Kan KDE make a Komeback?
Sorry for the “kTitle” – I kouldn’t help myself 
I just spent about an hour poking around the latest Kubuntu Daily build (of the upcoming 9.10 release) on my test notebook, and all I can say is “Wow!”.
I’m simply blown away at what has gone on in KDE since I last “seriously” looked at KDE 4 around 4.1.x – I’m speechless. It’s nearing perfection again. As a long time KDE user who jumped ship to GNOME because of KDE 4, practically swearing never to return, I can’t help but gush a little.
As *great* as I think Windows 7 is, I have my notebook running Kubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 with KDE 4.3.1 sitting right next to my Xeon workstation running Windows 7 Ultimate and KDE doesn’t feel cheap or 2nd class in comparison. It feels and looks equally as “World Class” as Windows 7.
As for the underlying OS (Kubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6) – great build for an Alpha! I haven’t hit a show-stopper yet. Actually I guess this is past Alpha 6 – I downloaded a “Daily Live” image, but everything is working great. I haven’t installed any updates, but I did install Google Chrome and “kubuntu-restricted-extras” so far, and no packages have broken. I did need to pull in a few dependencies for Chome, but everything installed fine with no errors. I’ll probably be pretty conservative with running updates for a while though – I may not update until the next “milestone” whatever/whenever that is (I need to check the release docs).
I also believe I will (for now) re-think making that M70 notebook a “test box” and leave Kubuntu there for a while – I kinda like having the two platforms side by side. There are always things I like better in one over the other (such as blogging using Windows Live Writer as I’m doing now) but there hadn’t been a darn thing in the Linux world that “excited” me enough to “live with” as a daily-driver OS on that notebook until I loaded up Kubuntu this evening.
Anyway – just wanted to take a moment this evening to get down these general impressions – I was too blown away to let this moment slip by un-documented. I think this *IS* the return of KDE as we once knew it!
Still gonna keep Windows 7 on this box though – it’s just “too good” (my suggestion for a tagline for MS)
I use Ubuntu 9.04 x64 at home. Only know Gnome. However, I use K3B for burning CD / DVD. It has the KDE interface. I don’t know KDE at all, but based on the experience with K3B, it seems like in the KDE’s interface, a single click means double click. I find this very confusing, for example, I want to click on a file/folder to select it for a drag and drop. But KDE thinks I wanted to double click so it opened the folder/file instead of placing the mouse focus on the item.
Can you try this: Place an icon on the KDE desktop. Now you want to move this icon to another place on the desktop. Can you do that with KDE?
Garry I do have a follow-up blog to this coming, but to answer your question: Yes you can – single click isn’t that hard to get used to- It was popular among windows users for a while also (during the windows 98 era I remember a lot of my friends had switched to Single-click and it drove me nuts).
And yes, KDE has always (at least since I’ve first used it in KDE 2.something) defaulted to single-click. The best thing about single click in KDE though, is that it’s very easy to turn off
just a note dont be sorry abot the kTitle, the word Kan is Danish and means Can