Hi all, I am writing this email, because there has been a lot of discussion about the new KDE and i still didn't find anything that emphasizes the *advantages* of KDE. I believe this is just as important, as having the most functional or most beautiful DE. OSX, with all the eye candy and ease-of-use did not gain any measurable market share from windows. Firefox with a pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, better security and some promotion did much better against IE...
This email is about a possible application of multiple dekstops. When you work on any non-trivial project, you propably have many different windows opened (word processor, spreadsheet, email, browser, terminals and more). It would make sense if all these windows could be grouped together, preferably in a whole new, virtual, "project desktop". Each project can have an icon in taskbar or in the desktop chooser. The project desktop of course would need an additional taskbar (maybe on a side of the screen). Any new window opened there would remain in the "project desktop" and it should not appear in the main taskbar. Each file/folder opened from an application in that desktop would remain in the "open dialogue/open recent" memory. You should be able to drag'n'drop files and application windows on the "project desktop" (although a simple right click option would also work). The "project desktop" can even have a different backround than the original desktop: It would help to have only the relevant files on this desktop, maybe categorized -in an obvious way- by their type/content/version etc. Where applicable, the information should be saved, in order to continue on the project after a reboot or a logout, or even send the whole project (with the relevant files and maybe application information -- for example the "open recent" files) to a colleague. I believe that it's technically possible: KDE supports many desktops, and can have many taskbars. KDE applications can remember the desktop they were opened in, and the open dialogue associates "quick access" entries with applications (I imagine it would be easy to associate them with a "project"). The "open recent" menu, which exists in most applications, would propably need some modification, but overall, it seems doable. I'd also like to make a couple of remarks: 1. The KDE desktop lacks a standard bar to place icons and applets. Kicker is nice, i personally like it, but everything is removable ( the taskbar, the desktop chooser, even the K-menu). For a new user this just doesn't "feel" rodust. Certain items like the desktop chooser, i believe have a reason to be "locked" on the desktop, even if not visible all the time. In any case, i propose a standard shortcut to switch desktops: I imagine something like the F<something> button in OSX that unclutters windows, only this one would show all the desktops and let you choose with the mouse the desktop and the application. 2. The Chinese rice farmer : It is stated in http://appeal.kde.org/wiki/Target_Group that the billions of users who have not used a computer before are "the biggest group of potential users" and should be the top priority of KDE. I'd like to point out that it's not possible to reach those users without a really big player of the software industry and maybe government initiatives like Thai governments "people's notebook". KDE is a free desktop environment, it's not HP and it's not Apple. Yep, this was a long email. Keep up the great work :) --Manolis _______________________________________________ Appeal mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/appeal
