On Saturday, 2013-12-21, 18:45:13, Bruce Byfield wrote: > As you may have heard, KDE recently topped the Linux Journal's Readers' > Choice Awards. > > That got me thinking. Why do people prefer KDE? What advantages do you think > it has over other desktop environments?
I can't really answer that in terms of advantages over other offering since I haven't been using any of them since about 1998 when I switched to full time Linux. But I think, as far as KDE's desktop goes, my personal preference is the good combination of classic elements (panels, window lists, pager, etc) with great configurability. For example I use a rather classic bottom panel, i.e. it holds the launcher menu button, the virtual desktop switcher/pager, the window list (showing only the open windows of the active desktop) and the notification area (a.k.a. system tray). I've customized it a little by adding a quick laucher with my top used four apps after the menu button, followed by the Kate session applet, and the lock/logout applet at the end. Additional to that a narrow panel at the top right of the screen, switched to stay-on-top mode (windows go below it), showing current system stati (CPU and memory meters, battery, network connection and time/date. Another thing I like regarding the desktop product is the window manager's capabilities. For example being able to move any window by clicking-and- holding anywwhere in the window when ALT is pressed as well. Same for resizing without having to move to the windows's border (ALT+right mouse button drag). Or vertical-only maximizing by right clicking the maximize button. As I said before I can't really gauge whether those are advantages over offerings from other vendors, they might very well allow all those things as well. While your question was targetted at the desktop, I saw that a couple of other respondents have also touched the area of KDE's application offerings. Again I can't really tell if there is a lot of difference to other vendors' applications, but at the time when I started using them they were just better than anything comparable. E.g. back then no other terminal (as far as I know) had tabs and the capability of sending input to multiple tabs at the same time. Or KMail's great handling of mailinglists (reply to list, new to list, filtering, per-folder identities), its offline-IMAP support (I travel a lot, usually reading less important list backlogs while disconnected/airbourne/etc). Generally the great consistency across applications, but I guess that is also true for other vendors with multiple applications. Anyway, the question on why people use KDE applications is a very different one, but it is just so tempting to mention their respective highlights even when the topic at hand is the desktop or workspace product :) Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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