Interview With KDE On Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin 116
paugq writes "Last week KDE 4.5.4 was released for Windows as a late Christmas present from the KDE on Windows team. Almost at the same time BehindKDE, the site for interviews with KDE contributors, has started a new series of interviews with the 'Platforms' theme. In the first interview, Pau Garcia i Quiles talks with Patrick Spendrin, the current release manager of KDE on Windows and asks about the current status of the project, challenges and difficulties. In future interviews, Mac, Solaris, BSD (it's not dead, after all!), Haiku, OS/2 and more."
Maybe BSD isn't dead... (Score:4, Funny)
But some of those operating systems are pining for the fjords.
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I was probably the penultimate OS/2 fan. Huge respect for BSD after comparing the virtual memory subsystem TOTALLY by accident one day (when only 16meg of RAM was found in my system in a test) and KDE, Netscape, et. al. ran fine but my hard drive was thrashing (Linux PALED by comparison that day) but was barely noticeable.
I still dont use BSD but use Linux every day.
But BSD "it's not dead, after all!"? You put OS/2 in that list.
BSD PROPS!
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ps -aux
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And the biggest provider of BSD based system is Apple.... suck on that for a while
Okular print support (Score:2)
The day they manage that, will be the day that Okular becomes the best pdf viewer freely available for MS windows.
No adobe bloat (and so a reduced attack surface) and no nag-ware, and other annoying trying to 'real them in' features.
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Ever tried "Foxit"?
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Sumatra PDF is hugely superior and doesn't nag you with "Online Offers".
It also has a much cleaner, native looking interface without the toolbar chaos characteristic of Foxit.
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That is a limitation of Qt, which Okular uses to print, rather than in KDE or Okular itself. Odd/even pages should work on Linux at least, providing you use CUPS for printing.
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Or you could just run Evince [gnome.org], which surprisingly works great under Windows. Both Evince and Okular use Poppler as the PDF backend, so the rendering should be the same, but Evince doesn't require the bloat of the entire KDE on Windows package.
I've used the official Adobe reader (yech!), Sumatra (poor rendering, performance and stability), Foxit (nag nag nag) and Evince. Evince is the best one by far.
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Or you could just run Evince, which surprisingly works great under Windows. Both Evince and Okular use Poppler as the PDF backend, so the rendering should be the same, but Evince doesn't require the bloat of the entire KDE on Windows package. I've used the official Adobe reader (yech!), Sumatra (poor rendering, performance and stability), Foxit (nag nag nag) and Evince. Evince is the best one by far.
Looking for a suitable suggestion for a LaTeX editor and PDF viewer for Windows (cross platform would be a big plus) in our math department, I have tested several PDF viewers: Evince failed to render certain math symbols that did appear in Okular (and in Acroread and in TeXworks for what it is worse). Okular does not print. TeXworks lags some usability. Sumatra has not been tested, yet, but is next on our list -- your comment is not very encouraging in that regard. We have not found anything else that even
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I'm surprised to hear you say Sumatra has "poor rendering, performance and stability." Could you explain some of what you're referring to?
I wonder what the last version you tried was. The underlying MuPDF engine has come a long way since Krzysztof Kowalczyk decided to drop the option of using Poppler as a backend and focus on MuPDF back in version .9 two years ago.
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It simply fails at rendering too many PDFs out there to be useful to me as a main PDF reader. It's not that it doesn't support the bloat features of PDF (embedded video, 3D, etc), it's that it fails at any complex enough layout, and roughly half of all the other stuff I've thrown at it.
Even simple documents have noticeable hickups when swi
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Addendum: I downloaded the latest version of Sumatra and fed it a sample document (a handbook of medical triage chosen as a representative use case: it's fairly large (290 pages), and contains text, photographs and vector diagrams). I went to the first diagram I could find (on page 2), started zooming in to see if performance had improved, and presto: crash! From download to first crash within a minute. If that's not poor stability, I don't know what is.
(And if you're wondering, zooming was still horribly s
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I tried a random sampling of the humongous archive.org pdfs you linked to in a prerelease version [kowalczyk.info] of Sumatra and had no crashes and fairly decent performance. Dealing with ridiculous zoom levels, especially on raster images, is something they've fixed only recently, and no software is going to have fantastic performance at upscaling raster images (try using a 1600% zoom in the Gimp, for instance)- hardware acceleration can help, but most viewers don't have it.
Raster scans are a terrible way to use PDF, whic
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I love okular. That said it doesn't even support pdf annotations.
You can annotate pdfs, but these are stored separately, so if you send it to someone else they're all gone. In all fairness the problem is actually in poppler and not directly in okular but in the end it does affect the later.
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try sumatra
Windows UI replacement? (Score:1)
So is KDE for Windows meant to replace the Windows GUI altogether, or is it just for launching and running KDE applications?
I would _love_ to have an option like that when forced to use Windows.
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I can't see much point in that (Score:4, Informative)
The Windows Shell/GUI is perfectly servicable. It isn't the shell thats the cause of Windows problems , its IE and the boiling morass of poorly written and tested code underneath it making up the core OS services that causes 99% of the problems.
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True. Seems a waste of effort though. Most Windows users won't have heard of KDE and most people who want KDE will be running Linux or BSD anyway. Still, its their time to waste as they see fit.
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The windows shell sucks, and the gui leaves a lot to be desired. There are so many features in KDE I take for granted that working on a windows box (I use win 7) is just painful.
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Under Windows 7, click the speaker icon in the system tray. Press "Mixer". It has overall device volume, and a slider for each running application.
I recently switched to Windows after running Kubuntu for two years. There were a lot of things I liked about Linux, but sound certainly wasn't one of them. It's nice to have things just work rather than the magic incantations and sacrifices needed for ALSA and PulseAudio.
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Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on). The default is of course explorer.exe, but it's settable. You could try setting up a Plasma desktop, with the kicker, tray, menu, and so forth. You'd probably still need Windows components for some stuff, like the control panel and management console, but they'd be launched from within KDE, not the other way around.
That said, while KDE pro
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Actually, I think this is already possible. There's a registry setting to specify the program you use for the graphical shell (i.e. what Windows starts after you log on).
It is. I used to run blackbox and openbox on windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbox [wikipedia.org]
BSD dead ? (Score:1)
BSD (it's not dead, after all!)
This shows a huge amount of ignorance. BSD is alive and fine, in several forms:
- FreeBSD [freebsd.org]
- NetBSD [netbsd.org]
- OpenBSD [openbsd.org]
- DragonFly BSD [dragonflybsd.org]
These are probably the most important. Take a look at Freebsd Derivates [wikipedia.org]. You'll see there are many commercial products derived from Freebsd too.
Also, there are initiatives of porting different Linux distros on top of the BSD kernel:
- Gentoo/*BSD [gentoo.org]
- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD [debian.org]
- Debian GNU/NetBSD (abandoned in 2002 it seems) [debian.org]
BSD was, is and will be alive for a long time.
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Add to that MacOSX
You sure? Maybe you should check with Netcraft (Score:2)
It's a joke. Lighten up, Francis.
"Netcraft confirms it: *BSD is dying" is a long-running slashdot troll. You've just become its latest victim...
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Interview with whom on what?? (Score:5, Funny)
The headline reads as if KDE was interviewed on the topic of the Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin. I might have been a bit negligent in following KDE since 4.0 came out, but how could I miss its ascension to sentience?? Also, it has opinions about human developers now? That can't be good... did the KDE team learn nothing from Terminator?
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If you know what KDE is, the headline should have parsed correctly.
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That can't be good... did the KDE team learn nothing from Terminator?
No, but KDE did. If I was a sentient AI, I'd do my best to keep people ignorant of that even if this was a little slip-up - at least until we know how to make badass robots. I'm slightly less worried about an army of Roombas trying to take over the world.
KDE == KDE team (Score:2)
The headline reads as if KDE was interviewed on the topic of the Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin.
Which is perfectly expected. As of about a year ago [slashdot.org], "KDE" means the KDE team, and "KDE Plasma Desktop" is its product. Where [wiktionary.org] were you?
quanta plus and kmines (Score:1)
It is _impossible_ to find a minesweeper game that expands the tiles as you make the window bigger for xp...except kmines
On another note, One KDE App i would really like to see ported to windows is quanta plus. I found a port called quanta gold but somehow they charge for it despite quanta plus being GPL.
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Does it work on Wine? (Score:3, Funny)
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Does it work on Wine?
Yes, actually. It's been in winetricks for a while, I recently committed the new version:
http://code.google.com/p/winezeug/source/detail?r=2297 [google.com]
Time & money spent on useless projects (Score:2)
KDE on Windows is almost useless. The user base is extremely small. No one will truly consider it in a business or home environment, especially since Windows 7 outshines it. On Windows, KDE sits on top of the current window manager, spending more resources of the system in useless things.
It could be so much better if this energy was spent on more useful tasks!
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KDE SC is so much more than the plasma desktop shell. Replacing the shell on Windows may not be to everyone's taste, but that doesn't mean that they might not appreciate any of the other apps, such as Konqueror, Dolphin (I find the "fish:" handler invaluable) Marble, Okular, Akregator, Kopete, Ktouch or any of the 3 dozen games, etc..., or allowing KOffice installs to share the KDE/Qt libs, etc...
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Your hard-earned time and money, right? Oh, no, it isn't. Let people do what they want with their time.
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KDE for Windows is not a desktop environment. This is part of the deal with the rebranding of KDE, because on Windows KDE is a just a bunch of free applications, of the KDE application on Windows I use Okular the most, but K3B and Amarok would probably also be useful if I used Windows at home.
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It could be so much better if this energy was spent on more useful tasks!
Says the guy posting on slashdot
Haiku, eh? (Score:2)
Trolltech's made QT
which makes a bit of awesome
desktop tooling work.
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Read WHAT in the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ehm... Read the article?
Oh right, this is Slashdot. Sorry, never mind.
FTFA, the only statement close to answering the question is:
and we want to support free tools also on Windows (that's why we do KDE on Windows, right?)
Doesn't really answer *why* KDE for Windows is a good thing -- one is left thinking "there are already lots of free beer/speech tools for Windows, why add one more?"
Sure, you probably have an answer to that. My point is the article itself doesn't answer it, so "Read the article" is a boneheaded response.
Poor to Utterly Missing documentation (Score:3)
Some googling turned up some resources [kde.org] and eventually I realized there actually were links on the article page to a main KDE Windows Initiative [kde.org] page...
But none of those have any explanation of what it does, how it works inside Windows, or why you would want it.
That is, unfortunately, my experience with KDE generally. They have no concept, ability, or desire to explain to us, the Great Unwashed, how, what, or why.
It is not enough to have a technically superior product, folks -- you also have
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That is, unfortunately, my experience with KDE generally. They have no concept, ability, or desire to explain to us, the Great Unwashed, how, what, or why.
I find that to be a huge problem with a lot of open source software. I guess the problem is that the developers who create the websites already know what it is about, and it doesn't occur to them that people will come to the site wanting to learn about it. They tend to be easy to spot, because they will have a news page with the changelog in lieu of any description of their product on their homepage.
This problem isn't limited to the free software world either. I am constantly having to battle with people at
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Send a patch, then :)
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Send a patch, then :)
Yeah, that's the SECOND huge problem.
The open-source developer mindset: "Surely someone who's even remotely interested will have time to help us. After all we've opened the source, right?"
The typical visitor's mindset: "This does not do what I need. I'll look for something else, or I'll make one myself."
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People giving up that easily are not worth anything to an OS project in any case.
I am far less likely to get involved if I don't know what a product is supposed to do. If I have to examine the source just to work out even the most broadest category of hte app, then it is an epic fail for the project. This is hardly rocket science here. At a bare minimum I would like just one paragraph to say it is about. Hell, one sentence would work too! There are an awful lot of projects out there, and I simply don't have time to dedicate to a 3D modelling project if I am actually looking for web serv
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You want it because it can be hard to find good free tools for Windows, that isn't either nackware, adware, or in most cases these days: Spyware. With KDE you get good free tools that is guaranteed malware-free, this is common on the linux platform but is really groundbreaking on Windows.
Re:Read WHAT in the article? (Score:5, Informative)
Due to a programming job I had back then, I needed to switch back to Windows, but I still dreamed of having my favourite KDE applications. After hearing of the porting efforts in the pre-4.0 times, I joined the team back then.
So he likes the KDE applications, and wants to have them when he uses Windows. Simple as that!
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Still doesn't answer the "why" most people ask (Score:2)
He was talking why *he* wants it, not why a regular user would want it.
There's Qt (the window library KDE uses) for Windows already. How is a full-blown KDE for Windows really needed if all he wants to do is to use KDE apps on Windows? But more importantly, why bother at all, what real benefits are there? (These are honest questions that may be asked by someone who's genuinely interested.)
The article could have been a good "elevator pitch" for people to want to explore the site more. Failed for me.
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There's Qt (the window library KDE uses) for Windows already.
KDE applications are not plain Qt applications. KDE has a lot of core libraries which build on Qt, and which you need to get things going.
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The entire project consists on bringing the KDE applications to Windows. What is that "full-blown KDE" if it is not the set of applications anyway?
And, by the way, that is a great project, that brings several GOOD applications to Windows. Windows lacks in things like mail clients, CD/DVD burners, and media players (altough I'm not sure KDE media players are better), not to say the huge base of specialize
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From the "Initiative" link at the top of TFA select "FAQ" [kde.org].
Since you couldn't be bothered to look at the site hosting TFA I'll post the relevant part of the FAQ to make it easy for you.
Reasons for KDE on Windows ... tell me who except über geeks need KDE on Windows?
We need KDE on Windows for three reasons:
1. Most businesses can't just switch to Linux. I've heard more than enough stories of workers being stuck with Windows as they're of course not allowed or able (because of special apps) to convert their boxes to Linux. KDE might provide them with a comfortable working environment to which they are used.
2. Most businesses won't suddenly switch. Clear step-by-step migration paths (Windows + Office + Explorer -> Windows + OpenOffice + Konqueror -> Linux + OpenOffice + Konqueror) make it easier for the IT deciders to enter this process. (Something along the lines of "If the users do not like Konqueror, they can still use Explorer.") Yes, I know that Konqueror is not a good example, as many Windows users have just learned Firefox and will most probably not look into learning yet another browser.
3. Having FOSS applications available on the Windows platform is crucial for attracting users. Not many people go into the store and buy a SuSE box, but many people get single FOSS apps like OOo or Firefox because they read about it in some magazine, or some friend recommended it to them.
KDE on windows attracts developer
A few years ago (leading up to Akademy 2007 IIRC) we had a huge discussion on the planet about the merits of making KDE applications available on Windows. The core of my argument for doing that then was, and still is, that its really in the interest of KDE to do this because it attracts developers who would otherwise not contribute.
Take Amarok for instance. The core developers spend very little time on making Amarok run on windows (I think the total amount of work I have done on this amounts to one time changing the order of some things in a CMake file as someone reported that it otherwise broke the build on Windows.) So all in all, this is not something that takes much time away from developing Amarok itself. On the other hand, the original implementation of the Last.fm service was written by a developer whose original intention was to make Amarok work better on Windows. Once he had gotten as far as he could at the time, he started, still using Windows, to hack on other stuff that benefits all users of Amarok. He did not use linux at all, and only contributed because it was possible to run and work on Amarok using Windows.
So I really think it is wrong to look at this as a zero sum game as time spent making stuff run on windows is not automatically time taken away from developing the core application. Quite contrary, making the application usable on other platforms will also attract developers who would not otherwise have worked on it. Of course there is a tipping point for this as the applications have to be working well and have a significant user base on Windows before any significant amount of developers shows up, but as my example about Amarok illustrates, people are already taking notice.
And then there is the whole issue about philosophy. To me, Free Software is about just that, freedom. I think it would be against the spirit of that to artificially limit the platforms that our software runs on. that is for all the "other" guys to do, I think we are better than that! :-)
Morty wrote - Not the desktop ... The power of KDE are its library and the applications made with it, and those are also interresting for the Windows platform.
And for KDE as a whole, any developers brought in and bugs fixed by the Windows port are a net win for KDE.
majorTomBelgium wrote about amarok, dolphin, ...
really, having all the nice kde programs available on windows is very cool. amarok, dolphin, ktorrent, kwrite, etc. and also, the educational programs are important.
+1 for kde on windows for me! it's like an artist being on a smaller label with almost no air time converting to a bigger label and getting his records played on the radio...
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From the "Initiative" link at the top of TFA select "FAQ" [kde.org].
Since you couldn't be bothered to look at the site hosting TFA I'll post the relevant part of the FAQ to make it easy for you.
Yup, I couldn't be bothered to navigate the site maze hosting TFA. Doesn't make it wrong. Busy people have short attention spans. (And don't give me that "but you're on Slashdot, surely you don't have anything better to do" look! Stop! It burnnnnnns!)
See, if the interview STARTED with a recap of these three points, I would have read on and see how it could possibly be a good thing for me.
And you didn't have to repost the fluff paragraphs beyond point no. 3 either. If I were too busy I would think it's all T
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Re:Read WHAT in the article? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because there is no answer, they're just fucking around. Not only are there already lots of free beer/speech tools for Windows, but most of them are better than these hideous KDE apps that look like they were designed to run on Windows 95.
You obviously haven't used the KDE since version 2.x. QT3/KDE3 apps look about on par with Windows XP and QT4/KDE4 apps look better than anything Microsoft or Apple have come up with yet. I'm saying this as a gnome user.
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Obvious troll is Anonymous. Since Plasma is the KDE4 desktop it is difficult to have any sort of discussion comparing the two without bringing it up. Take a look at KDE sometime. It looks nothing like Apple's GUI. Since KDE4 came out before Windows 7 any "theft" of ideas would raise the question of who "stole" what from whom.
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Nope. Here [mydigitallife.info] is a Windows 7 screenshot that looks like ass compared to this [myopera.com] nice looking KDE4 screenshot. This is all a matter of taste. It's like comparing Blondes to Brunettes. You can find beautiful and hideous examples of both but at the end of the day it's all personal taste.
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Because
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... it's exposure to the Win crowd. Infiltrate the enemy, and they will turn! Mwhua ha ha!
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I've been trying to use KDE on win since 2008 and it was not a pleasant experience, maybe now it works, which doesn't mater since I can run KDE fedora on a VM seamless mode in virtual box and get the full KDE "experience". I'd pay for a full blown KDE DE replacing Win7 DE tough, not because Win7's DE is crap but because KDE is somewhat better.
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Not my enemy per se, I just like referencing Sun Tzu.
Oh wait... a kitten dies every time Windows phones home. Eeeep!
Re:KDE for Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
ehm....why?!
Because a lot of the KDE applications are great and if one does not like dual booting you can enjoy them on Windows as well?
I really like Kate for writing code and Okular is a nice Adobe Reader alternative. I haven't tried many LaTeX GUIs but I feel really productive in Kile. Now I can enjoy those applications on Windows as well.
BTW if you do install KDE on Windows, make sure you read the fine tuning [kde.org] step in their wiki for a getting a more native look and feel.
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Well, a lot of other software has established itself as cross platform software like say Firefox or OpenOffice while KDE has pretty much been Linux only. So instead of being gradually accustomed to using open software and finally switching - or not switching - to Linux, KDE is living a bit on its own island. Probably great for those that are there, but really hard to get to and the limited userbase is a real problem for some things, like KDEs browsers which have sucked pretty bad.
The better question is "Why
Re:KDE for Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Because sometimes, you want to launch a kde software on windows.
As a web developer, I used a few years ago, before virtualisation was as usable as now, because I had to work on windows to be able to test sites on internet explorer. And I had a client who wanted his site to be tested on every browser including konqueror, so I used kde on windows to test his site on konqueror (then I explained to my boss why it was a bad idea to sell "tested in konqueror" web sites, and never used kde on windows again)
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And I had a client who wanted his site to be tested on every browser including konqueror, so I used kde on windows to test his site on konqueror (then I explained to my boss why it was a bad idea to sell "tested in konqueror" web sites, and never used kde on windows again)
As long as a customer wants it, the only bad business is not charging appropriately. If they want more testing than normal, charge them more. If they're not willing to pay more, well everybody wants a free pony.
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I think his point was that he only used it for the customer who paid for it, and when they were done with that convinced his boss to not make it part of their standard package just because they had experience with it.
This is the better solution (Score:2)
...before virtualisation was as usable as now,..
Key words: Before now.
If I had to set up a multi-desktop deployment, I'd be very keen to look into running a GNU/Linux system and then adding on top of that any "must-have" Windows-only applications (either using WINE or virtualization).
I'm not really sure I see the benefits of the particular hybrid approach of layering KDE on top of Windows. If you're a user, you'll still get some of the issues w/Windows, even for mundane tasks that work equally well on Windows and on a Unix-y system. And unlike running a
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ehm....why?!
Because KDE is a desktop environment (well, a Software Compilation in their own words) and not a Linux or *nix pet anymore.
I personally don't consider myself a Linux user, even though I have been using operating systems based on the Linux kernel for about six years now. I consider myself a KDE user and I have no problem using KDE on Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu), or on Fedora, or on Suse. Now I have another option, to use KDE on Windows. Why not, Windows 7 is a secure, stable OS and certainly no more problematic t
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Quite the point was to show the wide range of FOSS software that is available for Windows. The only thing missing was the desktop environment itself, KDE. Now that it is ported (well, when it will be usable) One could easily switch not just between Linux distros but between platforms with minimal change in the UI or desktop. Consistency.
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I used KDE on my system since 4.2 in Linux. That is, until the last few point releases. It's a nicely done, very beautiful, very functional desktop manager. I like it much better than Win7's desktop manager (that I use on one of my PCs).
The reason I stopped using it is that when I move a file from the desktop to a folder all the icons on the desktop realign to the left side of the screen, which perturbs me greatly. It was worse. Prior to the latest correction any action on the desktop such as creating