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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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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.
It would be nice if the editor showed which products he compared, and why the others did not get the award. and as far as the "Office Application
" section goes, was he only comparing word processors? what about gnumeric? gnumeric 0.75 is at a point right now where its so sweet, it makes your teeth hurt. and did he even try galeon. as far as the browsing experience goes, its my opinion that galeon is much better designed to be a web browser.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
i disagree some 150%
you want KDE look (and feel) like Mac ? enable Desktop menu, and remove taskbar.
you want KDE look (and feel) almost like WindowMaker/Afterstep ? enable WindowMaker Applets extension, and remove taskbar
the only thing you can't disable is the KParts/DCOP underlying system (well.. i think you can't). but i thought the aim of Linux on Desktop (which is the purpose of KDE), was to provide a component model implementation in order to allow high level interaction between applications (which is all the GNOME/KDE/GNUStep-WindowMaker projects do... using different languages, APIs, and having different set of features).
sure, if you want less features and les memory usage, you can stick to old and light AfterStep or FVWM (though IceWM and others appear to be better)
as for the binary size for KDE or problems of slow launching or whatever, one of the biggest problems of QT/KDE for the time being is that they are written in C++, and gcc is far from good at compiling C++ (which gave all the fuss about 2.96 and 3.x versions). usually distros don't even build kde using objprelink. wait a bit that all those things improve (and they are close to), and i think u'll see a great improvment in KDE performances.
> 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..
Well, try to print a file, every KDE-2.2.1 application has the option to print to PDF (and Postscript) by default. This is caused by the great kdeprinting system, which RULES in combination with cups.
If the quality of ps2pdf bothers you, thius is part of ghostscript. If you still use a 5.x version, I urge you to upgradde to GPL ghostscript 6.5.2 or AFPL ghostscript 7.03. PDF support has been greatly improved.
Moritz
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
This is related to the fact that the dynamic linker is slow when it comes down to resolving loads of C++ symnbols.
It's a deficiency recent versions binutils fix - try the (WARNING: not yet 100% stable) stuff from rawhide.
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Why is this KDE centric?
A lot of things won awards. Yes KDE won 3, and good for them. But why does the story only include the KDE part. All the other awardees were surely deserving too.
So, I'm saying it. Caongratulations to ALL the entities who won awards from Linux Journal. You ALL deserve it. Keep up the good work!
-jay