[ringo]

I feel like exploring a UNIX-style desktop and just installed X windows and KDE on my iBook (Posting this with Konqueror).

Could anyone suggest great/useful apps for use with KDE? I'm interested to see what it has to offer that OS X does not.

Anything interesting or unique?

Thanks.

ringo

[damosan]

Originally posted by ringo:

I'm interested to see what it has to offer that OS X does not.

Almost nothing. Going back to KDE, at least to me, is like going back to my Atari 800. Having said that there are a few good KDE based HTML editors out there.

Damo

[Sven G]

... For example, KDE has a very powerful integrated file + web browser (Konqueror, which you are already using), integrated virtual workspaces, extensive customisability, powerful contextual menus, Ogg Vorbis support, etc. (things which OS X still - incredibly! - lacks); and, of course, a free office suite, with some quite original features - KOffice:

[clarkgoble]

Konquerer has some nice features that I'd like to see rolled into the Finder. However other than that, all the things KDE offers, OSX has only better. If you are too cheap to get an office suite then OpenOffice or KOffice or AbiWord are interesting. I installed them but admit that I never use them and likely will remove them. MS Office, for all its flaws, is very nice and I enjoy using it. It is, in my opinion, vastly superior to anything for X11.

Likewise, unless you are sharing Ogg files on a network or have switched, KDE offers nothing here. Even there you can play Ogg files in iTunes by installing the Quicktime plugin for it. Ripping admittedly requires something else, but there are many programs that will do it. KDE is but one solution. Personally I enjoy iTunes so much and thing Ogg offers relatively little over VBR MP3 ripping.

Unless there is a particular application you need, there typically is very little in X11 that a Mac user needs. It is a nice crutch for Linux switchers or those who manage Linux servers. By and large though I decided that it offers little. I rarely run X11 and when I do it is more just me being curious and practicing stuff I may one day use. For productivity I find that OSX offers me a lot, especially with AppleScript, Python and so forth.

[Sven G]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
[...] However other than that, all the things KDE offers, OSX has only better. [...] Unless there is a particular application you need, there typically is very little in X11 that a Mac user needs. [...]

I wholly agree that OS X is great and offers many possibilities (albeit with some too simplistic solutions, sometimes) which were unavailable with the Classic Mac OS (or Windows).

Nevertheless, X11 apps, windows managers and desktop environments are quite cool, IMHO, both in general and from a learning point of view - besides offering a whole array of free goodies (also some real gems!) which aren't yet available, for various reasons, in native form for OS X.

Personally, I'm probably going to dedicate a whole HD partition to Fink: it's a great project! Also, when the OroborOSX "window manager" will be refined and polished even more, it will probably look and feel like X11 and Aqua are almost perfectly integrated environments...

[machiavel]

It's not just KDE apps that can be useful in XWindows. There's the XDarwin version of Mozilla, which is faster than OS X Mozilla and (at least on my system) doesn't hog 5 to 10% of CPU when running idle. There's Gimp, which is comparable to Photoshop LE. There's the Lyx word processor, which offers a front-end to the sophisticated LaTex layout engine. There's XEphem, an astronomical program that's not bad. At some point in the future, a usuable version of Open Office should be ready. The presentation program of Open Office, Impress, is much better than the presentation program in Appleworks (though it's obviously not as good as Powerpoint).

It is true, a lot of X Windows apps seem like pale imitations of commercial offerings, but there's a few good programs out there, and others that, even if not that great, are useful. And they're all free.

[Sven G]

Yeah... As for other apps, a very interesting one - among many others! - is the Bluefish HTML editor - quite promising, and, of course, also available as a Fink package!

[el_humpo]

Kompare is a very useful graphical diff utility (for the programmers out there). It's in the kdesdk package.

[clarkgoble]

I've not downloaded Kompare. (See my problems downloading Perl 5.8 which toasted by Fink) How does Kompare compare to the Apple supplied diff with the Dev tools.