Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?

[Bruce Cran]

On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:43:54 -0700
Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:

> Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >> Also GUI makes life much easier even for advanced users.
> >
> > exactly wrong. it make my life harder. these "advanced" users you
> > say don't like to read manuals and do once simple config taking few
> > minutes.
> 
> totally wrong. imagine setting up WiFi network. one mouse click opens 
> WiFi manager window. another double-click selects network to connect. 
> another click closes the window of WiFi manager. How in the world it
> can be easier to do this with config files ????
> 
> >> Unfortunately open source is pretty much a failure when it comes
> >> to GUI and
> >> desktop. Any kind of GUI, look at ddd for example. Untested 
> >> development-stage
> >> software (like kde4) is being released to the public for some
> >> reason.
> >
> > they try to compete with windoze - so they behave the same way! who 
> > first learned that giving unfinished/buggy/incomplete software to 
> > users is a good (in marketing point of view) thing?
> >
> > Microsoft! they learn from it.
> 
> they try to compete and fail. doesn't matter who did what first.
> today windoze gui is way more usable than kde4. that's the only thing
> that matters.
> if kde4 were a commercial company they would have been fired or go
> out of business long time ago.

I think it depends on what you want to do.  For developers KDE4
provides all the features you'd want such as smart text editors, a
nice terminal and lots of applications.  For normal users I'm not so
sure a stock KDE4 is so usable; however having recently used Ubuntu and
seen what can be done with Gnome, I'm sure KDE can be configured to be
just as good.  Talking of Ubuntu, I believe it's now almost as easy to
use as Windows, and that's for 'normal' users who don't know much
about computers. There are some things that are missing: for example if
for some reason it fails to automatically setup the monitor then you're
kinda stuck, but all the rest works.  

As an example of its usability I plugged a new printer in and a few
seconds later a notification popped up asking me to select settings,
paper type etc. That's neat.  I took some photos and plugged my SDHC
card into a reader: a photo import application popped up and I could
nagivate the photos and select which to copy over.  It's smarts like
these that really make the difference. I consider myself a power user
but I do enjoy things like that being done for me, since I would much
prefer to spend my time coding instead of hacking config files to
import files, get stuff printed etc.   Most people I know are moving
from Debian to Ubuntu for the same reason - things just work.  At the
same time, it's nice to know that if anything does start getting in
your way it's still easy to change a few settings to turn it off.

-- 
Bruce Cran