KDE Rocks

Over the past four years I’ve used both KDE & Gnome, but I’ve typically gravitated towards Gnome. ……that is until I played w/ the controversial Gnome Shell. Get me out of here! Watch the screencasts

Of course I didn’t really like KDE 4 when it first came out either. ….maybe it’s my “inner old-man” coming through that makes me resistant to change. I’ll admit that it’s entirely possible that I’ll warm up to the concept, but right now Gnome Shell looks and feels pretty awkward. I really hope they make it an option that can be disabled.

Enter KDE:

Anyway, I’ve been curious about giving KDE another shot recently so after my Karmic upgrade was running terrible, I decided to give Kubuntu a shot. It is AWESOME. What a beautiful desktop; I was really blown away.

Here are the issues I have w/ the current state of KDE:

  • Network Manager sucks – I couldn’t connect to my hidden WPA2 wireless network @ home. Also the openvpn component had problems w/ Kwallet. I ended up running gnome’s network manager.
  • No native SOCKs proxy – I believe this was included w/ KDE 3.X (not 100%) hopefully this will be added sooner than later.
  • Odd keyboard shortcuts – I qualify this by saying odd= I’m not used to it. Luckily everything is tweakable (which is often one of the main criticisms of KDE) so I was able to set it back to a Gnome-ish feel.
  • Korganize lacks simple Google Calendar setup. :(

At any rate, I have moved almost all of my boxes to Fedora 12 now, and one of the things I really like about their KDE distro is it defaults to gnome’s network manager. I’m going to stick w/ Gnome on my laptop for now because of the SOCKs issue, but for the time being I consider my self a KDE man and I’m loving my office PC.