4. mozilla news

on slashdot, if you disagree with any of the above 4 topics, the bot-moderators automatically flamebait your ass into oblivion...

Back in 94 I started using Linux because the HURD wasn't ready. The HURD still isn't ready. That's OK, things take time. But what's not OK is for RMS to write:

Huh?

Well, no, Richard, I'm sorry. This is like saying 'this is out bridge, because we built the handrails'. Linus did the hard bit, the bit you couldn't do; and he did it brilliantly well. In fact he did three entirely different hard bits, all of which you couldn't do. The first is, he wrote an operating system kernel which worked. Now you're entitled to say that a kernel is not in and of itself an operating system, and that's true. But it is the critical structural element without which a heap of assorted parts don't constitute an operating system. So that's Linus' first achievement: a technical achievement, and a big one.

The second hard bit that Linus did which the Free Software Foundation has clearly failed to do is to evolve a development methodology which allows - encourages - very many people to take part, and which manages to integrate and exploit the fruits of all their labours. That's Linus' second achievement: a social achievement, and a big one.

But Linus third achievement is the key one, and it is key to your project of making Free Software available to ordinary people all over the world. He has brought the system to critical mass, where it's robust enough and stable enough for many people to use it, and in consequence many people are motivated to port many programs to it. This is Linus' third achievement. It's a cultural achievement, and it is an absolutely critical one without which any Free Software movement is ultimately vacuous and solipsistic.

Yes, Richard, my system is a GNU/Linux system. But it is also and equally a KDE/Linux system and an Apache/Linux system. Your contribution - the Free Software Foundation's contribution - is critical; but so is that of the Apache crew and of the KDE crew and the Debian crew and many others. And although I agree that your contributions - especially on the issues of licenses and of the underlying social principles of what we are doing - are critically important, without Linus achievement your achievement would be a footnote on the eccentric fringe of history.

Disparaging Linus not only does you no credit. It actually undermines what you are setting out to achieve. It not only distracts from the important work you are doing on defending the information commons on which we all depend: it undermines your authority to speak on our behalf.

I know that you are a great hacker. I use Emacs every day, and appreciate it greatly; much of what I do depends on things compiled with GCC. But you must realise that your philosophical work is much more important - much more critical - than your software. You were prescient in seeing the assault on the information commons and in making a stand against it, and that will be the contribution for which you will be remembered.

I have no doubt that one day the HURD will be usable. I have no doubt that the HURD, when usable, will be an interesting opererating system kernel. But the critical issue is that you, and your team, could not deliver it when it was needed, and that Linus could. It does you no harm - it diminishes you in no way - to recognise and give honour to that achievement. And it is peurile and childish to pretend that the conrtibution of the Free Software Foundation is any more important to the operating system on my desktop, on my servers, than the contribution of the Apache Foundation and its contributors or of the KDE project and its contributors. It is mean spirited to pretend that without the critical, fundamental contribution of Linus Torvalds, there would be a usable free operating system for ordinary people around the world to use.

Life is not fair. It isn't fair that the Debian KDE/Apache/GNU/Linux operating system on my desk just gets called Linux, when it comprises 796 packages by literally thousands of different authors. After all, forty or so of those packages are GNU softare. Roughly one tenth, or to put it differently, 60% of the KDE project's contribution. But, I say again, the single, critical component that welds the work of the KDE project, and the Apache foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, and hundreds of other contributors contributions into a usable whole is Linus Torvald's contribution and it's only reasonable that he should get top billing.

Grow up. Give credit where it is due, and concentrate on the parts of your work which are really critical - not just to you but to all of us. Concentrate on articulating the principles which allow an information commons in software to exist, and defending that commons from all encroachments. That is your task to do, which you do uniquely well. The honour which Linus has earned does not diminish or detract from the honour which you have earned. It is your carping, your disparagement, your evident jealousy, which detracts and diminishes your honour. Grow up and stop it.

I have been trialing GCC 3.1 and the C++ compilation is a major improvement over past version of GCC. Being C based the GNOME 1.4 and GNOME 2 libraries and most applications compiles and runs without too much hassle. However KDE 3.0.1 is somewhat more problematic, even when neither debugging support nor strict syntax checking is enabled..

This is not the fault of either the KDE or GCC developers. KDE was coded to support the "older" C++ style of pre GCC 2.9x and Microsoft's compilers and the GCC Team is following the new C99 & ISO 14882 C++ standards.

After kludgeing around the defects in the older GCC C++ template and library implementations, GCC 3.1 C++ is real joy to use. It makes it possible to program C++ in a completely new styles, that IMO can be far more productive.

It is difficult layering one type of programing style over another, the older C++ style libraries certainly make Windows programing a pain.

Would it not be better to wait for the KDE team to port KDE to a pure GCC 3.1/ISO 14882 style?

At the very least the debugging support is required for GCC's Profile Driven Optimizations which can greatly improve application performance.

GNOME 2.0 is due for release soon enough, at the very least the GNOME libraries and core should also be included at a United Linux "main component".

If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME.

Christian: What is your background and what puts food on your table in real life?

Murray: I'm a freelance developer, though that's difficult in the current market. I do C++ development on Unix, on all kinds of projects, such as protocol implementations, compilers, interpreters, data converters, management systems, and GUIs to make sense of all these. I've lived in Munich, Germany, for the past 3 years, but I'm officially a Brit. I love Munich's healthy outdoors lifestyle and easy-going socialising. I try to put the Lederhosen out of my mind.

Over the past ten years I worked my way up through paper-shuffling, data-entry, typography/design, tech-support, database consultancy, and Windows development. I didn't learn programming at a college, and I still stubbornly believe that it made me a better developer. You have to really care about something to teach yourself in your spare time.

I didn't use any Unix-like systems until Linux was widely available. People forget that before Linux you had to go to University to use Unix. Some companies had big Unix boxes, and the staff who used them generally earned huge sums because they knew how to move files around. Naturally they didn't let anyone else near them.

I've grown to love the control that Unix gives you but I've done hardcore GUI development on MacOS and Windows, so I know there's more to life. Unlike lots of GNOME developers, I know that the Mac is a worthy influence but that Windows gives us nothing to chase.

Christian: How did you get involved in developing gtkmm and gnomemm?

Murray: I was originally just a user, more attracted to the up-to-date gtkmm than the awkward (and then non-free) QT. I did the carthorse work necessary to get gnomemm 1.2 usable and stable, and that's how I learned about the general issues involved.

Then I decided to make a big effort to get gtkmm2 going, when it didn't look like anyone else was going to do it. Karl had the beginnings of gtkmm2, but it didn't build and he was reluctant to show it to the world, fearing that people would expect a certain amount of work from him. He didn't have time to do much more on it, but I did persuade him to put it on the gnome cvs. I worked on it gradually, sending progress reports to the list in case anyone was interested, and so that other people could learn too. After about 4 months I understood what it was doing, and it was able to run simple example code. As soon as I reached that stage lots of people started helping out.

Christian: What are the main design ideas of gtkmm and gnomemm?

Murray: We aim to provide the interface that a skilled C++ coder would expect, based on his experience of the language and the standard C++ Library. We try to use the standard language features wherever possible, just as any sensible C++ coder should. There would be nothing unusual about this if it weren't for bizarre C++ libraries such as QT and MFC. Is sanity really a design decision?

It's not really a design decision, but we are particularly proud that C++ allows us to simplify the underlying C interfaces. For instance, GtkTreeView has a great deal of flexibility, but gtkmm doesn't expect you to worry about that functionality unless you actually want to use it.

Christian: Okay, as you told me you made an effort to get gtkmm going, what where your aims when starting out with it?

Murray: I had 2 aims for gtkmm2:

1) Refactor it until both the interface and the implementation were ridiculously clear. I did not want any lingering doubt about the code just because people couldn't understand it. I believe that even a dull-witted person, with enough time, and enough notepaper, can make sense of anything. If he's not dull-witted then he'll make it easier for the next person.

2) Get more developers involved. This becomes easier after 1) when people can understand the code enough to improve it, but it's also necessary to:

• Present a clear vision so people know what's happening. To this end, I make a point of pre-announcing all major changes, discussing them, and announcing my interpretation of the consensus before proceeding. Everybody now understands that that's how we work, and that's why we've been successful. We only have to point to the list archives to justify our decisions in detail.
• Nurture people to get them started. We do this on the mailing list and in the #c++ IRC channel on irc.gimp.net.
• Let people know that their contributions are valued.

I know from commercial software development that money alone doesn't motivate people. In both proprietary and open-source projects, a team can only succeed if its members feel valued and involved in something worthwhile. That requires constant attention, but it pays off eventually.

Christian: That sounds good, so what is the current status of the C++ bindings for GNOME 2?

Murray: We are approaching API stability for gtkmm2, I think. Our code generator warns us about any functions that we've forgotten to wrap, and we are keeping track of API coverage manually too. We are spending most of our time now perfecting and simplifying the complex TreeView and TextView interfaces, and I see the end in sight there too. Lots of people are using gtkmm2 now and the response is overwhelmingly positive.

gnomemm 2 is progressing more slowly, mostly because it's more difficult for people to install all the latest GNOME 2 libraries. While it's still in development. Gnomemm 2 is much more integrated than gnomemm 1.2 - you can even download and install it as one tarball to get wrappers for libgnomeui, libglade, and gconf, among others.

I recently shared the gtkmm maintainership with Daniel Elstner because he's been doing so much good work on fundamental stuff. With two committed maintainers, and several regular developers, the future should be secure.

Also, we just announced support for the Forte C++ compiler that Sun will use for GNOME 2 on Solaris. And we are on the threshold of supporting Windows. Both of these platforms should be of great interest to commercial in-house developers.

Christian: Do looking ahead, what are the future directions of gtkmm and gnomemm?

Murray: For the future, we need to work on more Rapid Application Development stuff. The idea should be to add convenience without adding complication or straying from existing standards.

I'm working on some libglade additions that should make it easier to link custom code with separately-designed user interfaces. libglademm's syntax is already simpler and more helpful than libglade.

When GNOME's Anjuta2 is released, and when I can easily install KDevelop for KDE3, we need to add helper features for gtkmm.

We need to add things such as:

• Application-creation wizards so people can get started quickly.
• An "Add a signal handler for this widget to this class" feature
• An "Add a member variable for this Glade widget to this container class" feature.
• A widget creation wizard.
• A Bonobo control creation wizard.

• Add a class, deriving from this widget class.
• Add a method to this class.
• Override this method in this class.

Christian: OrbitCpp is being integrated to ship as part of the core ORBit2 package. What will this mean for C++ developers working on GNOME apps?

Murray: The Bonobo bindings are progressing well, but until ORBit2's C++ support is merged in, just after GNOME 2, we must supply bonobomm separately. I'm particularly proud of the Bonobo bindings - the lack of API clarity in Bonobo has long irritated me and this is an opportunity to show that it's not really that difficult. I've explained the issues in more detail elsewhere. C++ is the natural language for CORBA, which is inherently object-orientated - CORBA in C was always a freakish idea so it's no wonder that it's difficult.

So this means more people can use Bonobo. And the API clarity should mean that the Bonobo interfaces receive more scrutiny, because people will understand them well enough to criticize them.

We're really lucky that Michael Meeks decided to support our efforts by merging the C++ mapping into ORBit2 itself. It gives it a mainstream future.

Christian: The release of GNOME 2 is approaching fast now, how does the GNOME 2 platform look from the view of someone producing language bindings for the GNOME platform? Will there be any significant design changes introduced into the bindings due to the changed in the GNOME 2 platform?

Murray: Language bindings should now be much easier. The GTK+ and GNOME authors are more aware of the needs of language bindings and the various bindings are cooperating more, particularly with the .defs interface-definition files. For instance, we use James Henstridge's .defs generation scripts for pygtk.

The transition to GNOME 2 has allowed us to make previously forbidden interface changes to the underlying libraries. We developed gtkmm2 while GTK+ 2 was being developed. With gtkmm 1.2, we just complained about problems in GTK+ 1.2, but this time we fixed the problems in GTK+ as we found them.

gtkmm2 (for GNOME 2) is significantly different than gtkmm 1.2 (for GNOME 1.x). Some of these changes are due to changes in GTK+, but most are just lessons that we learned from gtkmm 1.2. GNOME 2 rationalizes its interfaces a lot by deprecating its more crufty stuff, and we make our interfaces even clearer by omitting those deprecated parts completely.

Christian: What are you favourite applications that has been developed using the gtkmm and gnomemm bindings?

Murray: I use Gabber every day as an instant messenger client - I love how it Just Works. I'm trying to persuade Julian to start the gnomemm2 port, even if I have to code it myself.

Cactus's Guikachu is also pretty impressive - it has made me want to do some Palm development.

There's a bunch of specialist apps out there, though not so many have been ported to gtkmm2 yet. I think that a lot of our users are doing in-house stuff. C++ is much more popular than C for that kind of thing.

I have high hopes for my own Glom app. It's meant to be a very easy-to-use database application that embodies my years of database design experience. But I've been too busy working on gtkmm2/gnomemm2 to port it properly. In the meantime, I released a small file utility, PrefixSuffix, which is a pretty good gtkmm2 example.

Christian: What are your thoughts on the future of the C++ language? Will it continue to be one of the major computer languages or is it set to be replaced by languages such as Java and C#?

Murray: In my opinion, Java and C# are much closer to interpreted languages in their design. By this I mean that much more is decided at runtime than at compile-time. I'm bored by discussions of executable speed, but I do feel that compile-time checking verifies designs and speeds development. Java and C# offer object-orientated improvements over scripting languages such as Perl and Visual Basic, but I see no competitor to C++'s feature set. I expect it to maintain its current high level of popularity.

Christian: About two years ago there was a lot of noise around gtkmm and gnomemm, with Havoc Pennington having started the Inti project, and with the leaving of Guillaume Laurent from gtkmm development, after which Guillaume was quite vocal in why he felt that gtkmm wasn't what thought is should be, in fact he called it a 'throw-away prototype' for a GTK+ C++ wrapper. Two years is a lot of time in the software world so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the issues debated on back then, and how you see today's versions of gtkmm and gnomemm responding to any real issues raised back then.

Murray: I wasn't involved in those discussions, but I was annoyed at the schism. I like to think that I would have found an acceptable consensus. Most gtkmm users and developers strongly disagreed with Inti's design decisions so we carried on hoping that we would prevail. We did, and Inti didn't, and it's all history now. Inti died because it never involved a community of hackers, whereas I like to think that people preferred to work on gtkmm's design and felt more welcome in the gtkmm community.

RedHat's whole Inti framework never made much sense to people. Havoc is such a pragmatic developer that I still don't believe it was really his brainchild.

But Inti did create confusion among users, and even prompted one of the gtkmm maintainers to give up. My guess is that Guillaume never really got a handle on the gtkmm codebase and took the opportunity to jump clear of something that daunted him. When I was building gtkmm2 I sometimes felt the same but I chose instead to radically refactor it until it was manageable. I believe Guillaume felt certain anyway that, with RedHat's backing, Inti would succeed and gtkmm would fade away.

Guillaume uses QT now. He has stated that it was more important for him to have a full working toolkit than a perfect API. gtkmm2 will go stable soon - then we will have both in one toolkit.

Christian: What are the main differences of coding with gtkmm and gnomemm compared to coding with QT and KDE?

Murray: I addressed this in my GUADEC talk (1) and (2).

Basically, QT isn't developed publicly so it makes a number of mistakes without the benefit of any real criticism. Chief among these is its modification of the C++ language and the use of its own non-standard string class. It isn't necessary, as we've proved. These are just two ways that we've kept more up-to-date with the state-of-the-art in C++. It's then easier to use gtkmm in combination with other C++ APIs. I believe that you'll love gtkmm if you love C++, and that gtkmm is a better role-model if you're learning C++.

People sometimes complain about a lack of gtkmm documentation compared to QT, but that hasn't been true for a long time(*).

And perhaps most importantly, if you find a problem with gtkmm you can submit a patch or discuss it with the developers.

Christian: What is the advantage of using the bindings when creating GNOME and GTK+ applications in C++ compared to just accessing the C widgets?

Murray: Again, the GUADEC talk mentioned this (1) and (2).

gtkmm applications tends to be more organized than GTK+ programs. That's mostly because it's laughably easy for us to derive new widgets just to organise our code. In comparison, the structure of GTK+ code tends to be defined by the path that data happens to take through the code, rather than the layout of the source code itself.

Christian: What would you say to a developer who is trying to decide whether to write his application in C or whether to use gtkmm and gnomemm and C++?

Murray: I believe it's easier to develop software with C++, even if you're not very experienced, because the structure is there in the code, not just in your head. If you're as good as the GTK+/GNOME developers then maybe you can deal with the underlying C interfaces, but, in my experience, most coders want an easier life.

I'd recommend that people compare the C and C++ versions of the examples before deciding.

Christian: You made a presentation at GUADEC 3 this year. What is your impression of the GNOME community, is it becoming more language agnostic or is there still a strong favouring of C among the hackers you talked too?

Murray: I think people accept now that there will always be active language bindings for GNOME, and many of the core hackers now routinely use more than one programming language. There is still some general Unix-style dislike of C++, but interest has grown as people have seen that gtkmm is very much alive and useful.

Christian: For anyone wanting to learn how to create applications using gtkmm and gnomemm, where should they start looking? Are there any applications out there that you think a newbie would find a easy starting point to look at before starting creating their own applications?

Murray: Assuming that you're already a C++ coder, you should be able to get started easily by looking at the examples and the 'Programming with gtkmm' book. In fact, we have a particularly good documentation overview page with quick links into the manual and the reference documentation: http://www.gtkmm.org/gtkmm2/

We have converted all of the GTK+ examples and demos and added some of our own. I believe it's easier for a C++ coder to understand the gtkmm examples than it is for a C coder to understand the GTK+ examples.

I strongly suggest that you start with gtkmm2 rather than the stable gtkmm 1.2, because we have obliterated several confusing things.

People should also join the gtkmm-main mailing list and the #c++ channel on irc.gnome.org. We are a helpful bunch.

Christian: Okay, thanks for taking the time to talk with me Murray.

Murray: No problem, it was a pleasure.

• Germany
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  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
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source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
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  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
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source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
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  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
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• Austria
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• Sweden
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source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
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• Australia
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• Austria
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• Sweden
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source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
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• Australia
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• Austria
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• Sweden
  ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/mirrors/kde/ (http)

source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
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• Australia
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• Austria
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• Sweden
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source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
  ftp://download.uk.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  
• Australia
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• Austria
  ftp://download.at.kde.org/pub/kde/ (http)
  
• Sweden
  ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/mirrors/kde/ (http)

source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
  ftp://download.uk.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  
• Australia
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• Austria
  ftp://download.at.kde.org/pub/kde/ (http)
  
• Sweden
  ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/mirrors/kde/ (http)

source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
  ftp://download.uk.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  
• Australia
  ftp://download.au.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  
• Austria
  ftp://download.at.kde.org/pub/kde/ (http)
  
• Sweden
  ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/mirrors/kde/ (http)

source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

• Germany
  ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
• USA
  ftp://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/desktops/kde/ (http)
  ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde (http)
• United Kingdom
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• Australia
  ftp://download.au.kde.org/pub/kde (http)
  
• Austria
  ftp://download.at.kde.org/pub/kde/ (http)
  
• Sweden
  ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/mirrors/kde/ (http)

source: http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html

If you are looking for cheap, maintainable, stable software to replace your current Windows environment, then look into this :

Slackware Linux.
KDE.
OpenOffice (maybe StarOffice or Hancom Office or KOffice).
Mozilla (or maybe Netscape 6 or Opera).
The GIMP.
XMMS.
MPlayer.
GNUCash (or maybe Kapital).
Evolution.
NEdit.

Or if you need anything else, check out Freshmeat.

it has a shitty gui(most distros)

when was the last time you used Linux? Check out KDE 3 or GNOME they are sweeeet!

noone writes software that works for linux

It's not purely about how much, it's also about how good, and most Linux software is (imho) good. Before I'm going to write down a list of people that makes software for Linux, just check out sourceforge, download.com, tucows etc... you'll find a lot.

noone writes software that works for linux

Out of the box they mostly have far more beter support, and for most hardware you can get the drivers, only for those products-nobody-have-ever-heard-of-produced-on-ant artica-stuff you won't get drivers nowadays.

And please if you reply, don't write down experiences of distros like RedHat 4.x, use a new one.

http://www.riscos.org/

I followed that link to Rebranding RISC OS. Apparently, RISCOS Ltd is moving to a cogwheel for a logo. But isn't the cogwheel taken?

I don't know or care whether it's fixed or not in RH 7.3. The bug was discovered before the first 7.2 beta went out, and was open during all the 7.2 product life till now.

In fact, they chose to update KDE once, in this advisory, but they left the bug open. Furthermore, there was a new unofficial qt release here, in sync with the KDE 2.2.2 release, but the bug was not fixed.

So, please, make Red Hat accountable for this and stop trying to imply that the user is the only one to blame by saying that an upgrade is the only solution.

Disclaimer: I don't currently, nor have I ever, used WebDAV before.

Well, KDE 3 supports WebDAV. If you use Konqi to browse to your WebDAV folder, you can open the documents therein with any app - KDE copies it to a tempfile, then re-uploads it when the editor terminates. At least, that's how it works for the other protocols, e.g. FTP. KDE native programs upload the file on every save.

There's a WebDAV mode for [X]Emacs, and Emacs/w3 supports WebDAV.

Of course, if you go with DavFS, any Linux app can access WebDAV servers.

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

"As for KDE, forget it. As much as KDE lamers shout about it, KDE is a poor quality desktop environment."

Ok, I use and advocate GNOME, but this kind of flamage makes even me wince. Can't we just acknowledge that KDE and GNOME are both very good efforts with different positive qualities (KDE, for example, tends to be lighter weight in many areas).

In answer to the original poster, KDE accessibility info can be found on their Web site. The project was mostly inspired by the GNOME accessibility project. This is, IMHO, a good thing. KDE inspired GNOME, and now GNOME is inspiring KDE, and each is pushing the other to keep up with various features. This is why Open Source will eventually be the way to go for businesses, because the feature sets are based on user demand and healthy competition, not marketing.

• Places to start:
• The K12 Linux in Schools Project has some links and a client/server package of their own.
  
  
• Some of theKDE Edutainment software looks promising.
  
  
• Open Source Schools carries some in depth discussions of educational software. (Scroll Down and you'll currently see a review of Zope used as a gradebook.)
  
  
• The Simple End User Linux people have a large collection of nifty educational applications, and they are currently putting together an iso.
  
  
• Schoolforge keeps a small list of educational software. Follow the links there to find things like:
  
  
• Blue Linux, a distro that specializes in educational software.
  
  

I have been underwhelmed by Red Hat's packaging of KDE in the past. For example, in a boxed release (either 7.1 or 7.2), kdehelp's "back" and "forward" buttons didn't work.

This must be related to your setup. It doesn't happen here, and it doesn't happen to anyone else, at least not to anyone who cares about it enough to report it (as always, I can't fix problems I'm not aware of).

Even if a problem seems obvious to you (say, a crash on startup), go ahead and report it because chances are it happens only on your setup or your hardware. If it were really as obvious as it seems to you, it would have been fixed.

When KDE 2.2.2 RPMs were released, they helpfully included (and required) a version of Qt that froze the desktop

Also, for your setup only. Worked perfectly here.

The current KDE3 RPMs for RH 7.2 from Red Hat have their own glitches: ksplash goes kblooie at startup

This is a known problem. It only occurs on first startup though, which is why I didn't notice it before uploading the packages to kde.org.
It has been fixed since, and is fixed in 7.3, along with several other problems we've noticed.

and konqueror seems to have this big memory leak that bloats its footprint over time.

Not reproducable here. Report details here or here.

I wonder if anyone at Red Hat even tries to use KDE.

Yes. Plenty of us do. I haven't seen any other desktop running on any machine in our .de office for quite some time.

The only two desktops I ever use are KDE and text mode. Konqueror and lynx are my favorite browsers.

That's a p2/266 with a five gig drive. Had 64 megs RAM when I got it. $80 at crucial.com and it's at 288. (two 128meg sticks and 32 on the motherboard).

It's currently running Gentoo Linux. Every binary on my system except OpenOffice and Mozilla were compiled on my box with a lengthy set of gcc optimizations in CFLAGS. That's everything from zsh to KDE, XFree 4.2, etc.

Gentoo supplies a unified kernel patch, which includes all the fun goodies like preempt kernel and various latency patches.

I run KDE3. That means Konsole and Konqueror. KDE has no decent IRC app, so I have XChat compiled with no gnome support. Ditto for gnome. I read mail remotely in a terminal with mutt, but I've played with KMail, and even compiled all of gnome just to play with Evolution. (it's easy. I typed "emerge evolution" as root, and went to bed. When I woke up, the system had all of Gnome and evolution and all dependancies.)

I'm about to upgrade the CPU. p2/400 cpu's (MMC-2 form factor) have sold on ebay recently for as low as $26USD. I'll still have only a bit more than a hundred bucks in this thing.

I'm also pondering a hard drive upgrade. That will be the big expense. I'm weighing exactly how much space I need. 20gig for a bit above $100? or do I splurge on the 48gig drives and drop $350?. I'm also pondering either a USB or firewire drive. I've got a whole PCMCIA port doing nothing and firewire cards are cheap.

I use this machine daily. I surf the web, I listen to mp3's, I read my mail, I converse on IRC. I code, either in XEmacs remotely in a Konsole, or using Kate over kio_fish (Off tangent remark: kio_fish is fucking brilliant, if only I could use a few non KDE apps to access those remote drives).

Is it a speed demon? No. Is it flawless? No. Is it usable? Absolutely.

The system bogged down a bit using a more complex theme like mosfet's Liquid. I reverted to something more generic and it's downright zippy. Changing windows is fast, changing desktops is fast. The only time the system bogs down is if I'm compiling something, listening to mp3's and otherwise stressing the machine. But it never stops being usable.

Sure, it has it's faults. A bug in the thinkpad bios will make lm_sensors blow away certain EEPROM info on the system and turn it into an irreparable black doorstop. The little nubby mouse thing (Trackpoint?) has the annoying habit of masking the middle mouse button off a mouse connected to the PS2 port, forcing you to use Emulate3Buttons on external mice. And IBM never did learn how to make batteries worth a damn. Certain combinations of batteries and BIOS revisions can cause the "Smart" batteries to think they're empty, when they aren't. Some people report having a battery last only 3 months before total failure.

But those things aside, it's an incredibly usable machine. It does what I want.

I would not mind paying for it, but I want to compile a native FreeBSD binary -- they chose not to offer FreeBSD support...

And then, on the other hand, Microsoft bundling a free browser with the desktop is anti-competitive. KDE bunding a free browser with the desktop is 'cool'.

The problem wasn't with the bundling per-se. It was when an OEM bought Windows and tried to remove IE to install the (at-the-time) superior Netscape browser. Microsoft threatened the OEM until the OEM caved in.

The KDE package also bundles a browser but an OEM is permitted to remove konqueror and install another browser. In fact, the KDE people even tell you how to do this.

This is the fundamental difference. You can't ignore it. The judge certainly didn't, nor did the appeals court. Bundling is OK. Product tying is not. Microsoft did the latter. KDE does the former.

Everyone please note: This is not the real CmdrTaco, notice the (editor) in his name? Its a fake account. Nice try.

Your post linked in your signature is so retarded.

I am a linux desktop user, and are many many many of my friends. They serve our purpose perfectly. We can play heaps of games, run a very pretty desktop and use a good word-processor.

Linux on the desktop IS a viable solution, why would I go back to an inferior OS such as windows?

You claim that I should try Mac? Why would I bother spending 3 times more on an equally fast PC that I can't upgrade or customize? Why would I want to goto a platform that has a limited amount of software? Why would I want to goto an inferior platform?

You sir, are retarded.

This is for the rest of us

Can anyone say time for another major organization to take the leep and start using LiNUX + Open Source software as their default platform?

Last Year's"City of Largo"(from dot.kde.org), among many others are perfect examples of success in this transition. Yet another example of strong armed M$ tactics to retain their control of the average desktop computer. ANYONE AT THE DOJ READING THE NEWS LATELY??

Can anyone say time for another major organization to take the leep and start using LiNUX + Open Source software as their default platform?

Last Year's"City of Largo"(from dot.kde.org), among many others are perfect examples of success in this transition. Yet another example of strong armed M$ tactics to retain their control of the average desktop computer. ANYONE AT THE DOJ READING THE NEWS LATELY??

I know, I can't think of a single solitary application that's installed as a binary, easily.

Just do a compatible word processor? What a great idea! I can't believe that nobody though of that before.

Do you think that 100% compatibility will be hard to achieve?

Well, gotta go. I just had an idea . . . why don't I just invent an engine that runs on water and gives off cotton candy as exhaust?

By the way, KWord uses gzipped XML as its file format.

-Peter

KDE's KMail can bounce mail, too, manually or via filter.

KDE's KMail can bounce mail, too, manually or via filter.

--
Evan

Well, there are some open jobs within the KDE project. Another dull piece of work would be an installer/upgrader for KDE or a system configuration tool.

Although the largest problem here is to come up with something that works transparently on all those different platforms: several Linux distributions, *BSD, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Windows (well, there's a Cygwin port of KDE 2) and so on.

I am sure others can mention dull problems within other projects as well.

Konqueror - ... Doesn't support tabbed browsing.

In case anyone's curious, this is in the works for Konqueror in KDE 3.1, as mentioned in the KDE 3.1 Feature Plan.

There's a problem that can corrupt your mail when moving IMAP messages, see kmail homepage. The problem will be fixed in 3.0.1 (and it's already fixed in KDE_3_0_BRANCH if you're using CVS).

Complains about the install, then when you look at his problems, what do you find? Why he didn't RTFM. How do I know? Well, the guy tries to install the kdebase package first thing.

Then is surprised when he needs kdelibs to install that.
Then he's surprised that he needs arts to install that.
Then he's surprised when he needs qt3 to install that.

Some of the other dependencies he complains about all depend on who built your package and whether they enabled all the optional features. But his main gripe seems to have been tracking down dependencies he wouldn't have had problems with if he had simply RTFM.

(Side Note: While arts may be a dependency that's new with kde3, kdebase has needed kdelibs for as long as I've used it, and it's ALWAYS needed Qt. What's more, it's all right there on the webpage)

You would only add sites to the approval list if they didn't work without scripting, and you really needed to use them. Any Mozilla developers out there listening? Should I submit this to Bugzilla?

KDE's browser called Konqueror supports this feature...

Mosfet's Liquid with KDE3... hot hot hot!

http://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.0/

And as of now there is the new page with the official KDE 3.0 screenshots as well. :-)

In the meanwhile, check out KDE 3.0 Beta2 screenshots and screenshots of early 3.0 CVS.

No, there is little stuff which looks groundbreaking new GUI-wise.
Yes, KDE looks like Windows if you want it to.
No, I don't have PNG's for the old shots but they will be there for the new ones.
Yes, I use Tahoma [Xft] which is evil.

In the meanwhile, check out KDE 3.0 Beta2 screenshots and screenshots of early 3.0 CVS.

No, there is little stuff which looks groundbreaking new GUI-wise.
Yes, KDE looks like Windows if you want it to.
No, I don't have PNG's for the old shots but they will be there for the new ones.
Yes, I use Tahoma [Xft] which is evil.

KDE also has a site here but after a quick look I don't see a formal study done. Maybe somebody closer to the project can provide more info?

Taking a look at http://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.0/Red% 20Hat/i386/ just now, it doesn't appear that there's anything there yet, or even in the src directory. Is this really out or is this just slashdot jumping the gun because someone created a 3.0 directory structure under stable?

There are some freeBSD packages at freebsd.kde.org, but they are not yet right. There is at least one known problem. They will be re-generating the packages soon, but they would like experts (those who can work around the current known problems) to find any other problems that need to be fixed before a general release is done.

A general release will probably be on freebsd.kde.org long before anyplace else. I'd expect ports to be updated in a couple days though, so cvsup once in a while.

About screenshots:

KDE 3 is very tunable, but most of the user interface hasn't changed significantly from KDE 2.2.2 (most of the work has been in polishing the internals, to correspond to the move to Qt 3) - apart from a couple of things, like the new file selection dialogue. Your best bet to see what KDE 3 can do is to go to the KDE theme website, KDE-Look.org.

About the feature list:

Here is the internal KDE 3 feature plan. There's also a link there to the features planned to be in KDE 3.1.