[arch-general] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

[Shridhar Daithankar]

On Monday 26 October 2009 19:25:09 Lars Tennstedt wrote: 
> I suggest the opposite in the facts of speed. My work's computer runs
> with Windows XP and the hardware is faster than mine at home. But
> Windows XP often stands still without a reason and takes ages to do
> something. KDE 4.3 on my Arch Linux installation runs very well and
> fast. I guess that it depends on the hardware you use.
> 
> But I would say that the enterprise linux distributions should use KDE
> 3.5 and GNOME 2.28 in the nearly future. In such an area with
> installations on many machines things just have to work and Plasma and
> GNOME Shell are too new.
> If KDE is too slow for you, use Xfce or LXDE. I do not miss anything
> under Xfce. And if you want to use Windows 7, use it. At the moment
> linux has little percentage on the desktop market.

I am writing this for sole reason that silence of a satisfied linux user 
should not be taken as absence of one.

I am a happy arch and KDE user and use windows XP only as much forced by the 
work. I don't know about vista. Rarely seen it in action. These are my 
opinions and not conclusions. Just adding a data point here.

- KDE is hugely productive. Multiple desktop(it already had for ages but 
mentioned for comparison with XP), plethora of applets(plasma widgets lately), 
kopete, kmail, akregator, knews, kate, konsole, k3b  and konqueror. It is so 
much ahead of windows that its not even the same race. Not to mention, each of 
these apps have innovation on its own that are hard to rival.

- I was happy with KDE 3.5.x(on slack and arch) and upgraded to KDE4 just 
along the way. KDE4.1/4.2 were not upto the par but KDE4.3 is on par with 
KDE3.5.x for me.

- I don't need any eye-candy on KDE and I have turned it off. Even though I 
have functioning nvidia drivers, I want my desktop fast, not animating and I 
am happy with that speed. Frankly I have not found any plasma widget worth 
keeping on desktop(I don't get to see the desktop anyways. Its always covered 
with some app). But I am a konsole geek. I could go alone with kate/konsole 
except email/IM/webbrowsing needs.

- I couldn't change to GNOME. I hate it. File open dialog is lame compared to 
KDE. I don't know what virtues peole see in it. That is only one reason 
another is button order(third is GTK. C for desktop? Not for me and no mono 
please.). I could stand a half working KDE but not GNOME.

- To people advocating lightweight options, Don't you lose what *KDE* offers? 
Instead of putting together a solution yourself, isn't it much better to use a 
solution that is put together already? Use xfce, throw in firefox and 
openoffice and its hardly any different from KDE+openoffice. Throw in 
thunderbird and pidgin and one begins to wonder whats the point? Is the 
dekstop really that lean now? Besides, throw in one KDE app. because its 
irresistible(kmail, kopete, k3b?) and again, one might as well run KDE.

- Huge win for KDE is consistency. Whatever speed KDE desktop loads today, it 
will load with same speed 3 months down the line and 3 years down the line(I 
can attest that. My home directory has remains of mandrake 7 till date. 
Upgraded and moved from machine to machine). Windows will not.

- I don't like nepomuk/strigi/akonadi and its off on my desktop. Thats more to 
do with hatred of mysql than these technologies itself. I won't let my desktop 
depend on mysql. Period. Come postgresql support and I will give it a go. 
Besides I don't have time to tag 10s of thousand of photos that I already have 
and every download from digital camera is at least 150 photos. 

- on point of desktop war, KDE is not fighting with windows but windows 
ecosystem. What does vanilla windows offer compared to KDE anyways? freecell 
and solitaire? Where is google messenger? where is an up to date browser? 
where is yahoo messenger? where is a good console? where are tons of 
utilities? Again, KDE is not fighting with windows. Its fighting with an echo-
system.

- for browser, I dabbled with lot of them and here is simple conclusion. The 
web is too fluid. There is no single app that can render it well, now and in 
future. And the whole web2.0 is a  non-sense, at least functionally. So I have 
konqueror for regular browsing(no serious site breaks in it for me.) and 
firefox for occasions when its needed. Usually if it does not render well in 
konqueror, I bypass the site and not the browser.

- use windows and you have to format/reinstall to upgrade. You realize how 
much productivity hit that is? It is impossible to get back all the small 
tweaks that one has accumulated over the period of time. Besides isn't that 
like last century? With arch we upgrade every month, if not more and don't 
have any problems.

I am happy with linux desktop for long time, since 2001 and haven't had 
windows since then. The war is over. Neo won :)

-- 
 Shridhar