Usually I ignore birthdays, including my own to the extent that I sometimes have to re-calculate my own age. ;-) This one is the one exception: Happy birthday KDE. And no, I am not speaking about the Kentucky Department of Education (
http://www.kde.state.ky.us/KDE/) but the K Desktop Environment (
http://www.kde.org/).
KDE turns 11 today. Still a very tender age, but how far have we got! This is a brief history of
time the UNIX desktop:
- The complete disorganised desktop: Just X a plus applications
- The chaotic and ugly desktop: X Plus CDE + applications
- The integrated desktop: KDE
What an achievement in just 11 years! And now we are approaching KDE4. KDE 4 beta 3 is just around the corner. Over the last 15 years, our computer use has undergone some very dramatic changes. From a glorified typewriter with some games on it, it has become: An entertainment centre, a multimedia centre, a knowledge centre, an educational centre. From a couple of hundreds files or objects per user, we have grown to tens or even hundreds of thousands of objects.
KDE 4 is going to take care of these changes. It will be a "semantic desktop", meaning it stores as much meta data of a given object as possible. We are getting much closer to submit a query like "Granny's picture that came in with an email from uncle Joe" - and find the photo or any other object.
Forget about printed encyclopedia that are outdated by at least 10 years on their date of publishing. Go with online ones, especially the free one
http://www.wikipedia.org/. If you don't have the bandwidth to use it effectively, get the lite version and install it locally.
My Linux distribution Gentoo (
http://www.gentoo.org/) let one download every available codec for audio and video. I can play every- and anything I want to. That's multimedia! Authoring video DVDs? No problem.
Kdeedu is an amazing collection of educational software. Kstars is, most probably, the most advanced desktop planetarium available. Kalzium, a periodic table of elements, is far more advanced than everything else I have seen. Marble is going to make your printed atlas obsolete - and in OSS fashion.
KDE 4 will be released this year. For the previous 2 years or so, I have said: KDE is ahead of Windows and almost on par with OS X. With KDE 4 (not necessarily 4.0), my take is: We'll be in the lead when it comes to desktop computing. I kid you not!
Uwe
PS: No, I did not forget about GNOME. It isn't my baby. I don't comment on it but leave it to others.
