KDE4 for newbies and seniors
Enjoyed the article. Kinda thing Ill be passing on to friends who want to know more.
Im the kind of guy who likes things my way not someone elses (I hate all defaults and the 4.3 light scheme even more but that's ok, It takes 3 secs to change Air theme to Slim Glow or Glassified or others) so 4.3 finally does everything I need it to.
4.2 was the one I found ready for my family and inlaws but 4.3 fixes a few nagging things.
I now have 5 people in my extended family who are using KDE4.2 who are over 70 and 3 never touched a computer and KDE was easy for them ti pick up..
One of the reasons is I can customize the desktop to my needs and also to the needs of seniors (hint: make everything BIG!!)... there is no one desktop look..
One more thing: we had a installfest at our local LUG last week and I had two identical laptops running the latest Ubuntu and Kubuntu side by side and we asked people who tried them which ones they preferred and felt more at ease.
Kubuntu was the overwhelming favorite. 78%.
People kept asking if the other was some kind of old Win95 clone and the comments of fugly were many.
This of course is not scientific but with the 25+ installs I have done on my own (family, friends, coworkers whom Ive installed PCLinuxOS and now Mandriva 2009) I used to offer two live CD's (old hardware automatically was given XCFE), I also have about 75-85% KDE numbers so i wasnt surprised.
I used E17 and XCFE as well but KDE4.3 is an absolute pleasure to use.
PCLinuxOS was the best 3.5 I used for friends and newbies (Im a Gentoo guy so taht wasnt really an option) and Mandriva 2009 is right now the best KDE4 Ive used but to be honest the differences are there for power user because more than a few people will mention that 'they all look the same'.
Which is true.
The real question when choosing a Linux distro isnt which distro to use but which desktop.
The desktop choice is the big one, the distro choice (using the same desktop) is just semantics for geeks.
Id like to finish off with some numbers that were given with teh release of KDE4.3:
"The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in..."
Look at those numbers and remember the numbnuts who cried that teh devs didnt listen to the users. Remember them because you wont hear any mea culpas like the (half assed) one SVJN gave recently after he had hysterically cried out for a 3.5 fork.
I worked on 2-3 small projects over the years and I cant even comprehend the organizational demands of 10,000 bugs, 2,000 feature, 63,000 changes in 6 months.
That is just phenomenal.
Just like the desktop.