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LinuxPlanet's Year In Review
LinuxPlanet has a year-end review discussing their picks for favorite linux software in several categories, from window managers to time-wasters.
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Within the article I found that they mentioned quite a bit about kde and I thought I might respond.
There are many reasons why every kde app developer wants to get their app withing the base distrobution! First your app suddenly gets installed on (insert total kde desktops # here, some big ass number compared to said developers app downloads). Second you app then gets checked over many other developers as they are checking out the new kde app and because they are coders looking at your work they can provide good bug reports to quickly fix the problem. You application is quickly changed to conform to the rest of the desktop, making your application more pollished. The translation team will go through and convert your application to X (insert supported # of langues here) languages and you don't have to go out and find someone to do it for each language. Your Makefile etc worries are over as you no longer have to worry about then anymore (other then setting up your own Makefile.am, but if you can't do that then you still have some work to do before you should even think about going to kde's cvs) Also you can go and download just about any iso and there will now be a good chance that your app is sitting there. Now wouldn't you want to be part of this?
Second the windows manager debate page didn't have too much oomp to it. (more on this in the next paragraph) I think the major reason with this is because people don't want to think of them as seperate items, and with kde it simply comes with the desktop and works. (I am not currently up to date on gnome, but last I readup I think they are doing the same thing of a gtk based simple window manger that just works and ditched e). So other then e or some desktop that can only afford twm there isn't much to say on this.
Kmail, Konq, kword... A pattern here? Yes! The pattern is concistancy which I am surprised they didn't mention anywhere in their article (other then the corel dude, but that wasn't this type of consistancy). The applications look similar, behave similarly etc. The biggest reason I hated Netscape was how it did copy/paste differently then all the rest of my application. The reason I love Konq is similar. It does everything I need and looks the same as the rest of my applications and behaves the same. (this goes along with my own development of Kinkatta as an aim client for kde ) Things as small as that they all use the same "cut" icon in the end make life easier. You get anti-alias working for qt and suddenly all of the kde app have it, no getting it working for each app (cough mozilla cough). The like bobs_big_blue_theme? Go ahead and put it on. If you have all of 1 desktop then you don't have to worry about some apps not having it (besides xmms, but it has its own theme anyway). So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I dunno dude, these weirdos may have a different interpretation of "slower machines" than you and I.
dep's quote: "I admit that this is on a low-end machine, an Athlon 1.2-gig with 768 megs of memory and a G-400 vid card with a paltry 32 megs."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.