Why do you prefer KDE?

[Kevin Krammer]

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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