General comments on KDE

[Bruce J.A. Nourish]

Hey everyone,

Today seems to be the day for people who are new to KDE to pour their heart 
out over it. So let me add a few comments of my own.

First let me say that I am really impressed by KDE. Previously, I'd been using 
WindowMaker, gvim and mozilla to get everything done. Now I have instead a 
suite of programs that work and feel the same and share data almost 
perfectly. And I have a decent file manager. I'm learning C++ so that someday 
I'll be able to contribute something to KDE.

I've found a few bugs, too. I'll submit them to bugzilla. But I've also found 
some things I don't like, beyond the scope of a bug entry. This criticism is 
meant to be constructive, not personal:

* How did kit get into the KDE tree? It would be better to not have an IM 
client at all, rather than a broken one. Even the option for the window to 
minimize on startup does not work. kmix, kgpg, kget - in fact, almost every 
other tray app - all get this right. How hard can it be?

* Why do we not use xscreensaver for our screensavers? It should not be 
neccessary to lecture the people on this list about the benefits of Open 
Source, so I won't. But if we know the theory so well, why aren't we applying 
it?

* There needs to be better interaction between KOffice and OpenOffice, KDE 
generally and mozilla, and kdepim and Evolution. I have wowed numerous 
Windows users with OpenOffice and Mozilla on their own platform. This makes 
them take Open Source seriously. But KDE, the best UNIX desktop by a mile, 
doesn't play well with those programs. 

* The multimedia support sucks. kaboodle and noatun seem to choke on anything 
but an ogg/mp3 file. Video support is nonexistant. Or am I missing something?

* Is SSL support for korn in the works? Sending user/pass combinations in the 
clear exactly every 5 minutes seems to negate the point of all that nice 
crypto work in kmail.

Finally, let me say again that I love the pants off KDE. No other desktop 
comes close to it. I think there is an application suite that could rock the 
world in here - it's just waiting to get out.
-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <kode187 at kode187.net>
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