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looks like mark shuttleworth had a good gut feeling about including kubuntu into his realm. now that novell shuts down their complete line of desktop and workstation products [ http://linuxtoday.com/it_management/2005110401826O PSSNV ] he's the new kid on the block. he even announced at the ubuntu conference that he switched his personal desktop to kubuntu [ http://www.kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-commitmen t.php ] already.

instead of novell's silly shareholders (who drive management to mimic redhat in order to) succeed catch up with the first player on the linux server market, they are now challeneged by a newcomer with a complete offering in his portfolio: rock solid server foundation (debian), and two fully supported desktop environments (ubuntu for gnome, kubuntu for kde).

sweet alternative!

i'll certainly consider this platform now. we have 5 SUSE sles servers running our business, and we have about 120 suse 9.2 kde desktop workstation systems. we are currently evaluating nomachine nx and freenx to switch the workstations to thin clients accessing a loadbalanced dual-node desktop application server. gnome sucked here completely -- kde with its kiosk lockdown mode shines.

i'm sure I can realize this with debian and/or kubuntu too.

novell goes down the same road they went down with dr-dos, word-perfect and netware. what their management touches turns to shit.

farewell! this time forever.

I just switched to SuSE because I prefer KDE. GNOME strikes me as cobbled together and amateurish. Oh well, there is http://kubuntu.org/

Kubuntu, which is a KDE version fo the wonderful Ubuntu distribution, which incidentaly standardised on GNOME also. If you wait long enough, I expect you will see a supported version of Novell's distribution, but with KDE as the desktop.

I agree that SuSE's KDE stuff was pretty sleek.
If I were you I'd have have a look at Kubuntu or Mandriva - both were pretty KDE-centric last time I checked them out.

http://www.kubuntu.org/ is one option.

Go for Kubuntu:

http://www.kubuntu.org/

The joke works much better in German...

You do know that you can get Ubuntu with KDE, called Kubuntu, right?

http://www.kubuntu.org/download.php

--
Evan

Kubuntu sounds like what you need. Or regular Ubuntu, depends on which look you prefer.

Since you mention kde-redhat I assume that you are a KDE fan (like myself). In that case you should try Kubuntu which is basically Ubuntu with KDE in place of Gnome. You COULD install Ubuntu and then apt-get the KDE metapackage, but then you would have both environments and you may not want that.

http://ubuntulinux.org/
http://kubuntu.org/

Its pretty cool. Hasn't crashed yet. If you are running Kubuntu, you can go to this site: http://kubuntu.org/kde-35beta1.php and get the hookup.

Kubuntu uses the solid base of Ubuntu plus the latest KDE. We are part of the Ubuntu community and use their infrastructure and support. Our mission is to be the best KDE distribution available.

Kubuntu?

Have you tried the program synaptic? The GUI package manager? It should be in your KDE menu. If not just run "sudo synaptic". For that matter, did you even read the documentation telling you in clear and simple steps exactly what to do?

When you were looking for how to make your laptop sleep or how to make the wifi card work, did you try actually looking on the Kubuntu website? I see an impressive list of laptop brands there telling you how to do different things including sleep and get wifi working.

I know, the distro web site and the distro manual. The last place I'd have thought to look as well.

Packages are available for Kubuntu as is a Live CD with KOffice 1.4 (and KDE 3.4.1).

Kubuntu Hoary KOffice CD and packages.

That's a difference between Gnome and KDE, not between the distros. There's a lot more to a distro than desktop environment... both KDE and Gnome can be run on either.

In fact, there is a customized version of Ubuntu that uses KDE by default called Kubuntu.

Ubuntu, like debian, has spectacular package management support through dpkg and apt. Slackware simply lacks that functionality, using tgz files to unpack onto the filesystem... no dependency resolution, package searching, downloading from (one or more) repositories, or any of the features I've come to depend on to make installing and updating software less of a chore.

I'd recommend Kubuntu (http://kubuntu.org/). It offers you the very user friendly power of KDE, combined with the awe inspiring packaging of Debian and the quick release cycles of Ubuntu. The system will be very usable right away, but not as restrictive and Mandrive and Lycoris releases. You'll be able to hit the shell if you choose to do so, but you're not forced into using it by any means.

If you want to get KDE with Ubuntu http://www.kubuntu.org is the place to go. If you want just a basic minimal install just "apt-get install kde-core" as root (yes it's more than just the base libs, but not that much).

Although it's not yet listed, I'll be talking about Kubuntu and KDE.

Switch the desktop to KDE please.

Things you might consider:

Kubuntu Live CD (Info at Kubuntu.org)
Games Knoppix (Although the 0.2 release is accidentally missing a file manager. Also, the 0.2 version is not a "upgrade" of 0.1 - it has a different list of games, though they do overlap.)
Linux Live Game Project

All three of these are based on KDE, and so should be relatively familiar-looking for a Windows user. If you are comfortable enough with "Mac-like" theme, you can also try:

Ubuntu Live CD (Info at Ubuntulinux.org)

All of these are live CDs, which means that you can boot into them and try them out to your heart's content, without harming your existing windows installations. Those 5 CDs (Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Games-Knoppix 0.1 and 0.2 and LLGP) are what I give out to people to try out linux... Because there are games, they don't feel like it's so scary...

In order to get used to the command line (if that is one of your goals) the following may be useful:

The Command Line - The Best Newbie Interface? (an alternative perspective on the "scary" command line)
and
The CLI Series at Linux.com (Start at the last one on the last page "alias cat and pipe meet grep" and work your way up at your leisure.)

You may want to read and/or contibute to GrokDoc:
GrokDoc

KDE 3.4 isn't being uploaded to unstable (sid) as it would complicate preparations for the upcoming (yes, still) Sarge release. However, (experirmental) KDE 3.4 packages are available by adding the following repository to your sources.list

deb http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.0/ ./

These debs are built by the usual Debian KDE packaging team, and have (for me) worked out fine. See also the Debian KDE maintainers' page on installing KDE 3.4

That said, those who want to try out a Live CD with KDE 3.4 might want to take a look at the recent Kubuntu 5.04 (hoary) release.

You sound like you might be interested in Kubuntu - it's Ubuntu, but using KDE instead of Gnome. Damn silly idea if you ask me, but it takes all sorts ;)

Download the torrent

New stuff include

• Gnome 2.10.1, which makes the desktop a lot faster than before
• X.org
• Simplified update- and package management
• Much faster boot process
• Better laptop support (ie suspending, hibernating, processor frequency scaling)
• Kickstart support for automated largescale installations
• Live CD and Install CD both use the new debian installer infrastructure
• UTF-8 by default
• A program for collecting information about what hardware works and what doesn't
• Kubuntu - complete KDE 3.4 based version of Ubuntu

Stuff people are going to bitch about

• No graphical installer. The current installer is extremely simple and has been streamlined even further in this release. A graphical installer is planned for the next version (Breezy Badger).
• No menu editor installed. One can always edit the files by hand, or install kmenu or something similar for gnome. The official gnome menu editor just didn't finish in time.
• No DivX or MP3 support. These are simple to add though and anyone coming from debian will probably already know of the Marillat repositories. Just look at the instructions in the wiki or use Hoary After-Install helper or another script to do the dirty work for you.

OSDir has published a lot of screenshots of Ubuntu.

Oh and if you are interested to know if your laptop or other piece of hardware is supported, some info can be found in the wiki on the Hardware support-page

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