The "cool" things... and the not so cool.
So, I thought I would go through and detail a number of the features in KDE I really love and find usefull, as well as detailing a number of the problems I've found.
Cool Things
Cool Things
- Spell checking in * (Konqueror, Kopete)
This is really awesome, Konqeuror (web browser+) and Kopete (instant messanger) have in-line spell checking, in text areas, anything that is mis-spelt goes red, and I can use the context menu to bring up a proper spell check, but often the red is enough to get me to fix it and I often know the spelling, but just mistyped it. I am definitely paying much more attention to what I am writing, so that's really good. (To be fair, gaim also includes a spelling plug-in, it really should be on by default. :) - Amarok
Amarok is a *really* usefull music player, rather than being just another iTunes or winamp clone (at least, I think these aren't cloned iTunes features :) I haven't really used iTunes much)- Context Information - Shows related songs and albums, artist information, etc in the widebar. I can even click a button to load up a wiki page about the artist (part of the wikipedia partnership with KDE)
- Dynamic Mode - This means Amarok keeps a playlist populated for me with 10 songs ahead of the current one, and it chooses these songs based on some criteria, I have mine getting "suggested" songs, which it takes data from last.fm from (it also submits my data) to try good guesses, and its really good, I have some crap in my collection and it plays decent stuff much of the time.
- In the playlists section, it has a list of the .m3u playlists in my collection, so I can load them up, very usefull for soundtracks, etc.
- Klipper
Many people argue about clipboard helpers, etc, but I don't care for it not so much for its helping or clipboard saving, but it can be setup to respond to "actions", so whenever I copy a URL into the clipboard, it pops up with a menu to open it in konqueror, firefox, email the URL, etc.
This I found to be a replacement for gnome-terminals right click -> open link which I sorely missed for a day or so till I figured this out.
This turns out to be a little more flexible, because among other things, in gnome-terminal sometimes if a URL hit the end of the screen in irssi, it would then guess that it went onto the next line (theres really no way not to guess, other than assuming it didn't, which is also broken) so I'd end up with a timestamp on the end of my URL. Using klipper, in this situation I can just highlight it manually. - Audio CD KIO-Slave
I stuck in an audio CD the other day, and to my surprise a window popped up containing folders with the CD in FLAC, OGG and MP3. Wow! That means to rip the CD I just had to copy a folder to my computer, that's really cool. - KIO (VFS) Integration _everywhere_
It seems that _everything_ in KDE uses KIO (Their VFS implementation, like GnomeVFS), this is really convenient as I can now just open anything in anything. It also appears to generally work better but I think thats a part of the first bit, just everything uses it, and uses it (for the most part) properly.
I asked, and apparently this is really just due to policy, they bash anyone not using KIO to death. :) This is quite a good policy apparently.
- KDE does not adjust very well to larger font DPIs, my laptop is running at 120 or so (the nvidia driver sets this to what its supposed to be), but many dialogs have their things messed up, text goes off the edge, labels always end up with a "..." for simple things that could fit, and some things like Kubuntu's new 'system settings' are totally broken, not expanding the icon area to fit the new label in.
Additionally, it seems impossible to change the DPI manually, it *exclusively* (afaict) uses the X setting. Gnome/Gtk/Pango on the otherhand ignores this setting (gdm uses it, the rest don't) and uses the setting from its own font dialog, this turns out both good and bad, but its convenient that I can manually change it, because some people like to use a lower DPI on higher DPI screens, and most X drivers don't actually set this, and many cheaper laptops have the wrong setting encoded into the hardware anyway. - I Can't figure out how to start something in my session
I've dug around in settings, system settings, etc, I can't find any way to add a program to my session manually, because I want to start gnome-settings-daemon, so I get a nice looking theme (clearlooks) on my GTK+ applications. Somebody tell me how to do this? :)