10 reasons to use KDE
Personally I love KDE, but admit that all the bells and whistles take some getting used to. If you are a Windows user you will feel much more at home in kde than gnome. The default KDE desktop looks very much like Windows with the taskbar on the bottom, a start menu on the left of the taskbar and the clock in the right of the taskbar, but don't be misled KDE is not Windows. Before getting into to many details, here are the features of KDE that make it my desktop of choice.
- Tabbed - splittable Windows with configurable profiles. In KDE you can split a window as many times as you want both vertically and horizontally. For instance you can navigate to /home/regx/regx.dgswa.com, split the window and navigate to ftp://dev.regx.dgswa.com split again and goto ftp://regx.dgswa.com.
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Now you have a window split 3 ways with a local directory, a dev site ftp directory and the live site ftp directory. But wait, there is more now we can open a new tab Ctrl+T and open the dev site http://dev.clientx.com split the window and open http://clientx.com.
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Now we have a tab containing a side by side comparison of the dev site and live site. Oh yes, there is more! - Profiles
Now we can save this configuration profile and open it any time we want.
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- Attached virtual terminals In KDE you can attach a virtual terminal to any window that follow you as you navigate the window.
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- Built in find/search The built in find in konqueror is very nice and has a lot of options.
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If you want to find stuff based on filename quickly, locate is built in as well. Locate is a normal linux utility that uses a prebuilt index database. In ubuntu you ubdate the database by typing:
sudo locate -u
after that you can type in locate *.txt in konqueror to find all files with a .txt extension. In konqueror type locate:*.txt and konqueror will return a nicely formatted page with results grouped by folder. This all happens extremely fast. I can search for all docs on my windows partition much faster in linux than I can in Windoze and that includes the time it takes to reboot into linux.
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- Built in manpage and info viewer
Linux has great help utilities, but traditionally these are text based and run in a terminal.
KDE's explorer (konqueror) allows viewing man and info pages by typing info: command
or man: command. The pages are nicely formatted and hyperlinked.
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- Filesize view
This is a really cool and usefull view for quickly finding what is taking up space on your disk.
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[G2:5469] - KIO, Kipi and konq-KIM pluggins
KIO KIM and Kipi pluggins add options to the file right click menu as well as programs that make use of them. For instance from within Konqueror you can scale and compress images similar to the image scale power toy in XP only better. You can also quickly rename images, create photo galleries, flash animations, mpeg movies etc. From within DigiKam the kipi plugins allow you to export your images to gallery, flicker, picassa etc. The integration is great allowing you to export entire albums, selected images, or images with specific tags. - kFileReplace
Multi File Find and Replace. Several developer aplications such as Quanta leverage kFileReplace to offer multi file find / replace from within the application. - KRename
Batch rename with regexp support. I absolutely love KRename. It is much better than any of the Batch Rename tools I used to use in Windows, and the built in Regular Expression support is wonderful. For me this is a huge time saver.
This really only scratches the surface. There is a lot to love in KDE if you just dig a little bit everything is configurable. By default all of the advanced stuff is tucked out of the way so a new user feels right at home, but there are a ton of configurable advanced options so power users feel right at home as well.