It has been interesting to follow the rise of Linux . It's a vindication of the "copyleft" concept protected by the GPL—it will always remain free. Steadily improved by open source developers, Linux distributions now rival or surpass other competing operating systems just about any way you measure it. Now, with the release of KDE 2.0 , Linux will have an opportunity to take over the traditional strengths of Microsoft and the Mac in desktop usability and office applications. KDE could provide Unix that your mother could use. Will it?
KDE (the K Desktop Environment) is a window manager and set of core applications for Unix, particularly popular on Linux but also available for Solaris, BSD and other *nix flavors. It's been around for several years, bundled with Linux distributions such as Linux-Mandrake , SUSE and Red Hat. It was welcome relief after years of less-than-adequate desktops for Linux, and featured a small but particularly high quality set of applications. Standouts to me are kfm (a combination file manager, ftp and web browser), kghostview (a lightweight but fast PDF/Postscript viewer), and kppp (a dial-up Internet connection manager that made such tasks easier than Windows). Then there's kmysql , an admin editor for the popular open source RDBMS, and krabber, a high-quality ripper that make making MP3's as easy as a few clicks.
A competing desktop, GNOME , was created when some developers argued that Qt , the core library that KDE is built upon, was not [at the time] strictly compatible with the GPL. In practice, despite some great applications ( Gimp , a PhotoShop killer, and Gnumeric, an Excel clone) GNOME proved to be slower and buggier in comparison. This seems to be due to the fact that KDE was developed with an object-oriented framework in C++ enabling more core reuse and extension. At any rate, KDE developers have now released a new version with much-anticipated features and applications. KDE 2.0 became available in late October of 2000, and version 2.1 is expected in the first quarter of 2001.
Of critical interest is Konqueror , the new version of the kfm web browser. In little more than a year, the small group of Konqeuror developers are close to doing what (for whatever reasons) the Mozilla folks have been unable to do in 3 years: build a browser as good as Internet Explorer. It's almost there. The rendering engine is quite fast, standards support (HTML 4 and Cascading Style Sheets) is said to be excellent (but see the next paragraph). I like the fact that you can split the window, and thus drag-n-drop files between remote FTP sites, or between a local directory and an FTP site and so on. It also supports SMB (Windows shares) and serves as a help / man page viewer. You can go into tar files and such (even compressed), or view documents inline. Basically it makes networked file management as easy as it should be.
Some flaws still exist. Netscape's Flash plugin worked fine, but the install is not automatic (unless you go through Netscape's silly SmartUpdate of course). It doesn't remember file associations when encountered (say, real audio) but it's very simple to edit this from the configuration panel.
Drag-N-Drop between FTP sites and/or local disks.
Java applets work fine (using your own local choice of the Java Virtual Machine), but not if they're bundled in Jar files. JavaScript doesn't seem to be all there yet. You can filter cookies on a per-site basis, and SSL finally works. One nice feature is that form buttons in html will be drawn using whatever theme (skin) you have installed, but unless the theme's buttons have transparent backgrounds, the page can look a little screwy. Although Konqueror claims to have full CSS1 support, a couple of CSS trick I tried (setting the color of a textarea, justified text) did not work properly. So it's still a little shaky.
The mail client is Kmail. Unfortunately Kmail does not support IMAP, the superior standard for Internet mail so it's not that useful to me. For POP or local mail accounts however, it has a fine feature set.
KOffice delivers equivilants of the Microsoft Office applications. In my very limited time with them, they seem to be already rock solid stable, polished, quite usable but some features still need work. This article is being written in KWord, a word processor with some DTP features. Spell check didn't catch all of my mispellings. Embedded images aren't resizble. One bug I noticed in KSpread was upon insertion of a row, formulae did not track the new range. Imported Excel spreadsheets were fine, however they were fairly simple documents.
The user interface will be familar to the Win 9X user. In fact, one fault may be that by default the Qt widgets and dialogs look almost exactly like their windows counterparts, which surely could be improved upon. KDE 2 also gives you the option of a Mac look-and-feel with app toolbars at the top of the screen. The level of configurability is very high, theme support is excellent so you don't have to settle for the Microsoft Windows style. I applied the Aquatica theme from themes.org (KDE 2 also supports GTK/GNOME themes) for a nice Mac-style effect.
Most KDE 1 applications (such as the great knapster mp3 client) work just fine. Some, such as the krabber (a ripper/encoder frontend) don't, but should have updated versions soon. Overall, KDE 2.0 provides in my opinion the best desktop environment yet on Unix. In another revision, the Konqueror web browser may be the equal of Internet Explorer. The KOffice apps have a suprisingly rich feature set, good for simple use, but not yet competitive with Microsoft Office.
KDE used ask on their web site, "Is Unix ready for the Desktop?" The answer is a qualified yes. If you are a MS Windows power user, you'll likely be disappointed (however, the freedom, stability and security may be enough of a reason to switch). If you are a UNIX power user, you'll find the upgrade compelling. For the novice computer user (such as your mom), KDE should be an acceptable alternative to Windows or the Mac.