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KDE 2.2.1 Up
Igloo Boy writes: "The most excellent KDE developers have made KDE 2.2.1 available for download. Please check the mirrors before you flood ftp.kde.org. I will now crawl back into my igloo and warm up next to my Athlon. It gets really hot from all this compiling." Or you could just call out those 3 little letters that make ya feel so good ... a-p-t. I'm installing now. Hope you guys fixed all the bugs I reported!
I've been a Gnome + Enlightenment man ever since the 0.14 days of E and the initial betas of Gnome. *Hated* the whole KDE 1.x line, from the looks to the "usability" to the looks.... ;-) Anyways, I followed the party line, accepted that KDE was evil because of the whole QT thing, couldn't stand the looks (did I mention that?) and even when they started shipping themes, they were all butt ugly. Well, the 2.0 release rolled around, I heard good things, wasn't interested. 2.1 came, wackos were raving about konqueror on /., I was running sid so I said "what the heck" and installed it.
:-) Dunno if it's just habit, or if it's a failing in gui fm's, but if I want to move a file, I alt-tab to konsole, then "cp ~/fi[tab] /tm[tab]ba[tab]foo.gz" and I'm done. I truly can't imagine /any/ gui that could improve on that. But as a web browser, it is more stable than IE (not that IE is stable, but it still locks up on me occasionaly, whereas with the stable releases of KDE, a crash is noteworth), pretty standards compliant, and if it supported https through an authenticating proxy, I would be 97% of the way to removing all other browsers from my machine.
Instant love.
Kmail is the client that I've always wanted for linux, and could never find. It is the *only* client that has managed to pull me away from my beloved mutt. Nice. Clean. Simple. Stable. Luckily, I don't need imap support (though it has been in the last couple versions, it's pretty beta'ish), ldap, smtp-auth, or any other "esoteric" feature. Gpg-support works quite well, it just rocks *quietly*.
Konsole was a delight. I had previously tried super-term (I think) that had the same basic idea (multiple terms in one window) but the interface was clunky enough it was unusable (at the time, haven't tried it in a couple years). shift-arrow to cycle through the terms, instant configurability (i.e., no editing Eterm config files by hand), again, just plain rocked.
Konqueror. Don't really have much to say that hasn't already been said. About the only thing I *don't* use it for is managing files
Kdevelop and kde-designer (though that's not really a KDE project) rock my world. I am a crappy coder, and fairly inexperienced in c++, but I have been able to help out the main kpilot developer simply by recreating the kpilot config screens in designer, allowing him to focus on getting usb support up to speed rather than rewriting the interface. I know there are some old-school programmers shaking their head at these new-fangled gui toys that lower the bar so much, but anything that allows a newbie like me to help out with one of his favorite OS projects and actually make a difference (the next version of kpilot that ships will be with my GUI) is nothing but a good thing.
Anyways, to make a long story short (heh), if you haven't tried KDE since the 1.x days, this is the time. You will be pleasantly suprised, and may even make the switch. If not, then happy Gnomeing, or BlackBoxing, or WindowMakering, or CommandLineCommandoing. Just have fun! The world is too great a place to worry about what other people are using for their desktop.