General comments on KDE

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi Bruce,

On Montag, 24. März 2003 03:36, Bruce J.A. Nourish wrote:

> 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.

Ah, cool.
Someone just posted a link to a new tutorials on kde-devel:
http://developer.kde.org/~larrosa/visualtutorial.html

> 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:

The bugsystem can also be used for wishes or other feedback if it applies 
to a package, program, etc.

> * 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

I think it was the first one.
It will stay in as long as a better client provides at more than the same 
functionality.
Kopete is a good guess here :)

> 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?

That is definitely something for a bug report.

> * 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?

AFAIK one can use xscreensavers with KDE.
The KDE screensavers are just an easier way for developers with KDE 
knowledge for programming screensavers.

> * 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.

Office: I think there is work being done in that area. The OASIS group is 
aming at creating a document format for all office suites and KOffice has 
one its core developers in this group.
IIRC the short term goal is to have one format but each application will 
ignore the parts it cannot handle (yet).

There might be some unmanagable incompatabilies in the long run, because 
application goals can be different.
(KWord is frame based, OpenWriter page based)

Not sure what you mean with "KDE in general and Mozilla"

kdepim: from what I read in the mailinglists, tha KDE pim people strongly 
support open formats like iCalendar, vcard, maildir, mbox, etc. to store 
data on disk.
I don't know which formats are used by Evolution.

Sometimes the best interoperability can be achieved by using a server to 
store the data and just access it with different clients.
The Kolab client features will very likely make it into KDE3.2, Evolution 
might be able to access a Kolab server through its Exchange plugin or 
someone might write a Kolab plugin, once Kolab is released.

If you have interests and/or knowledge in one of the areas, I am sure your 
feedback will be appreciated on the appropriate mailinglists.

> * 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?

I am using mplayer for video, usually preferring the commandline but there 
is also a GUI frontend available 
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jjvrieze/kmplayer.html

> * 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.

I'd say that is definitely a bug report again :)

> 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.

I second that1

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at>
Developer at the Kmud Project http://www.kmud.de/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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