I am Impressed

I must say, I’m duly impressed.

Last week I downloaded and installed the full KDE 2.2.2 package, along with KOffice 1.1.x. I’ve been a KDE user in the past, but have preferred Gnome for quite awhile, especially the Ximian Gnome package. While, by default, Ximian tended to “dumb down” the interface a bit, I’ve used it long enough to understand how to keep all the system settings visible within menus. The biggest reason for using Gnome, though, was that the look and feel really equated, in my mind, to Linux. There’s no question that you’re using a Linux system with Gnome on your desktop. At times, I’ve just found KDE too “Windows-like.” When I’m using Linux, I want to leave no doubt.

The installation last week was a rediscovery, of sorts. The look and feel of KDE is still much more like Windows than Gnome - it’s written in C++, the lingua franca of Windows developers, while Gnome is pure C. But, overall, I really like what I’ve been seeing. KDE has made it nearly effortless to configure critical system elements of your system. All the GUI elements tie together seamlessly. And, if I absolutely insist, I can still use some of those Gnome-based applications from within the KDE environment. They do play reasonably nicely together. After a week or so of digging and playing, I guess I’ll have to award a second first-place finish to KDE.

I’ll be spending a big chunk of the upcoming weekend preparing my system for Lycoris Linux, the first in the second series of distribution reviews we’re calling Distro II. Since I gave up the laptop, I have only one machine in my office, running both Win2k and RedHat 7.2 Pro. As you know, I’ve been doing some PHP and MySQL development on this box for Penguin Shell and the Lockergnome newsletters, in general. I’ve also been rebuilding my company website using PHP. All these development versions are hosted/stored locally. While we’ll certainly put Lycoris through its normal paces over the next few weeks, it will also be interesting to see if and/or how Lycoris stands up to a more production-oriented environment. Maybe it’s more accurate to wonder just how much pain I’ll have to endure to get Lycoris to a production (as opposed to a consumer) environment.

One thing’s for certain - I’ve got lots of backups to freshen and create over the weekend. It’s a good thing CD-Rs are cheap. I’m going to need quite a few.

Tony
Steidler-Dennison