[Wylug-discuss] KDE

[Smylers]

david powell writes:

> i use kde ,

Thanks for replying.

> no chance of me doing a talk on it though 

Oh, why not?  Not even a short demo?

> there are a lot of kde apps  koffice , kmail, kstars , konversation
> ,too many to list

Exactly -- if there are too many for you even to list, there are
definitely too many for me to try out just to see if I like them!  What
I liked about the article I linked to is that it didn't try to be
comprehensive or to cover the basics of things, just to highlight some
specific features of some apps, where those features are particularly
novel or nifty.

> i guess the bigest advantage i find with kde is the customisation
> options for most of the windowmanager functions

I don't buy that.  In terms of what I want to achieve with a computer
there's a list which includes things like dealing with e-mail, browsing
the web, programming, and listening to music.  Customizing my window
manager definitely isn't on that list: it isn't an end in itself.  Even
_using_ a window manager isn't an end in itself, but a means to doing
one of the other tasks, so _customizing_ a window manager is 2 steps
removed from actually being useful!

My ideal window manager would work exacty the way that I want it to
without me having to perform any customizing at all.  And if it does
that, I wouldn't mind if it had no customization options at all.

> konqueror  kdes file manager and web browser is good ,

But in what way specifically?  What are the features that make it good?

Currently I don't really use a file manager at all: I can work very well
at a Bash prompt in a terminal (talking of terminals, one of the things
that most irritated me the last time I used KDE was that Shift+Ins in a
Konsole doesn't insert the X selection) and so haven't felt the need to
use a file manager -- except for browsing music files and
drag-and-dropping them to an XMMS playlist window.

And I'm very happy with Firefox as a web browser.  What nice features
does Konqueror provide that I'm missing out on?

> http://www.kde.org/  is a good place to find out more about it

Except it isn't really for the kind of information that I'm trying to
find out.  It's quite a big website, and has lots of information on it,
but nearly all of the information is either irrelevant to me (because
its aimed at developers, for example, or it's explaining things I
already know such as what free software is).

I don't want to read the complete documentation for hundreds of programs
that I'm currently not using -- at least, not yet anyway!  I first want
to discover what the nifty features are to see if it's worth spending
time investigating further.

Smylers
-- 
May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a
difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.