Well I have survived yet another day of KDE and I’m still going strong. It’s not so bad once you get used to it 🙂 I will say that I would not be having such a positive experience if it weren’t for all of your reader comments. I really do appreciate it. I feel a bit like I’m on the other side of the tutorial this week! No worries though, for those of you jonesin’ for a tutorial I’ll have some good ones coming up soon. I’ve got some in the works that I’m pretty excited about. Just let me catch up on this weeks workload and I’ll be ready to roll again.
A few more thoughts on todays usage.
- I did not get a chance to check out Amarok last night (just too busy!) I hope to be able to sit down to some tunes after this post is done and relax.
- I do like the suggested app yakuake but I can never remember the dumb apps name! lol — its frustrating to try and remember the app name to launch it. I’ll make sure to write it down this time 🙂
- Still not able to get wireless working in Feisty, even using the updated broadcom driver, but I’ll keep working on it. Other than that Feisty has been more than stable, very reliable and I say will shape up to be a very nice release. I’ve actually seen that it has resolved a few issues from Edgy that I have been dealing with.
No issues tonite to gripe about. Status is still the same as yesterday. No real preference for either WM at this point other than a slight lean toward gnome based on familiarity only. The KDE apps rock my socks off though…
We may just need a tie breaker in the next few days. With that I invite any of you to sell me on gnome or KDE in one sentence. Commenting is now open, hit me with your one-liner sales pitches to make or break this current tie-breaker. (no flaming allowed!)
Hmm. One sentence…
kio_slave plugins allow for URLs such as fish://user@host/, ldap://, smb://, sql://, man:/, info:/, and plenty more!
I sold my brother on KDE by going to the “Konqueror Introduction” page, clicking on “Specifications”, then “many more…” in the “Transfer Protocols” section. After that, he was hooked!
I’ll use the opportunity to pimp for KDE a bit more also:
– Kioslaves as mentioned above: try out “audiocd:/” when you have an audio cd in the drive… the easiest way to encode ogg/mp3 I know of.
– Use Katapult to launch songs in Amarok (once you have Amarok going that is)
– Cervisia for CVS and kdesvn for SVN management (WARNING: the Edgy version of kdesvn is borked in a major way 🙁 compile your own instead)
– Speedcrunch is the best desktop calculator by a mile and then more
– Putting your menu at the top of the screen Macintosh style – it’s not for everyone but after some getting used to I can’t live without it.
Had some trouble with my Dell laptop with Feisty and the broadcom drivers. Roll back to 2.6.20-6 and the broadcom v3 drivers will load without a problem.
Are you using session saving? It opens all the apps you were using when you logged off, not all apps work well with it, though. Yakuake won’t save a thing (but it’ll be running 🙂 ), but it runs consoles, so it’s to be expected. KPDF will open up in whatever desktop you were last, which is not nice, but it’ll reopen documents and go to the last opened page, etc. Konqueror works great with it.
Btw, the box for posting this is friggin’ tiny 🙂
If you like yakuake and happen to go back to the beloved gnome ;), you should check out tilda. It is another drop down terminal however written with gtk.
With KDE you get desktop customization the way you want it, Konqueror for the one stop shop, Amarok (what is iTunes?), Katapult, Kopete and Konversation, and the every so lovely Kontact w/ KMail.
DUDE! and Potato Guy!
Amarok, KMail, and Akregator are vastly superior to their Gnome counterparts. Those are the main reasons for my choice of KDE.
Feel at home, use Gnome.
You don’t have to remember the Yakuake name, just press F12 (or any configured keyboard shortcut for it)
Gnome: Just get out of my way and let me get something done.
That’s my reason for using gnome. On the other hand my friend claims the following.
Save a battery, use Gnome.
He claims that gnome is kinder to his laptop battery. Of course its completely anecdotal and unscientific. But aren’t most things when it comes to desktop choice.
It all comes down to taste and what you like. I use Mac OS X in my daily work, which is a _very_ slick environment. But, I use KDE programs anyway (provided by fink) for most tasks.
To try to sell kde in one sentence … kind of hard.
If you like your command line, I can try sell it in one word: “dcop” – a command line interface to almost all kde applications. you dive slowly thru it by the `dcop’ command.
dcop amarok player next
Else, the kio_slaves as frank suggests is also one of the ‘hidden’ killer features.
/Sune
It’s all about choice and for me – KDE gives me more choices…
I just love the KDE apps and how well they interact together – basket 1.0 really rocks, of course also amarok, the giant konqueror with all its features (you will discover more and more, I promise), katapult, kontact, k3b, not to forget digikam (!), konversation and kopete, kompose, and if you like eye-candy you definitely should try out superkaramba.
I can do it in one word.
Integration…
try getting lock screen on gnome to automatically mark you away in gaim, like Kopete does in Kde. Try getting a plugin for GAIM that allows you to display the currently playing track as your “available message” like Kopete does for Amarok. Try getting a dowload link clicked in firefox to autmatically send the job to wget so that you can pause it(konqueror and kget). There are just so many examples….
As a Kde user for my whole linux carreer, I’m tempted to try something like this with gnome.
I can make you hate KDE.
Open up Kopete.
Message someone.
Notice the 20 buttons to change the appearance of your message.
Who needs alignment?
Yes, you not only can customize KDE. You must customize KDE for hours to make it not suck.
KDE people are like the people that buy MS Office to type a simple document. The people that buy (or download and steal) Nero, just to burn a simple disc.
They want to be able to have zillions featues nobody ever uses.
My philosophy: USE GNOME. And for that one app you are so geeky that you need weird functionality, launch up the KDE app. But don’t ever bother me with alignment buttons in a chat app. Taking screenspace, taking mental proccessing units from my brain just by being in my view.
One point for KDE though: you can easily enable Mac OS X style menubar. If I would ever switch, it would be just because of that.
I switched to Ubuntu a year or so ago.
I’m now switching to Kubuntu and going back to KDE, because Ubuntu and GNOME are infected with Mono.
A question instead of an answer: how do they compare, speed-wise?
Does gnome *feel* faster than KDE? Or the opposite? Thanks!
@Ralph: I’m sorry to hear choice frightens you. I don’t use this mentioned feature (I use Kopete though), but the extra toolbar doesn’t worry me, at least the default settings are quite sane. By the way, you can get rid of any toolbar with the menu you get by clicking your right mouse button an a toolbar. (I know – you don’t want to do that, it’s work…)
What I absolutely love about KDE and haven’t found anywhere else, is interoperability of the different KDE programs. That you can start a chat from within Kontact, or burn a CD from Amarok and, of course, use any protocol supported by KIO (ftp, fish, smb, …) in any KDE application you like.
The best way I have found to activate yaquake is with the keyboard shortcuts. The default is the F12 key but hey – this is KDE and everything is configurable 🙂
Personally, I set the yaquake shortcut for the F1 key and now any moment I need a console it’s very quick and easy to trigger.
Yakuake = Yet Another Kuake (Quake [like the id games’ consoles that it emulates] with the K convention)
Just have it autostart and F12 is all you need to remember.
Good to hear you’re enjoying KDE!
check out filelight for a pretty cool kde app. haven’t seen a similar gnome app.
Working with remote files a lot I cannot live without KIO. ftp://, smb://, fish://, sftp:// and it works from any KDE app.
integration and network transparency.
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XFCE! THAT’s how you save a battery and have compositing at the same time. If you want really cool features go for KDE. Gnome seems to be caught in the middle and bloating.
heh I just realized that this is really ole. I followed the planet ubuntu link of your random posts.