38 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
---
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author: einar
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comments: true
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date: 2007-07-21 10:08:35+00:00
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layout: post
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slug: why-kde
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title: Why KDE?
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wordpress_id: 274
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categories:
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- Linux
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---
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The title comes from some random thoughts I had while reading [aseigo's latest entry on Plasma](http://http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/07/plasma-update.html). I was thinking about the line "who uses KDE for his/her day job, and why?", but related perhaps to people who don't code for a living. Here I will illustrate my point of view on why I chose KDE as my day to day desktop environment.
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<!-- more --> It's not like I started on KDE at all: back in 1995, when I first tried Linux out, I used fwvm, and didn't quite get used to its way of doing things. When I returned to the penguin OS a few years later, I installed a copy of Red Hat (I think it was RH 6, but I'm not sure). It came with GNOME and Enlightement as the window manager. For a long time I used that desktop environment, but:
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* It felt somewhat ''alien'' to me;
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* Admittedly it was still in its infancy, so not quite sophisticated
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Later I got to try a copy of SUSE 6.4, which came with either KDE or GNOME. I tried KDE (back in its 1.x days) and I thought "how ugly!", so I returned to GNOME. This went on for a while, until I got Mandrake (now Mandriva) 7.2.
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Mandrake offered packages for the then new KDE 2. I admit that I was blown away by the change, everything was much _better_ than what it used to be! Still, it had a lot of quirks, but I soon started getting familarised with the platform. What I liked best was the integration of features, still in its infancy but on the way to become something interesting.
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KDE 3 then came, and while it looked "less revolutionary", it brought integration at a whole new level. I still used GNOME from time to time, but the feature removal was not what I wanted (even though I'm not as much of a power user as I used to be), so I decided to see what KDE would bring.
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I first started using KDE for fun, but now I use it in my bioinformatics work every day. There are a number of applications I use constantly, such as KDevelop (it may be worse than eric for Python support but I find it a really nice IDE), Konqueror and its io-slaves (do I have to mention fish://?) , Kontact (I find its integration and features better than what Thunderbird has to offer), Amarok (for music in the boring moments) and Kate (a rather nice editor).
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Also, other applications that are not part of KDE that I use constantly, and which fit into the DE perfectly are Kile, Yakuake and k3b.
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The way everything is arranged, integrated and designed helps me in being quite productive, and even if there are quirks, they aren't as annoying as some Windows bugs. I like the idea of a consistent DE, from file operations to looks to the way applications behave. When I get back to Windows, with its mess of non-standard widgets and UI operations, I cringe.
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So, I would like to congratulate the whole KDE developer community for making an amazing piece of software and also for making my work easier. I am really interested in seeing how KDE 4 will shape out.
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