30 days with KDE 4.1...

[arnold]

I've now spent 30 days with KDE 4.1 on my home desktop, as well as on one of my office PCs - I downloaded Mandriva 2009 Live when it was released, installed it & what a pleasure.

Uwe was right, the new interface takes some getting used to, but once using it, it is really nice.  So far, I've not had a single crash/bug in any application; everything just works, and works well 

I didn't spend much time testing all the new the eye-candy though - the bits I did test really slowed my PC down, but this was expected.

Dolphin was the real surprise; it takes some getting used to, but especially the command-line session one can open below it I found of much value; I work on the command line quite a lot, and in combination with the visual browsing it is great; click-click to get to a directory, and type your commands 

All in all a very pleasant experience, and one I can recommend.

The KDE team did a great job!

[sinisterstuf]

Although this seems to be a KDE only board, I just had to say this reminded me of "30 days without X" and I wonder if anyone would be daring enough to try that. A whole month (or maybe just a week) using only the CLI to do your daily tasks, i.e. not starting X 

[jf]

Actually that's how I started with Linux after leaving Windows. The kernel was still in 0.9 range and the number of completely different VGA cards would not make running X easy (and the OpenLook interface was not really the greatest pleasure to work with anyway). However, you'd get a number of graphical apps compiled against the SVGA libraries - so it wasn't just plain text).

Have a look at the various programs using libaa (ASCII Art) for graphic display through the console (mplayer being one of them) - it's quite amazing to watch a movie on the console. But use something higher than just an 80x25 emulation..

Another step away from KDE or Gnome would be Window Managers like ion, which come without any fancy desktop management stuff, but will always maximise your apps and focus on keyboard-only control. While not quite being the same as the console, it can actually boost your productivity.

But then I wonder what anybody would use the 4 or 8 GB or RAM for if it wasn't for some effect-overloaded GUIs :-)