Be free. Today.

Very well, I must confess. File management is an everyday task — and most file managers get it right. What they usually don’t get right is the ability to do advanced things in an intuitive and discoverable way. Dolphin does — it successfully merges a basic file management interface with the most-requested advanced features, and in a non-obtrusive way.

Now, it’s been three weeks since I’ve been using Dolphin (the KDE 3 version) exclusively. As it turns out, Dolphin is quite versatile (if a bit more flickery than Konqueror 3) and faster as well. My only caveat was that I had to manually associate the inode/directory MIME type to get it to take over directory browsing.

But today, for the purposes of this review, it’s Dolphin 4 all the way.

How Dolphin starts up

There’s nothing magical about Dolphin. Picture a Windows Explorer folder view (with the side panel, not the side tree). Picture a Nautilus browse folder. That’s how Dolphin looks like:

Of course, Dolphin has the ability to show previews like any other file manager. If you want it to show previews, you just hit the big Previews button, and presto:

Network transparency

Of course, Dolphin wouldn’t be part of KDE if it didn’t put to use the fantastic KIO technology. KIO is a way for applicatios to request and send data to local and remote file systems. Any application that uses KIO gets two big advantages:

1. It becomes asynchronous. File operations never hang, because things happen upon notifications instead of waiting for them to happen.
2. It gains the ability to access data anywhere in the world, through any popular protocol (HTTP, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, SSH and much more).

And Dolphin is no exception. However, I didn’t test KIO remoting via SFTP on Dolphin 4, so you’re just gonna have to take my word for it. It’s okay — I use it every day in Dolphin 3.

It hangs. Hard. But, well, it’s a beta

Of course, it wouldn’t be a beta if it didn’t hang

Let’s continue to explore what’s new in the (admittedly rather boring) file management world.

I’ve been following KDE since KDE 1.1 was released — in fact, back in the day, I used to compile KDE from source. Being the grownup that I am today, I no longer have the time to indulge in days-long compilation — instant gratification is the name of the game for me nowadays. Nevertheless, installing KDE betas has always been an interesting experience for me.

Evidently, I rejoiced when I discovered that Kubuntu is carrying the latest betas of KDE 4. After following the instructions on the aforementioned page, and installing the kde4base-dev package, I started to screencap and document the newest release.

There’s a new article called A cursory look into KDE 4 file management: Dolphin beta to go along this article. Make sure you check it out afterwards!

First impressions

I took home two distinct impressions:

1. KDE 4 started up faster than KDE 3 on my system.
2. There’s no flicker. KDE 3 applications used to flicker all the time. KDE 4 apps don’t anymore.

Long live Trolltech and Qt4 — I understand it’s in no small part responsible for these dramatic improvements.

For now, here are some key points to notice:

• It’s broken. If you know your way around a computer, you might be able to take advantage of it (so-to-speak).
• It’s gorgeous and interesting.
• It’s not gonna eat your configuration, since it uses a separate configuration directory. So it’s generally safe.
• It’s a big download. Dialup need not apply.

It’s all horribly broken right now

That’s right. KDE 4 starts up half-drunk and half-broken. In my opinion, this beta is (judging from the developmental stage) not really a beta but rather closer to alpha quality.

I don’t mind. KDE has always rocked, and even in its utter brokenness, it’s still awesome:

These first screenshots show you how KDE starts up. The picture of the devs in the splash screen is a nice touch! And the desktop appears unusually clean. That would be a good thing, except for the glaring absence of a menu with which to launch applications. All my attempts to add one were futile.

Plasma

KDE abandons the “desktop-as-scratch-folder” metaphor. It also abandons the notion of a panel separate from the desktop (Kicker’s dead. Long live Kicker damnit!.). Don’t be fooled — there is a panel as you can see in the screenshots. It’s just that now any object you want to place on the desktop can also be placed on the panel, and viceversa. This concept is called Plasma, and while it’s still rough on the edges, it’s a true revolution.

Let’s take a look at the desktop toolbox — where Plasma applets dwell before being added:

After toying around with the toolbox, these are a few examples of what I got:

Interesting, huh? The picture frame looks awesome both in concept and in real life.

My answer: yes, categorically.

The open source advantage: why you should be using open source applications

Well, there are at least two reasons:

1. Open source applications tend to be higher-quality. I don’t want to generalize, because I’ve test-driven tons of immature open source applications, but a great portion of them are very high-quality, and tend to improve with time, since everyone can “pitch in” and help develop applications further.
2. They’re (usually) free. Why pay money to “the man”, when you can save money and do better?
3. They respect standards better. You can easily move to Linux or other operating systems, because they respect standards and save their information in easy-to-use, easy-to-backup, easy-to-move file formats.

So, which applications?

Open source applications for Microsoft Windows number in the thousands. The most widely used have gotten great amounts of press coverage, are mature, stable and well-known:

• OpenOffice.org: this Microsoft Office killer has nearly everything to be the next king in office-suite land.
• Mozilla Firefox: unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past 5 years, it’s hard to believe you haven’t heard about it. Plainly said, it’s the best Web browser, ever.
• The VideoLAN client: it’s a straightforward, no-frills, fast media player. The amazing thing about VLC is that it supports lots and lots of video and audio formats — you can even play Flash videos with it(for example, downloaded from YouTube with the VideoDownloader Firefox plugin).
• Azureus: downloading torrents in your computer? Azureus is the best there is for Windows.

Chances are, you’re already using open source applications in your computer. Note I said applications — some portions of Microsoft Windows are direct descendants of other open source operating systems (such as FreeBSD). But the short list doesn’t stop there.

Where do I get them?

Three distinct projects aim to bring lots of originally-Linux open source applications to Windows:

1. Open Source Windows. Billed as This is the best Windows software that we know of. No adware, no spyware, just good software., it’s absolutely on the spot.
2. TheOpenCD. Instead of having to download each application, you can simply download the CD and start test driving them. Obviously, you can copy the CD as many times as you like, and give it to acquaintances, friends and family.
3. PortableApps. If you have an USB thumb drive, you’ll find immense value in this project; if you’re on the road, you no longer need to install and configure each application on the computer you’re about to use — just install them once in your thumb druve, then plug it on any Windows computer.

And the march to Windows continues!

KDE on Windows! Replace your Windows Explorer with a much more powerful desktop environment!

Actually, what gets me even more excited is the fact that Amarok, the best music player/manager ever to see the light, is going to be available on Windows as well. Amarok cleanly blows iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp out of the water.

I’ve open sourced my applications… what next?

Run them for a couple of days, maybe two weeks, and avoid running the applications they replaced (Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and so forth).

Get comfortable with them. Most likely, you’ll be using them in Linux too. Take this opportunity to learn, effortlessly, more about computing. No one ever complained when they saw a résumé and noticed extra computing experience, right?

Finally, install Linux. I recommend KUbuntu, because it’s more similar to Windows than regular Ubuntu. Download the live CD, burn it to a CD, then boot from the CD. Run it for a while, see if you like it, install it — once you’ve installed it to your computer, you can use Adept (included in KUbuntu) to install your beloved open source applications.

Did I mention installing applications on KUbuntu is much easier than on Windows?

More Linux questions?

Have a Linux question? Why don’t you drop by our Month of Linux Answers and leave your question as a comment? I’ll get to it right away :-).

And it’s surprisingly good. After a decade of using RPM-based distributions (first Red Hat 5.2, then Mandrake, then Red Hat 9, then Fedora), I’m now using a Debian-based distro.

And so, andrea (my previous Linux installation) is no longer. Gabriela (this KUbuntu deployment) took its place.

So what’s different?

Package management

Adept is used to install and remove packages. It’s dramatically faster than Smart and Yum, the two solutions I had been using in Fedora. It uses way less memory. Honest, it’s an order of magnitude faster.

Responsiveness and performance

Having my usual stack of applications open (tons of Konqueror windows, aKregator, Evolution, Valknut, KTorrent, KGet, gtk-gnutella, Amarok) is no longer a recipe for disaster. It runs smoothly. It doesn’t get memory-starved. Mind you, this computer has only 768 MB of RAM.

It certainly boots faster too (not that it matters, since I tend to go for weeks without rebooting).

Looks

The default KUbuntu theme is very elegant. It resembles Plastik, but better.

Software availability

All of the applications I had installed throughout the years are available for KUbuntu. Installing them took a couple of hours only, and absolutely no intervention during installation (except for the Flash player license agreement).

Hardware

All of my hardware is working now — including one network card that didn’t work before.

The network manager application is faster and easier to use than Fedora’s.

Configuration

The configuration center is complete. It’s more complete than Fedora’s, and it feels very well integrated in the operating system.

Power management

I couldn’t make hibernation work. The computer would hibernate alright; but, on boot, the hard disk light would stay on, and the grub prompt would hang for a fairly long time. I know for a fact that hibernating a computer cannot physically damage a hard disk, but shivers ran down my spine for quite long — especially considering I currently don’t have any backups, and I don’t want to lose my 80 GB, 15.000 track music collection I have painstakingly organized by hand.

Sudo!

Sudo make me a sandwich! After years of having to type su followed by a password, it’s refreshing only to have to prepend sudo and typing the password only once.

You should change too

There’s a reason why the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions is the most popular now. It’s simply superior.

Give it a try today. After the (admittedly) long download of the live CD, you can try it without touching your hard disk… then take the plunge and install it.

Hi there, LinuxToday readership. Welcome. Let me steal ten seconds of your time and ask you to Digg this article. This site is undergoing a Digg traffic storm as I write this, and I’d love to see if it can handle two simultaneous storms. Thanks. Now, back to our regular programming…

One of the most hotly debated topics about the Internet today is, without a doubt, BitTorrent: the most popular peer-to-peer network protocol today. Why is it controversial? Because clients (applications) for BitTorrent file transfer proved to be first choice of people sharing and downloading movies and music from the Internet.

Today, it’s almost unimaginable not to own a BitTorrent client. And KDE users don’t need to resort to third-party clients, because there’s one BitTorrent client that fits snugly into their desktops: KTorrent.

Instead of exploring the trite angle of copyright infringement myself, this time I give you an interview with the men behind the program: Joris Guisson and Ivan Vasić. They’ve done an awesome job, so the least they deserve is public recognition — and we’re pleased to have them as guests today.

So, without further ado, the next page has the interview.

:: Reviews : Ubuntu Goes Low Spec! (found here) introduced me to the new project called Ubuntu Lite.

What’s Ubuntu Lite? It’s a new Linux distribution. Its goal is to make a usable Linux-based system that works on 128 MB of RAM. How they plan to achieve this goal seems straightforward: around “lightweight” applications.

And it’s is exactly the wrong way to build a low-footprint distribution. Why?

Saving pennies, squandering dollars

First, the applications and building blocks chosen are simpler. In other words, they have less functionality than the two standard behemoths: KDE and GNOME.

Say it out loud: they’re building a cripple from the outset. It will never be as functional as any environment that comes with either KDE or GNOME.

Does that lead to a low memory footprint?

Second, the project is motivated by an underlying assumption: using simpler, heterogenous applications yields less memory usage.

This assumption is wrong. A recent study by Lubos Lunak completely disproved it. Chief findings of the study:

1. the system with heterogeneous applications (Xubuntu, promoted as the ‘lightweight’ variant of Ubuntu) did boot up into less memory usage;
2. but, as soon as any useful applications were opened, Xubuntu lost the war against both KDE and GNOME

There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation to this: both GNOME and (to a larger extent) KDE share much more code than the heterogeneous applications in Xubuntu. More shared code equals a larger footprint without open applications, but an incrementally appreciable benefit when real users are actually using the machines. Especially, if I may remind you, in terminal services settings.

Low-hanging fruit

Sure. I know one type of low-hanging fruit. Compile every application and library using the gcc -Os flag. It makes smaller binaries, which are faster to read from disk, and take (a bit) less memory. The savings should add up to about 10-20 MB of RAM, according to my completely unscientific estimates.

There’s another. Disable functionality (by properly configuring the applications before compilation). I’m not sure this is the route to take.

After that, any gains become exponentially harder.

Into the future

Fortunately, all is not despair. After the study was completed, it underwent wide distribution on the Internet. That study was directly responsible for cementing the belief on shared code.

Today, both KDE and GNOME are more committed than ever on the agenda of sharing code, and optimizing this very shared code can yield significant benefits. There are big gains lurking in all that shared code, and it’s yours for the taking. It’s just a matter of applying freely available tools and the scientific method. Instead of squandering time placing decals on your hot rod, why not try some real software tuning?

As for Ubuntu Lite: I just hope the Ubuntu Lite guys realized, independently, what you just read, and surprise us with newer ideas.

Am I crazy?

The idea behind this feature request is quite simple: KDE applications should be ’service-enabled’.

KDE already includes an extremely rich plethora of IPC and reusability mechanisms. It would be completely fair to say that KDE is the single most remotable and serviceable desktop environment ever invented. Except their applications’ outputs cannot be used (without jumping through a lot of hoops).

An example drawn from personal experience: I use Subversion heavily. I have a couple of KDissert diagrams pertaining to a project of mine. I regularly use Kompare and Web repository tools such as Trac to visually audit changes to a project.

Oh, how much would I love for these tools to support some sort of visual diff for non-text images! Only it is impossible to implement without a way to remote GUI applications such as KDissert so that they produce graphical output.

Sure, a Frankestein concoction of a memory buffer-based X server could work. But that’s subpar because we want the entire printable object to be exported, without user interface elements. Plus, the latest Qt library does not require an X connection, so there’s one fewer reason KDE applications could not be used as standalone command-line tools.

Of course, this could all be implemented as a per-application feature. For example, there’s a command-line application that uses KHTML internally to screenshot a Web page. That’s all nice and great, but I’m aiming for something greater here: to establish this ‘command-line switch’ as a standard protocol and to minimize developer takeup time. Hence the idea of implementing this as a --renderToImage switch.

That’ll make my Subversion diffs a whole lot more entertaining.

The answer’s no. I took the time to produce a small showcase of what modern Linux is capable of. This is, honestly, my typical (non-work) computing session, in 90 seconds. The cool Linux things you’re about to see will leave you drooling:

And here’s the link to the better-quality version (DivX codec needed to view).

What’s on the video

This video showcases a demo of my typical computing session (really!). The video makes my computer looks fast; it’s not (see below). It’s actually “fast-forwarded” because the computer can’t capture 10 frames per second. However, even with all apps open simultaneously, it’s perfectly usable.

The sidebar on the video illustrates what’s being showcased at each moment:

• Window management and effects are provided by Beryl.
• The Matrix effect is simply the GLMatrix screensaver that comes with Linux xscreensaver, colorkeyed in real time onto the screen with xwinwrap.
• The applications are:
  • Amarok: the best music player ever
  • KDissert: a fabulous dissertation writer and mind mapper
  • Akregator: I’ve never had to go to a single Web site to read news again
  • The universal sidebar in KDE
  • Konqueror, in Web browser mode
  • Kopete: my favorite multi-system chat application
  • KTorrent: how else did you think I get all the music on my library?
  • MPlayer: it’s playing snips from an episode of Prison Break
  • KSysGuard: it lets me keep an eye on Rudd-O.com’s health at all times
  • xvidcap: it makes a cameo appearance during the first seconds of the video

The artwork on the top of the cube was created with Inkscape.

And the music is a short edit I made of The world is mine (F*** me I’m famous remix) by David Guetta, available in the album RTL 2 I love house, disc 1. I used Ardour to produce this edit.

The making of The coolness factor of Linux

All in all, this video took about 4 hours to make, including the time to install and set the required software up. Here’s the step-by-step lowdown:

1. Used xvidcap to record the video at 10 frames per second into an MPEG file.
2. Used Kino to find out a suitable end frame for the video. That way I can encode only from the start to a certain frame.
3. Used mencoder to scale and encode the MPEG movie into a DivX AVI file. This is the command line: mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:v4mv:autoaspect test-0000.mpeg -o youtube.avi -frames 950 -vf scale=320:240
4. Used Ardour to create a mini-mix of The world is mine, for the audio track.
5. Used mencoder to encode the audio and copy the DivX file into the final DivX video. This is the command line: mencoder youtube.avi -audiofile track.mp3 -oac mp3lame -ovc copy -o final.avi
6. Uploaded the final video to YouTube.
7. Uploaded the final video to my Web site.
8. Wrote this post.

All done with Free Software. Free as in beer, Free as in freedom. Most remarkably, all software was installed using packages specifically done for Fedora Core… this proves useful applications are available to install by point-and-click. And I hate compiling from source.

Some software used here is patent-encumbered. This doesn’t apply to my country, though.

The hardware powering this video

Nothing special, really. If anything, it’s very old. It couldn’t even capture 10 frames per second in real-time! Thus, the video is kind of “fast”. Here are the specs:

• a GeForce 2 MX. Beryl runs slowly because of it. It also runs slowly because I told it to run only at 10 FPS.
• 768 MB of RAM. The system swapped heavily because of all the loaded applications.
• a lowly 3-year-old Athlon XP 1.5 GHz

This time, I’ll exercise my mind by coming up with three honest reasons not to use KDE. Of course, this is not an original idea either, since it was inspired by Three reasons not to use GNOME — I tend to derive my inspiration from third parties. Since I’m a bit drunk, I won’t make any promises as to glaring style or logical errors, but I’ll try and keep my spelling in line. And, without further ado, let’s get on with it:

Web browsing

Everyone who uses KDE has used Konqueror, in one way or the other — most probably in its file manager role. And, while Konqueror excels at being a versatile file manager, Web browsing can sometimes be a pain.

Let’s face it: a lot of Web sites with JavaScript have serious bugs. I’m going to go out on a limb and state something that should be fairly obvious: JavaScript encourages sloppy code. And there’s a lot of sloppiness out there in the big World Wide Web:

• Web sites that contain IE-isms.
• Web sites that use language/runtime features without checking if they’re available first.
• Web sites that check for and cater to both IE and Firefox, but no other browser.

Guess what: usually, it’s both Konqueror and Safari (which share code) the ones that are left out in the code. I, for one, cannot use my bank’s Web extranet.

Of course, there’s Firefox. All I have to do is drag the URL of the problematic site onto my panel’s Firefox icon, and up comes Firefox, ready to challenge the evil forces of Web proprietarianism and imbecility. Usually, that does the trick.

I’m fully aware this is not really a KDE or Konqueror issue, but rather the Web site author’s fault. But whom do you think is going to take the heat for failing to render buggy Web sites properly? In about 99.9% (numbers pulled out of my ass), it’s Konqueror instead of the buggy site.

And here’s a valuable suggestion: Konqueror should complain loudly when it encounters a JS bug. Konqueror should boldly and arrogantly state in uncompromising terms: This Web site is broken, and add a short explanation — understandable by non-techies — as to why this could happen. At the very least, this kind of message motivates users ro report broken Web sites. Oh, did I mention that the explanation should warn users about lame Web masters that say “Konqueror is unsupported”?

Clutter

There. I said it. Make a non-techie user visit the KDE control center. It’s an exercise in fun at the expense of others. Yes, there are navigation aids — such as the search box atop of the sidebar — but they just don’t cut it. Just open any control center applet and you’ll find a myriad options, some of which don’t have context-sensitive help aids. Never mind that the question mark in the titlebar is so inconspicuous as to being close to undiscoverable.

Moreover:

• The wording of most options is fairly technical.
• Some options can be nuked by clever programming. It’s all a matter of never asking users to choose when the computer can make an informed decision. By the way, kudos to the KDE team for nuking KPersonalizer in KDE4. It’s an unexpected interruption at first login, and it really doesn’t help the user very much, seeing as the great majority of KDE newcomers have a Microsoft Windows background.
• Some other options (but not most of them) should plainly disappear from public view. I’m perfectly sure that the KDE developers are thick-skinned enough to take a bit of heat from users who complain about the disappearance of their pet setting. I’m also convinced that the KDE developers can choose sensible behaviors for 99% of their users, thus succesfully reducing the different ways their software can behave. It’d be good for software quality processes, since a simpler application with frequently exercised code paths it’s easier to debug than a complicated applications with seldomly exercised code paths.

Applications have similar malaises. Even Konqueror, posing as the file manager, has way too many buttons in its toolbars. Guys, just make the buttons bigger and slash some of them. Advanced users can still right-click on the toolbars and add their pet buttons. Of course, weeding out the unused buttons will take some usability research.

This should have been fixed as of yesterday. And I’m positive that the KDE people will fix it, eventually. It’s just a question of when.

Speed

I’ll admit it. KDE feels faster than GNOME, especially when using remote resources, file shares and Web sites. Yes, I said Web sites: Konqueror consistently renders them faster than Firefox.

Actually, I may be exaggerating just a little bit. Konqueror tends to avoid rendering incomplete pages. When the Web page’s data downloads fast, Konqueror beats Firefox. But Firefox’s incremental rendering in the face of incomplete Web site data still beats Konq any day.

And, of course, the expert KDE devs should continue to optimize application load times. The fact that they’re using C++ has historically put them at a techincal disadvantage against C-based apps (such as typical GNOME apps like Nautilus), from a perspective of application load time. Yet they’re still defying the status quo:

• They’ve come up with ingenious ways to work around slow application loading times. The famed kdeinit (which is optional) is a good example.
• They’ve lobbied continually to push their discoveries down the dependency chain (e.g., into the linker and other system libraries). This kind of effort benefits us all, not just KDE users.
• They continually run their most representative applications under valgrind to weed out errors, memory leaks and performance problems.

Here are three Issues to keep in mind when optimizing:

• Reducing memory usage. Try to share as much code as possible.
• Reducing disk fetches. Icon and font caches go a long way, but there’s got to be a way to reduce disk accesses upon application startup.
• Providing better user interface clues for lengthy or potentially asynchronous operations.

Conclusions

I know, I know… the title of the article is deceitful. I haven’t managed to find a single powerful reason to avoid KDE altogether. You see, KDE is quite good. Of course, if anything above this paragraph discourages you from using KDE, so be it, because it’s all fact. But, before abandoning KDE like a rat in a sinking ship, I honestly think you should make an informed decision, and the best way to do so is to experience KDE in the flesh.

However, I certainly think this short piece has managed to:

1. highlight the (frequently underappreciated) efforts that the KDE project has consistently exercised,
2. convey facts (with decision-making and opinion-forming value) to both existing and potential KDE users, and
3. point future KDE efforts in (what I consider to be) the right direction.

What? Were you expecting any sane conclusions from an article I quickly cobbled together in ten minutes? If you did, you were wrong, my friend. Talk is cheap, so it’s up to you to voice your conclusions in the comments area. What are you waiting for?

Efficiency: The fast desktop

A few weeks ago, I read a very interesting (and purportedly fair) analysis that compared memory usage among desktops, which featured GNOME, KDE, and a baseline ‘lightweight’ desktop, plus “official” applications from each desktop suite.

The conclusions of the test appear, on initial glance, to be contradicting. The first and foremost conclusion is that, upon fresh start, the ‘lightweight’ desktop (Xfce) consumed way less memory than the other two. Apparently, the Xfce guys have done a great job in keeping their feature set and memory usage to a minimum

But then, the big surprise. When real productivity applications were opened, it turns out that the winner is KDE. KDE wins over both GNOME and Xfce. Both the Web browser and the office suite applications caused GNOME and Xfce to balloon in size, compared to KDE.

And there’s an explanation to this: KDE core shares more code with its official applications than GNOME core with its official ones. More sharing, less memory usage. Less memory usage translates into an immediate and appreciable speed boost.

Of course, this only goes to show that, in software engineering, there’s always more than meets the eye.

Internet: The network desktop

Sure, GNOME’s file manager (Nautilus) has several ways to access network shares: FTP, SSH, Windows file sharing, and more. But the official GNOME applications don’t do such a great job in this sense. Ever tried playing an MP3 on a share with Rhythmbox? Maybe opening a remote file in OpenOffice.org? Due to the way remote file access is integrated into GNOME applications, these operations sometimes and have quirks, or are outright impossible. For example: you cannot just drag and drop a file in an SSH share from Nautilus to OpenOffice or other applications.

With KDE, this is a non-issue. Literally, remote files and directories work in a fully transparent manner. I routinely drag and drop icons of PHP program files on my Web server from Konqueror’s window onto KWrite and edit them in real time. It’s also very fast and the desktop environment doesn’t block — it’s certainly faster and more responsive than Nautilus’ network access. All K applications have this network transparency built-in. In practical terms, this is the only productivity booster I truly depend on. As a matter of fact, that’s the only reason I always kept Konqueror and KWrite open during my latest short flirt with GNOME.

Do you use Google a lot? You should use KDE too. Hit Alt+F2, type gg: followed by what you want to look for, and behold Konqueror opening up in a matter of seconds with your search results. Sure, Firefox’s got the small Google search box. But with KDE, you don’t even need to go there, because it’s instantaneous, Alt+F2-search term-ENTER. Of course, Konqueror also does tabbed browsing and advertisement blocker, and something you might find as useful as I do: split window browsing. It’s all batteries included, and then some.

Applications: The useful, powerful and fun desktop

GNOME has put a great deal of effort in choosing its official applications. And, mind you, the applications aren’t bad at all: I use Evolution as my only e-mail client, and OpenOffice.org for the rare document and spreadsheet editing tasks.

But KDE ups the ante with extremely useful applications I fiercely depend on every day:

• Akregator: never has a newsreader performed a better job. Though it’s got a couple of warts (especially in terms of speed, which I forgive because I really abuse its archival capabilities), it’s a godsend, and it goes hand in hand with the Beagle and Kerry desktop search utilities.
• KNotes: yes, I know I should be crucified for switching to Tomboy, but KNotes is really lightweight and blazing fast.
• KMix: I can map keyboard keys to each volume slider! Try changing the bass levels with GNOME’s volume control and your keyboard.
• Kaffeine: my only DVD player application. It’s great!
• KTorrent: though it was only a few months ago when it crashed every single day, now it’s stable as a rock and downloads my TV series and albums like the best of them. Plus, it’s got amazing KDE integration: I click on a torrent link, and pop KTorrent handles it — I didn’t even need to configure it!
• KWrite: it’s just how a text editor should be. KWrite is so addictive, I haven’t moved to Eclipse or another RAD environment yet, simply because it does 95% of what I need with a fraction of the resources.
• Konsole: try dragging and dropping an icon from Konqueror to Konsole: you’ll not only get the chance to paste the URL of the icon, but to copy or move it to the shell’s working directory. Talk about power.
• Klipper: ever hit Ctrl+C to copy some text and panicked, because you had important stuff in the clipboard? It doesn’t matter, because an elephant’s memory’s got nothin’ on Klipper’s. And a big plus: just select an URL (you don’t even need to Ctrl+C it), and have Klipper pop up and ask if you want to open it in your browser.
• Kopete: I don’t really like how it does its thing, but, hey, it’s a multiprotocol chat client, and it beats GAIM.

And the number 1 spot where KDE technology has enabled something that kicks major ass: Amarok. Yes, I’m aware that Amarok isn’t the “official” music player for KDE. But you’d have to be braindead not to use it, even if you used GNOME. Amarok has zero-handedly cleaned up my music listening experience, and made me discover music I didn’t even know I had. Plus, I don’t need to keep track of my music anymore: Amarok does it for me, and it can even tell me which songs I listened to in the past week were songs I liked. It’s, of course, faster and more useful than Rhythmbox.

Thus spake I

KDE saves klicks, saves time, saves memory, and keeps me from going insane. Whenever I need it, KDE’s there to help me out. And the KDE guys, though two percent points behind in market share, show no sign of stopping. If anything, with KDE4, I’ll expect an even better, more integrated and faster desktop experience. I already amaze my friends when they visit me and ask “what the hell is this” (in all fairness, I may be cheating here, since I also run Beryl). How will my computing experience be with KDE4? Only time will tell… but I can’t wait.

In eight words: GNOME is good enough. KDE is the best.

That’s my take on the matter. Flames and kudos on the comment boxes below.

What happens if you’re reading a Web page and you hit the Down Arrow key while the SHIFT key is depressed?

Try it. You’ll see the Web page scrolling down slowly, at a pace you can read from, without having to scroll manually. You can regulate the speed at which the page scrolls by using the Down or Up Arrow keys while holding SHIFT depressed.

To stop the autoscrolling, hit the Esc key.

Fantastic! Sheer genius!