kde3
kde3 has gotten pretty good. ditching windowmaker might be for real. kwallet is
good - if it's really secure. konqueror has gotten better in a number of ways
big and small (and current firefox/mozilla/galeon on at least freebsd have some
annoying hangups, though we are admittedly too lazy to investigate the
possibility that advertising-related tarpitting (or perhaps ISP-related) is
making shit out of lots of major websites - but something is, and it stalls
mozilla worse than konq). shortcut handling is really good - you can check it
from almost any app, and easily see both global shortcuts and app-related ones.
it has the nice "smart" alt-mouse2-drag window resizing that windowmaker does,
which just rocks. kopete is good. panel icon-zooming is cool, the bouncing-ball
app cursors are cool, and what's really impressive is that this stuff doesn't
suck up as much resources as you'd expect. the tightness of integration, in
comparison with gnome, is expected at this point, but we acknowledge that this
is a distribution or platform-related question. even still, it's expected at
this point.
certain things, like volume control applets, are too bulky and awkward. but
some theme changes fix that - the default kde widgets are like OS X widgets on
twinkies. the system monitor applet doesn't work on freebsd. the distinction
between panel applets and system tray applets isn't clear. i'll continue to use
gkrellm cause it's great. the menu alteration is a litle hard to get to, and
disses non-kde apps too much - xmms, for instance, isn't so easy to replace.
overall, it's very impressive and smooth. occasionally it feels
over-standardized, like OS X before Apple realized a volume widget on the
menubar is unavoidable. but you can still use your fave apps (ok, the virtual
sound devices on freebsd help to solve arts/esound competition), and most
importantly to me, it can be configured, with a lot of smart little tweaks
(e.g. no desktop icons) to keep everything i like about windowmaker while
adding a few more, new advantages.
we're looking forward to korganizer; it's like outlook netfolders (?)
scheduling without worms (and that corresponding feeling of walking down a dark
alley with a short skirt and no knickers). we're also looking forward to
vimpart support in kmail; it's just no fun to give up powerful editing. right
now it seems to dump out on the temporary filename. kmail looks almost ready to
coexist with mutt - sort of a holy grail for us - and do the one thing we
really like (albeit with some rule maintenance), which is keep sent mail
in the same folder as the saved mail. combine that with threading and you've
got useful e-mail, since you can see the whole conversation. the sent-mail
folder is actually one of the worst ideas in e-mail.
this may be a permanent change, since we get the desktop-user-type
conveniences with no real obstacles to old-fashioned window-manager-type usage.
