Screaming Penguin

Yep, the long awaited and a little bit overdue next rev of KDE is now out. Check out the "Ready for the Enterprise" press release. Many of KDEs 2.01 and 2.1 features are very impressive. These include Konqueror (which is a great file manager that even loads network shares including SMB and is a web browser that works quite well), KMail (an all around great mail client), noatun (a new all around multimedia player), KDevelop (the new IDE for KDE) and many many more. There are now KDE apps for everything. Literally, K Oracle clients, K setup your network x stuff, K games, K personal finance, K office, K fractals, K out the wazoo (you get the idea.) The new KDE improves on the array of apps and is allegedly faster and more stable. I have not had any past stability or performance issues, but hey, faster never hurts, right? (Careful with the jokes here, insert your own.) Along with all of the other new stuff I am ready for the new KDE for a semi-silly reason, I want the Theme Manager. The new stuff is supposed to have it and 2.0.1 does not (although 1.x does.) This is not a big thing, I know, themse schmemes, but its just cool to be able to re-skin the desktop in one click rather than copying files everywhere, minor but cool. The new KDE is here, get it! NOTES on a KDE Desktop at the Office, no more windoze! I have been using KDE 2.01 as my sole desktop environment (no dual boot, very little VMware with Win as guest OS use) for about 3 months now. I love KDE. It is very solid, rarely do I have any issues, and it has eliminated the almost daily windows "reboot" ritual. MY machine has an uptime of 56 days, not too bad for a workstation and "desktop" environment in a development shop. It takes a little getting used to, not having any windoze around but I do highly recommend it. I have personally only had a few minor problems. My company has a few web based apps that require IE (require ActiveX and VB crap, this is a henious thing for an "internet" company to do, but they did it) and this is literally the only thing I use VMWare for. If we did not have this silly requirement I would be totally windows free. The only other issue, and it is minor really, is that office documents that are created and or edited in StarOffice (which is my office suite of choice) are a little "klunky" in the formatting department when exported to MS Office and sent to the rest of the office or clients. This does work, but it does not look quite as professional as it should (requires some massaging once in MS Office to get it just right, this is an admitted pain, but its not StarOffice or Linux at fault, its the entire world that insists on a proprietary standard that is more to blame.) On the plus side my Linux box (RedHat) with KDE can do everything else. It makes for an awesome development platform with much better Java, C and scripting integration (what I mean is stuff is the same as on production unix machines, no fixing paths, no screwing with environment values, etc, but this only holds true if your production env is Unix, which it ALWAYS should be.) It runs the full suite of office applications (with the aforementioned StarOffice.) It runs many web-network apps great, Mozilla, Netscape (4.x , 6.x), Opera, Flash, Jabber IM, AOL IM (arghhh to the proprietary, but it works very well), Acrobat, Kmail, IglooFTP, etc. I use Kmail and the StarOffice built in mail stuff for POP mail and I use our companys web based mail for all my Outlook stuff (this works for all the calendaring and everything, the web based outlook is pretty good, better solution, have your company NOT use Exchange at all, try phpGroupWare or JetSpeed.) I use other standard Linux desktop apps too, GIMP, FreeAmp (for the MP3z) etc. All of the networking within the office is either to UNIX machines that have Samba or NFS mounts or to Windows SMB stuff. My Linux-KDE networking works great for all the Samba-SMB mounts and they are mounted auto in my fstab and then available via the GUI file manager or shell (even my windows "home" directory, all works great.) The thing even prints right, it basically all works and while I have always been a Linux server proponent I was a desktop semi-holdout. Not anymore, Linux because of KDE is ready for the prime time desktop. Try it.   KDE