Back in 2004 to 2006 I was what most teenagers call a “n00b” although I prefer the word “newbie” because it reminds me of a series I watch, Scrubs. I was new to linux stuff, and comparing from that time to now I’ve became a little decent in using linux, just to make sure that “./configure” does not make you a “pro”. Getting a bit carried away, anyways, I met Colton Provias which was also a linux user and he was also the one who said that KDE was the best GUI. Introducing me to Quanta and other stuff, the other stuff is what I don’t remember… been years :(
To be honest, I never liked KDE, back then it was bulky and weird for me, a new starter. Too much eye candy (still do but it’s more polished). But part of not liking also was influenced by the part that I was used to GNOME. I knew where the stuff was and it gets annoying to learn a new interface sometimes. (Like the feeling of learning Microsoft Office 2007 when everyone was used to Office 2003, yea, took a while to get used to!).
In linux, while most new starters don’t know, you can run GNOME applications in KDE and vice versa. You just need the libraries installed and some dependencies and you are done, but crossing the line of “native applications in a different graphical environment” sometimes cost you in CPU/Memory. A lot of nitpickers do it and of course a lot of people who just want to learn do it too. The point is… that well it’s been said thousand of times, you can do anything you want in linux, except the restriction on commercial applications and games that work on windows.
Now that KDE 4.3 was released. I just took a look in their official announcement and watched the video. My first thoughts were “I would switch nautilius to dolphin anytime”. Dolphin is the file manager of KDE that comes as default. And probably one of my favorite, it comes with all the menus and submenus I would use which made me happy.
Besides dolphin becoming my preferred file manager. I came across K3B, Amarok and KDE Widgets which enhanced my decision to ditch GNOME. Don’t get me wrong, I still like GNOME but in matter of tastes KDE just won me over. So sad GNOME… but staying simplistic is just part of the answer :(, not the complete answer.
I’m a bit sad though, my preferred IDE, NetBeans reversed back to Swing since Java did not implement QT3/4, sad but true, I wish KDE team did their own implementation, like Apple did for their GUI. Nevertheless I noticed something, switching back to Swing in Netbeans gave me a performance boost, more responsive than ever, makes you wonder why! And FireFox.. well you know, I like speed, so I stopped using firefox and changed to Opera. Not to mention some silly problems with Firefox. (Scrollbars, and firefox process hangs in the air when closing it)
