KDE will beat Apple Macs
KDE, short for the “K Desktop Environment”, is at heart no more than a single letter. It’s around this letter that many thousands of people have gathered to develop an excellent window manager for Linux.
KDE 3.4 was release just a few days before the writing of this article. Version 3.4 offered great improvements in accessibility features and many hundreds of bug fixes, stability improvements and such but what I care about is that it made itself even more visually appealing.
Windows XP was a decent effort
Microsoft tried hard to make Windows XP have an aesthetically pleasing interface. It was a great improvement from the days of Win 3.1 or even Windows 2000. Still, a fischer-price theme and some rounded edges aren’t quite enough to make converts of the artistically minded.
Apple computers are pretty
Jaguar and Tiger are excellent window managers that Apple has built to run on top of their Linux-based OSX. They offer every possible visual and functional feature, but it’s completely closed source. Apple’s development will only ever grow at the speed that their small corral of developers can push it.
KDE is the future
There is an increasing demand for virtualization engines like Xen and VMWare because users desire the ability to run all programs on their main computing system. In a few short years there will be a strong desire for a unified window manager. It’s a herculean task for any proprietary software company to tackle. A unified window manager would require tens of thousands of hours of development time just to port from one system to another, but then even greater amounts of work to optimize it for both systems.
KDE will be a global effort
KDE has shown itself to be able to meet the needs of its users on a fast development cycle, while keeping a mind to aesthetics, productivity, accessibility, and system integration. Only KDE, being fully open-source, is in position to become a multiple-system window manager. In a short while I hope to see it functional on my Windows XP machine as a replacement to explorer.
Until then I’ll probably just keep running LiteStep.
