KDE Ported to Mac OS X

benh57 writes "KDE has finally been ported to Mac OS X, by the Fink team. Source packages and pre-built binaries are now available. Read the announcement and instructions for installing. Woohoo!"

Comments

Re:Fun--Not Practical, but Fun!

[benh57]

Hmm what do you mean, wrap up their port? GNOME has been on Mac OS X for a long time.

Gnome-2.0 is not yet on OSX, but a glib and gtk+ are in fink.

Re:what if you delete .cvspass?

[bdesham]

Just type cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ fink login at the shell prompt, type <return> for a password, and you should be set.

Re:nice, but ...

[nathanh]

But, Aqua is a really nice window manager already. I use OS X and Aqua at home, and Linux/KDE at work, and IMHO Aqua is by far superior to KDE.

KDE is more than just a window manager. This port simply means that Mac OS X users could run Konqueror or Konsole on their Aqua desktop. It doesn't mean Aqua has to be turned off or that you have to use the KDE window manager.

PS: Mac OS X is damn sexy. It's UNIX... but it's Macintosh... but it's UNIX!

How to work efficiently with MacOS X?

[rbrito]

I have some moderation points that I was going to dedicate to this discussion, but I think that it would be better if I posted instead of moderated.

Let me ask this honestly: how can someone work in an organized fashion with the MacOS X style of managing windows?

I am an experienced Unix system administrator, but a complete newbie with Macs (in fact, I just bought my first macintosh 4 months ago, an iBook 600MHz, combo, 12") and feel completely lost trying to work with MacOS X.

I don't care for eyecandy and animated icons as much as I care for a functional environment, but the fact managing windows with MacOS X is much messier than with standard Unix window managers, where you can separate your desktops for different tasks. In my case, I usually have my first virtual desktop for an xterm and e-mail, my second for browsing the web and my third and fourth for other tasks various tasks.

On the other hand, when I am typing some important text in LaTeX, I usually reserve the first desktop for some command line hacking (say, with perl), the second virtual desktop for Emacs and the third for seeing the output of my text with xdvi (I usually use Windowmaker as my window manager, both under Solaris and under Linux).

I feel that this separation of tasks keeps me organized and makes me quite productive since I can quickly move between different aspects of my work, but how can I keep everything organized with MacOS X with just one desktop and with applications with more than one window (say, Appleworks)?

I also appreciate that I can do all that under Windowmaker with intelligently set key-bindings and having to use the mouse quite few.

So, this is an honest question: how are you guys productive with MacOS X? Is there any way to keep various applications organized?

I already tried Space for MacOS X and, honestly, its capabilities are nowhere near, say, windowmaker in terms of functionality.

So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.

Also, today I tried installing Fink and was amazed at first, but after only two or three hours of using it, the fact that XDarwin is much slower than XFree86 under Linux (on the same notebook) makes me also suspect that I may not be using the programs correctly. I can't believe how slow it is. I would not even dare to run KDE on MacOS X (the topic of this story).

So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.

Any comments are desperately appreciated.

Re:How to work efficiently with MacOS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a Mac user for years'n'years'n'years, and believe you me, I can feel your pain w.r.t. Mac OS X's window management.

The trick I'm using to keep them under control is to download Youpi Key, which is an automation tool, and configured it to hide all other applications with command-space. It's not perfect, because there are some apps I'd like not to hide, like DesktopConsole.

One final thing to note: Many of us (including Apple) would appreciate it if you could send this feedback to Apple here. If you could clearly explain your problem (and your post, as is, is mostly there), and then make clear suggestions on what exactly would help you, I'm sure they'll give it serious consideration. Their recent track record seems to support my belief that they are more customer-focused these days.

Missing the point

[ZigMonty]

KDE has been ported to *Darwin*. The fact that that means it can also run on Mac OS X is less important. Darwin, the bare Unix part, now has a decent window manager/desktop environment. Now (or soon anyway) people could use Darwin as an alternative to Linux. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but we now have a free Unix for the Mac that is binary compatible with Mac OS X. This will make it a lot easier for the community to work on Darwin as its own OS, with obvious benefits to Mac OS X.

Re:Actually...

[Leimy]

Yes... this is true. I initiated the discussion of KDE-Darwin on opendarwin.org mailing lists. Jordan Hubbard was kind enough to sponsor me. The Fink guys said "what a coincidence... we were hopeing to work here too". Things came together remarkably well and the Fink guys deserve all the credit in the world for doing this!!!

Without them it wouldn't have happened. Patches are being committeed, RangerRick got KDE CVS access and the future looks bright for KDE-Darwin.

Thanks to Apple for providing the machine that hosts everything too! The OpenDarwin-core team and admin staff who have been putting up with my crap deserve a shout out as well!

The first round is on me!

David Leimbach [Leimy]