KDE Success in the Enterprise

Arandir writes "Is UNIX ready for the desktop? Display Works Inc. thinks it is! They adopted KDE as their official desktop environment over a year ago, and KDE::Enterprise is running an interview with IT manager Tim Brodie over their experiences. This is a very good interview that covers why KDE was chosen, user migration, and wish lists for KDE. Quote: "I now see KDE taking the lead in polish and professionalism on the desktop"."

Re:A flash-only web site??

[Lshmael]

Much as I hate all Macromedia products (grr!), there is a Flash plugin for Netscape-compatible browsers that is for Linux. Go here [macromedia.com].

Re:KDE Myths

[CoolVibe]

[yeah yeah, troll... but I'll bite this time. I feel like burning a little karma]

Wow, that's a lot of conjecture and speculation you're spouting, yet you haven't given any solid proof of any of your arguments. Most of it is objective (X is better than... Y is faster than...).

There are also quite a few flaws in your diatribe. (i.e. Ximian's Red Carpet is NOT part of "official" Gnome)

Anyway, for the real beef on KDE myths and facts, go here [urbanlizard.com].

...and remember, it's only a desktop environment. Remember you can always opt for something else, because the FOSS has given us choice.

Re:Better than windows

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear you've never used Windows 2000 because it's resolved some of the issues that you mention. Most notable: 2000 no longer tries to display more than one column.

XP/2000/98 have always been themeable (though exclusing XP, this required thrid party software.)

So it looks like you just prefer KDE.

Good to see KDE::Enterprise is making headway

[Anonymous Coward]

As KDE has been making excellent progress into providing a unified approach to the desktop, I was getting concerned as to the level of effort into getting KDE into the enterprise.

I guess these things take time, but from http://enterprise.kde.org's website hadn't seen an update since Feb 2002 its good to see we are starting to demostrate the power that KDE 3.1 has. Not to mention that there is room for KDE within the enterprise and should be considered to be a contender in this space.

With KDE 3.2 clearly within our sights, I welcome the inclusion of policy restrictions into KDE's framework to effectively allow lockout policies. (This will allow all applications to follow a policy conduct as to what the user can do, execute it, not allowed to ect.). Note: It's presently there in 3.1, but no GUI interface.

Looking at the current CVS builds, including groupware collboration (meeting events etc) functionality in kmail and korganiser I'm very excited!

I'm running Suse 8 with the latest KDE build and I'm pleasently suprised how well it operates.

Power to the users!

Re:Better than windows

[Osty]

[KDE] Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.

All of that is available in Windows. Get TweakUI from the Power Toys [microsoft.com] page and you can enable X-Mouse if you like focus-follows-mouse functionality (personally, I don't like it, but to each his own). You can also theme XP with StyleXP from TGTSoft [tgtsoft.com] (or if you don't want to pay, you can find the uxtheme.dll hack on google -- search for "uxtheme.dll SP1", no quotes). Tons of themes are available [themexp.org].

However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for.

That's just organization. There's nothing stopping you from organizing your Program Files menu on the Start Menu in Windows. KDE has a nice organization because it comes with a lot of apps to begin with. Windows on the other hand tends to rely on separate software, and each installer wants to have its own top-level menu. Don't let it. Some apps play nice, like all of Microsoft Games Studio's games -- they all install under "Microsoft Games" rather than having one menu for each game. So, organize the menu if you don't like the default.

Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.

Try the Virtual Desktop Manager, again from Power Toys [microsoft.com]. It does multiple desktops correctly, though it does have some other issues. Also, I guess I'm not familiar with KDE's file manager/CLI (I assume you mean Konqueror?), but remember that the Konqueror design is essentially Explorer/Internet Explorer's design -- it's really little more than a container for other objects. There's a Power Toy to open a command prompt from a folder, or you could try something like this [codeproject.com] instead, a command prompt explorer bar to put a CLI directly in the explorer window. Is that what you mean KDE does?

Sure, right out of the box KDE is more configurable and has a little more functionality (virtual desktops, mostly). But with a little work and using only that which is built into Windows or Power Toys provided by Microsoft directly (ie, not replacing your shell with something like LiteStep, or paying for something like StarDock's WindowBlinds) you can make Windows (XP) do everything that made you choose KDE over Windows. The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux :).

Re:Great...

[Arandir]

With KDE & QT, your application will only be GPL...

Minor correction: your application must be Open Source, but it need not be limited to the GPL. You see, Free Qt isn't under the GPL, it's under a dual GPL/QPL. No, it's still not going to let you release pay-for software without using a pay-for Qt, but you still have a lot of latitude regarding licensing.

Desktop Ready on Enterprise Level is REAL!

[westyvw]

After reading comments that there should be more examples, and a larger amount of clients would add credibility, I would say there is:

How about 450 thin clients running KDE with 800 users? All running from one Linux server box. Now that sounds good!

Articles:

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/m ai n/0,14179,2860180-1,00.html

and the follow up:

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/12/04/2346215. sh tml?tid=19

clarified?

[Slur]

I use NetBSD every day. I use Mac OS X every day. They're both UNIX as far as I'm concerned, regardless of how many Erdos points they are removed from their AT&T ancestry.

You know what the Mac Window Manager is? It's a UNIX daemon. You know what Mac OS X "Web Sharing" is? It's Apache. You know what the core compiler of ProjectBuilder is? It's gcc.

Perhaps my definition of "UNIX" is too broad for some, but I see no reason to split hairs about something built around the same foundation and principles. However I will happily agree that Windows NT is not UNIX.

Re:Someone explain the (L)GPL to the guy...

[g4dget]

Just keep in mind that if you develop for KDE/Qt, you spend months learning Qt and tooling up for it. Then you end up paying thousands of dollars to them if you actually want to create a product.

Using Qt would make a lot of sense if this was still the early 1980's and there were no good C/C++ toolkits around. But today, there are plenty of good toolkits. You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license. And you can use Gtk+/Gtkmm and wxWindows for free, even for commercial applications.

Is Qt that much better to justify its steep price? I don't think so. But you have to decide for yourself. Just be aware of the price before you invest the time learning it.

Re:Recent Experience

[GauteL]

You seem to have some obviously legitimate problems. However some of them are pretty simple issues that reading READMEs and any GNOME-user should be able to help you with.

1. The bad icons on the desktop is due to you missing "gnome-icon-theme". This is a FreeBSD (and Debian) distribution issue. Nautilus should depend on "gnome-icon-theme". Installing that package will make the default icon theme show up. Why the BSD and Debian -distributors of GNOME did not add this dependency beats me.

2. Copying settings means copying .gnome* and .gco*. They ARE copyable. If you cannot seem to copy settings, then you've skipped one of these.

3. The menu-editing problem is a genuine GNOME-problem, so might the russion-problem (that I have no idea about).

Re:Great...

[infiniti99]

This is absolutely not true. Go read the license sometime, it is pure GPL.

I believe you're thinking of some old FAQ entry on the Trolltech website, probably written by someone without a clue. Saying that you can't change your application's license is ridiculous and completely unenforcable. Of course, if you distribute your code then you can't take it back (this goes for any software), but future distributions of the code could have a different license. Even the GPL itself doesn't 'force' your derivatives to be GPL, only that you break copyright law otherwise (in which case, you pay your fines and keep your source closed).

So yeah, go use your Free Qt initially, and then buy a commercial license when you want to close the source. This issue has been brought up too many times on the qt-interest mailing list, with the same concluding remarks as this message, and with no objection from Trolltech. Bottom line: read the license.

RH 8 & 9

[jobsagoodun]

Having just installed RH8 (9 doesn't work with WebSphere yet) for a development project I was really impressed with how far it has come since RH6 and RH7. In fact, so impressed I'm having another go at replacing win2k on my notebook with it. Last time I tried, I had trouble working with people using MS Word etc. Openoffice initially looks good - time will tell if I can interoperate. Its great that KDE and Gnome are moving forward so fast - they really look like a viable desktop platform these days.

Re:Duh...

[WindBourne]

If you need speed (or extremely low memory useage), try icewm or blackbox. Personally, I find KDE is awesome on the desktop, but use ice on an old toshiba satallite pro.

Re:Someone explain the (L)GPL to the guy...

[g4dget]

WxWindows/GTK is a great cross platform gui toolkit but its limited to mainly gui development.

Not at all. wxWindows has C++ classes for I/O, networking, threading, network protocols, and other facilities. So, for that matter, does Gtk+.

Re:Better than windows

[SiChemist]

I have a couple of favorite features in KDE (3.1) that (AFAIK) have no windows counterpart.
Open the KDE file browser and type fish:// plus the location of a machine running sshd and you can then graphically browse/copy/delete/etc files on the remote machine as if it were local. This feature even shows thumbnail previews of remote files (if you have that feature enabled). Browsing is very fast over my DSL connection to the machine at work.

Another great feature is the KIO CD slave. Typing audiocd:/ in the Konqueror address bar gives you a directory listing with .wav files in [by name] or [by track] folders, an [Ogg Vorbis] folder with tracks in that format and a MP3 folder. Copying files from these folders automagically extracts and encodes the tracks in the appropriate format. Slick!

Re:Someone explain the (L)GPL to the guy...

[KiwiSurfer]

GNOME isn't Linux-centric too. Sun is in the process of porting GNOME to Solaris and I'm also writing this from a FreeBSD box running GNOME 2.2. Both GNOME and KDE works perfectly on FreeBSD and that shows that both projects has made a lot of effort to make sure their code works fine on non-Linux OSes. This is good because it means non-Linux users have the same choices as Linux users.