KDE was the first desktop environment I really stuck with on Linux, previously I'd just used Blackbox and whatever apps seemed to work. For me, it peaked around KDE 3.2 - it felt like a nicely structured, object-oriented system. You could open up KOffice documents in tabs in Konqueror alongside web pages, thanks to KParts. Every address bar and file dialog could connect to any protocol, thanks to KIO. KMail and KNode were functional and consistent. KDevelop was very nice, for someone coming from a Visual C++ background. And Atlatik stole more hours than I can remember.
I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.
Same here. First Linux desktop I ever used was running KDE 1. I kept using KDE for years, up to 3.x, because it was just incredibly integrated, fast, and functional. I cannot shake the feeling that it was engineered, or at least directed by a single competent person with a vision. I don't know if that's true, but KDE 1 to 3 had that "single mind" feeling, as opposed to "designed by committee."
After that, I moved to OS X for various reasons, until recently when the latest OS X 10.11 and 10.12 drifted so far away from the original OS X concept as to turn me away.
As a newly returned Linux user, I tried Gnome Shell in Ubuntu, but recycled its bytes in a couple of days. Then I tried the latest KDE 5, which was even worse, an ungodly monstrosity. I briefly toyed with the idea of using a supposedly modern fork of KDE 3 (http://www.trinitydesktop.org) but then settled for Cinnamon on Mint.
Still, KDE 3 was definitely some sort of pinnacle in desktop computing. Maybe the Trinity guys are not entirely crazy!
I still use several components of KDE3 via the Trinity projects.
So, if they are crazy, they're a kind of crazy I dearly love :)
(The components do, for what it's worth to anyone out there considering using some of Trinity, play nicely with others. I stopped using KDE/Trinity as the actual desktop in favor of i3, but still use a ton of the KDE/Trinity applications.)
I don't know what happened to KDE and Gnome. They used to dominate, now many people look at them as jokes.
I seriously prefer Unity over both of them in their current incarnations and that's something I never thought I would have said when Unity first came out.
Old Gnome and new Gnome are very different. The old Gnome is now Mate. Also Cinnamon from Linux Mint has captured a large portion of the user base. There is Unity that comes by default with Ubuntu and many people(like me) are too lazy to switch. And finally, there is up and coming Pantheon from elementary OS.
Same here, KIO was incredibly useful. As a young dev, I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I still have fond memories of KDE in the early years before flashy looks became a must have feature.
KIO is very much still alive, and in frequent use for me at least. Treating remote folders over SSH straight in my favorite file manager is pretty indeed.
> I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive.
I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled.
On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
Not sure this is a fair comparison. It works with basically any KDE app, for any protocol that has a KIO slave. There certainly must be a lot of confusion for users that don't understand why it doesn't work in random non-KDE apps they've installed, or the command line, but I suspect very few of them are typing in SSH URLs anyway. At the same time, Windows doesn't accept an SFTP URL in a file open dialog.
Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.
The UNC paths in Windows are very much a Windows-ism. They work perfectly when you're in an all Windows environment, but there's no consideration to speaking non-Windows protocols.
The key problem I have with KIO is that it's doing something that should be done at a lower level so that every application can benefit.
As I see it, there are three classes of apps on Linux when it comes to file handling:
* Apps that can open remote files using one set of protocols (KIO-enabled apps).
* Apps that can open remote files using a different set of protocols (things that reinvent this wheel, like emacs in your example).
* Apps that can only work on local files.
So we get a situation where I can open a file on an SMB server using Kate, but I can't open the same file in Sublime Text. It makes for a terrible user experience.
The Mac makes it easy to mount filesystems, but it's kludgey compared to using UNC paths in Windows. This is the one feature that I really miss from Windows.
Sure, totally agree that it'd be great if this was a low level feature of the OS that seamlessly integrated with any possible GUI for authentication from readline and up. But we could sit here all day and enumerate ways in which open source operating systems and desktop environments are less integrated than others.
All I was saying originally was that KDE was the first Linux environment I used which came close to the level of broad support and integration you get from something like Windows, and in some cases it went beyond.
That also only works for the windows file sharing protocol. It's not even close to what KIO provided with it's protocol agnostic support. The windows UNC paths also only work on windows with windows apps. It's not a fair comparison.
The real win would be the Plan 9 filesystem protocols which had the same feature but at the file system protocol level.
same. 3.x was my default environment for so long. it was nice to have all the basic working well out of the box, instead of having all the apps talking a different dialect, especially on how they talked to the clipboard.
Yes, KDE 3.2 was a huge enhancement over 3.1. I had a slow PC and 3.1 was awfully sluggish, but 3.2 seemed to run fine on it from a Live CD (probably Knoppix). It took an awfully long time for KDE 3.2 to hit Debian unstable---I remember reading debian-kde archives on the edge of my seat...
Amarok 1.4 was the best audio player ever. My most beloved feature - changing queue position of song in a playlist with mousewheel. Second - could reorganize your files by Artis/Album/Song.mp3.
I remember having my friends over for parties and when they saw Amarok - instantly wanted to try Linux. It was, imo, the killer app of Linux.
When I switched to Windows 7 - tried to customize foobar2000 to make it feel like Amarok, but it wasn't the same. :/
Careful when using Clementine. It reorganized all my music collection, and it took me several months to revert all those changes.
It is partly my fault because I wasn't careful what I was doing. But I never thought a media player would do such extensive reorganization on file level.
That's how everything is with Apple: you use their software and their walled-garden. If you want to do anything at all, big or small, differently than how Apple wants you to do it, then Apple stuff is simply not for you. With Apple, it's all-or-nothing.
So really, if you're an Apple user, you have no business even joining discussions like this about non-Apple software or anything that runs on a non-Apple platform. You're basically trolling.
I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.