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KDE Wins 3 awards
Linux Journal has just posted who won its awards this time - and KDE got 3 of them: Konqueror, KDE-2, and KDevelop. Congratulations to the KDE team and to all their supporters.
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I rcently came back to using X from the command line(although its stil my favorite work place). The last time I had used kde was the kde 1.x days. Now I am using kde 2.2.1 and let me tell you, it is a thousand times better. Konqueror already beats the crap out of Netscape, I don't even see how people can call Netscape an alternative now. I also jsut bought a MAC to try out the "other" *BSD and to me, kde2 is still better than all the "eye candy" at OS X.
There are a few small bugs I do notice sometime.
Try to view a table with a left align in konqeuror and see the result. This 1 line of code will be messed up:
messed up column
I use KDevelop loads. It kicks arse.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
KDE 2.2 is slick as all hell. Still a few minor hiccups every now and then (many of which would probably be fixed if I upgraded to 2.2.1) but overall it's the most solid and robust *nix desktop environment I've ever used. (I've used OS X, but am not really impressed with it).
While everyone was busy harping about Mozilla, Konqueror grew up. It's now tantalizingly close to being an IE-killer. I shit you not. It's a very pleasant browsing experience, standards compliant, and to top it all off it's a great file manager as well.
KOffice is a great start at an integrated office suite. It's at the 'basic' stage right now. It reminds me of Clarisworks for the Mac, in that it's all integrated together and, while it doesn't support some of the fancier features, it can handle 90% of what most people want to do.
I'm really looking forward to KDE 3.0.
Go KDE.
Now if only they could convince them to remove some of the sluggishness from it.
Not that I'm criticising it, mind you, but some of those windowing apps are very processor intensive.
proof of Osama's guilt..
both, when i am in geek mode i prefer nothing but shell, when i have to administrate - gnome or fvwm or the others are usually just fine and cool etc.. etc...
but when i am in office/show off mode KDE rocks hardest, it is all there, it all works terrific and the gui is an amazing flow of Mac/Win/solaris/NeXT/SGI (all of which i am familier with so it's nice and familier and never really confusing). Star and K office rock hard enough for me really. I have the MS crap on my G4 and 2K boxes so i know the differences and i really don't ever feel underpowered on my Laptop running Mandrake 8.0.
Then when people look over my shoulder and see me working with/on KDE they are always impressed and suddenly the Linux questions come and i am an evangelist. It's better when they come to you for the gospel.
Ximian Gnome is pretty, and mostly stable and fast and so on. but i always feel like i am locked in a room when i use it. I do think that it is another great productivity/showoff Gui but it dosent have the charm and magic of KDE.
but hell that is what large hardrives are for, choice and impulsive morons like me.
congrats to KDE by the way.
Awards like this mean plenty to everyone within the industry...Developer, User, or somewhere inbetween: We all benefit by recognizing excellence. What we have here is not necessarily Yet Another Award, but a standard for others in the Linux Community to measure up to. Just because it doesn't come from a Ziff Davis publication does not lessen its value -- besides, it's not like this 'zine hasn't been around enough to have established credibility...
i just installed kdevelop for the first time yesterday and i was was pretty impressed. on the down side it only supported C/C++... even in the syntax highlighting part - when it shouldnt be too hard to have it for other languages as well... but ok it's 'an ide for c/c++ development' whatever... i'm so sure you're all thinking 'real coders use VI' ;-)
konqueror's just awesome. it does crash from time to time, but i'm happy with the features, especially with being able to just enable cookies for just a few sites in particular - like slashdot so i dont have to relogin everytime i come here, load my prefs just to filter out all my jon katz posts...
mozilla has that too, but it loads too slowly.. but konqueror's loading faster.. could this have anything to do with it being "integrated" with the kde desktop? man.. this thing is sounding like IE with windows... they're saying about implementing activeX in this thing in future releases... oh boy... next thing, "KDE updates" anyone?
Koffice is nice... one great thing they can have is to include a pdf writer into it... ps2pdf isnt good enough... fonts arent always supported properly..
i just switched from 2.1.1 to 2.2.1 or whatever it is (the one available in debian testing to one in debian stable) last night. very pleased. but so much slower. this thing does eat up a lot of RAM - eventhough i've got plenty of it.. but still...
kde-look.org's got some great themes for 2.2.1 (despite recent random postings of ugly themes and porn...)
check out the QNX theme. looks great.. but it's not just bells and whistles we're about right?
my blog
That's true, and all your points (especially the lack of a good X setup apps - Ximian might fill this in with its own tool if only it would work). Fonts, media playing, network display, and software installation are also areas where Linux desktops currently are behind, but they're also being addressed (KFontinst, MPlayer, DXPC, and Red Carpet). However, there's many points where KDE is ahead of Windows.
:D
* Behaviour of Windows drag and drop depends on whether the destinatio nand source are on the same partition, a new partition, or a shell folder, and what type of application is being dragged. KDE simply asks me when i drop it - copy, move, or link?
* The ability to support document previews is getting even better. XP, for example, don't support previewing Acrobat files (obviously, NIH). Note sure about Word files in XP, but KDE could easily preview Staroffice or KOffice files in Konq too.
* Drag a file to the desktop and it has the brains to suggest I'd like to make that file my wallpaper. This allows me to easily change my desktop, for example, from a pictire of Christina Ricci, to er...another picture of Christina Ricci. How good is that?
* Linux web browsers often have some very useful features their windows counterparts don't - eg, the ability to turn off annoying popups without disabling javascript, stop animation on a page, and handle privacy and cookies in a much more customizable way than IE can.
* Xkill shits all over the windows task manager - so does ksysguard.
So yeah, there's good and bad points about both (the point my seemingly inflammatory sig tries to make).
However, in the space of a year, Linux desktops improve faster than their Windows equivalents, and are already ahead in some areas. If this continues (and it seems it will), in 2 years time KDE will blow Windows away. in almost every aspect.
Mike
Windows98 has a better interface than XP as does Windows2000. Turn all the new features off and what you have IS windows2000.
I prefer the interface of KDE by far, I mean WinXP copied KDEs ideas, the taskbar grouping, they stole that, As far as the Icon goes, thats KDEs main weakness.
Gnomes Icons totally destroy KDEs, as does MacOSX and WindowsXP.
KDE needs to copy gnome and go for SVG based Icons.
Good icons is very important when it comes to having a nice looking desktop, good fonts is also important, XP has better fonts. KDE already has the best functionality of any interface i know of besides perhaps OSX. What KDE needs right now, is to improve certain things, the icons in KDE are crap and i hear they are planning to copy Xps icon style, thats fine for windows users who go to linux, but XPs icons are horrible compared to Gnome, Nautilus, MacOSX etc, SVG is definately the way to go for Icons.
Fonts will take time to improve but they are getting to be at XP quality, I think we will see high quality fonts before the end of the year, The Icons in KDE hopefully will be fixed sometime in 2002 if they switch to SVG but if not, then their icons will be as crappy as Windows icons, which is fine for Windows users who havent seen anything better but not for me.
KDR looks very nice however it still looks very plain, it needs a theme, KDE has Luna, Mac has Aqua, even Nautilus has its look, KDE however looks too plain, as if it was just thrown together, i mean theres no theme, its bland, like windows2000, while this is fine for most users, its not going to give KDE the impression that its on the level of XP because XP will have a taskbar which is beveled, has a nice color and shadows, while KDE just has plain style.
Nautilus and Gnome have figured this out and currently looks way better than XP, but KDE and this isnt in terms of functionality, but in terms of how pretty it looks, it doesnt look as fancy as it could look.
I also dont like the fact they took out the little icon effect where you click on it and it swirled,why? these little unique effects were what made kde KDE!
Put it back, the highlighting is nice, windows doesnt do it but still this isnt unique to kde.
If you get what I'm saying, KDE needs more unique features and looks to seperate itself from being too generic.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I simply refuse to run poorly designed software! Why should I, because it's trendy?
Do it right--from the start--PLEASE.
Unix was supposed to have saved us from these sorts of Microsoftisms.
I'm personaly glad, I have been impressed with KDE... I like the clean interface... heck it looks almost as good as XP...