switching to KDE

Since switching to Linux (about three years ago) I have been mostly using Gnome as my GUI of choice because that is what the people around me were using so if I had any questions, I could ask them. It worked quite well for me and I particularly liked apps like Evolution, Gnumeric, Mr Project,.... However I have mostly been using Linux as a bootstrap for OpenOffice, Mozilla, TextMaker (I really, really like the Outline function) and Oracle 9i as a tool for studying for the OCP.

In the last few months I have been venturing out and customizing/tweaking how applications launched, and configuring the menu bar,... and the more I tweaked, the more I started getting slightly put off at Gnome. I knew that all the applications I use (OpenOffice, Mozilla,...) would run just fine under KDE so I figured I might as well give it a shot.

After using KDE for the past two weeks on my RedHat 9 box, I'm starting to realize what I have been missing. I'm not tyring to put down Gnome, I'm just impressed by KDE 3.1. The application Konqueror, a web browser and file manager (kinda like Windows Explorer combined with IE, sans the virus, crashing, and bloat) is truly amazing. I'm really looking forward to the day when Konqueror is officially released for MacOSX, hopefully it will not be too long now that they have a running proto-type.

Another KDE based application set that I'm intrigued by is KOffice which appears to have some additional features then OpenOffice and runs faster then OpenOffice. The next version of KOffice (1.3) will be able to read OpenOffice files and hopefully also be released for MacOSX in the not too distant future. I'm not sure which Office app I'll use the most, I'm leaning toward OpenOffice because it runs on Windows (which I still have to deal with) and I know the application quite well.

Having said all this, Gnome is a very nice GUI that is serving the Linux or BSD desktop effort very well and it is a very nice problem to have that I have to choose between Gnome & KDE for my GUI/Window Manager. It is wonderful that I have to choose between office suites like OpenOffice and KOffice. It is very nice that these two office suites have to compete against two very good word processing programs (AbiWord and TextMaker) and a very nice spreadsheet app (Gnumeric).

The key part about all this competition is that all this applications are able (or will shortly) to read and write to each others file formats. If KOffice starts 'winning' I can easily switch over and still be able to read all my data with out issue. If Gnome starts putting together a feature set that beats KDE, I can move back with very little pain. If I buy a MacOSX laptop in a year I can copy my data over with minimal fuss and can keep my Linux workstation. Which for the foreseeable future, will be running KDE.