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Seven Years of KDE Celebrated
Ashcrow writes "Almost exactly 7 years ago, Matthias Ettrich announced the start of a new desktop environment, originally called Kool Desktop Environment. Check out LinuxFrench's article (English translation) and the news at Dot KDE. Thanks to the KDE Team for a great 7 years!"
You're not way off. You're not spot-on either. Fact is, you make your own choices, and that's a good thing. Personally, I prefer KDE, but I probably know as many, if not more, people who use the Gnome. (This could be because most geeks I know, I know through Uni, which insists on the Gnome, though switching to KDE is a matter of issuing a single command.
My reasons for KDE are first and foremost its configurability. I can set shortcut keys in any native KDE application and for the system as a whole to do what I want it to do. I find that the integration is slightly better for the things that I use, but that all depends on what you do use and what your priorities are.
You'll hear a lot of people flaming KDE. The thing I hear most often is that it is too Windows-like. My response to this is that you can configure it to act very much like a number of different environments, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing, especially given that Windows have made a few sane user interface design decisions (though they have also made some really poor ones in later years, and the underlying structure is helplessly flawed).
A lot of the bucketings that KDE cops are due to experiences with earlier versions, and indeed they were pretty sad, but some Gnome-users that have seen my setup of KDE have been impressed to the point where they went ahead and downloaded it. It really has come a long way, and I'm amazed to see the rate at which it has been improving just over the last few months.
So Kongratulations to KDE. Have some Kake.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
["KDE Sucks! GNOME rules!" (reverse, repeat)] (reverse, repeat)
;)
Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.
Ha!
Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.
However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).
Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
There was an interesting interview with Matthias Ettrich, done in 1998, and available here.
:-)
Amazing to see how KDE grew since then, and a good reminder of all these (past) issues with Qt, and the QtMozilla huge hack...
And by the way, is this "KEmacs" thing a reality somewhere?
I switched over to KDE from Gnome about 2 months ago after using Gnome since 1.4ish (and I used 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4).
I like KDE better. That's really all I can say. Gnome isn't bad, but I spent too much time wondering if Gnome was ever going to get polished. That and Nautilus just sucks.
When I was using Windows I used Directory Opus as my file manager and when I first started to use Linux full time that was the program I missed the most. Then... then I found Konqueror. Life's been good ever since. From that point it was a slow conversion to KDE as a whole.
I'm very happy with it. Koffice included. I'm very much looking forward to SVG support in the next version as well as a few other little bits I've read up on.
Good job guys!
And just a clarification, I like Gnome. I just like KDE better and you know what's cool? I'm not longer stuck between these two choices:
Windows DE or Windows DE.