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Happy birthday KDE!

KDE just got 10 years old! The K Desktop Environment, is "one of" the best (the "one of" was put in order to stop a flame war in my blog) desktop environments for Linux. KDE has been crucial in introducing Linux to the Desktop, true a GNOME based distribution, Ubuntu has the taken the reign now (I believe this was due to marketing and hype), but KDE based distributions, Fedora, Kubuntu etc are not too far behind. Its been now 5 years that I've been using Linux, my first distribution was Redhat 7.2, which was running GNOME; KDE, due to Redhat's modifications had a similar look and feel in Redhat. So I couldn't get excited about Linux at all, it was a very boring interface for me. But in a random surfing session I came across screen shots of Slackware, which of course ships with unmodified sources, and the screen shots really appealed to me, I downloaded Slackware, and from that moment I've never looked to any other distribution, and use Slackware with KDE exclusively. So what is it that I really like KDE?

1. KDE look and feel

I really like KDE themes Plastik and Keramik. There are numerous innovations in KDE, for example the KMenu applets, which provides fast access to numerous highly useful features, like weather reports, dictionary, direct access to storage media (one click mount), information about my local wireless network etc..

Apart form the KMenu there is another toolbar which I really use a lot, the KasBar, its a toolbar which shows thumbnail views of opened windows, it helps my productivity especially during programming when I have multiple windows open, the IDE, the debugger, Mysql administrator, Mysql query browser, etc. Having thumbnail views allows me to navigate to the required window a lot faster.

KDE Icons look very very clean and well designed. KDE's file browser, Konqueror, in my opinion is the best one around. I've used GNOME's nautilus, and I cant figure out, why they have not included a "open terminal here" options in the popup menu, in any Linux system you have to turn to the command line frequently, because there are some tasks which are more suitably done in the commandline than in a GUI file browser.

2. KDE has tons of freebies!

KDE ships with tons of applications, many for similar purposes, all in all the bundled application mostly fill nearly all my needs, and very few extra software have to be installed, such as OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox etc.

KDE's own webbrowser, although for a very long time couldn't even open Gmail, has come a long way, and often I prefer Konqueror over Firefox, because it is lightweight. But Konqueror has still some way to go to challenge Firefox on KDE desktops, because it doesn't support some AJAX functionality for example, in Konqueror I can't see the GMail integrated Gtalk client.

There are tons of KDE application which are not shipped along with KDE, but you can get them from here.

3. KDE application development is easy!

KDE is based on Qt/C++, which is one of the best GUI development toolkits for Linux and others. Its innovative 'signal and slots' based event abstraction makes development of GUI application very easy. KDE Desktop Communication Protocol (DCOP), allows KDE application to talk to each other. I really wished that there would be something similar in Windows (maybe COM, but majority of windows application are NOT COM enabled), because allowing application to application communication allows a developer to reuse the functionality of existing software. Then there is KParts, which is analogous to COM, which allows the developer to encapsulate a component which does some specific thing, and then reuse that component in other applications.

KDE comes bundled with some of the finest development tools around. KDevelop, is a very feature rich development environment, which allows you to do development of every type of application from simple BASH shell scripts to complex Kernel modules.

Quanta is an excellent web development environment, its hard to ignore when I'm doing php programming. I use it to complement Zend, a commercial php IDE I use, which lacks in website design capabilities.

If you want to learn Qt, you can consult this book its the best book I've come across, and covers a wide range of topics which help you to get productive with Qt quickly.

So these are my top 3 reasons why I prefer KDE, I'm very excited about KDE 4, and can't await its release, the screen-shots I've seen have been marvelous.

I would like to know from my readers what they like or dislike about KDE?