Gustavo on Information Technology

An screenshot of KDE 4.1 in Kubuntu Hardy

After being disappointed on KDE 4 since the first beta releases (it was simpler than Gnome!), and upset when the new Kontact ate my emails, I’m finally happy with the latest “stable” [sic] release of KDE 4.

However, I must say that to me this is the first beta-quality release of KDE 4; the others were just pre-alpha quality. I wish I can refer to the upcoming KDE 4.2 Final as an the first stable release of KDE 4.

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I was not aware that I was losing emails because of Kmail since I switched from POP3 to IMAP in all my email accounts ~1 week ago, until I saw how Kmail deleted all of my unread messages after a crash.

I suspected that I was loosing emails and that was the conclusive proof. I thought it was caused by an issue announced on my provider’s blog some days ago, which was fixed.

What are the consequences? It worries me that I don’t know them all. Among the few consequences I’m aware of, the worst one is that three of our servers were down today for almost 2 hours because I didn’t receive the monthly receipt nor its reminders; fortunately, our highest traffic websites (like GetGNULinux.org and translations) are hosted in other servers.

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A picture is worth a thousand words:

Have your software the way you want it and well-integrated with other programs.

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While the Gnome Foundation is eager to support the OOXML crap, Qt, the library KDE is built upon, is going to be licensed under the GPL v3!

I just hope Trolltech to drop the senseless restrictions over the other editions of Qt.

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As a happy KDE user, I used to install Kubuntu on the computers of those relatives and friends of mine who wanted to make the switch to GNU/Linux. Now I install Ubuntu (because of Gnome), while I’m still a happy KDE user (eager to use KDE 4!).

The first time I installed GNU/Linux on someone else’s computer was on my girlfriend’s; it was Mandrake 9.x with KDE (yeah, it’s been a while). I was glad to see how happy she was with her brand-new, freedom-respectful, fully-featured system (even my mother-in-law loved it!).

Since then, I’ve installed Kubuntu on the laptops of my parents, my dear 8-years-old sister, other relatives and some friends of mine. Except for my little sister, they all complained about GNU/Linux being harder to use than Windows (but by “harder” they often meant “different”, as they expected GNU/Linux to look like Windows, despite I warned them); also, I often received phone calls and emails from them, asking for help with “Linux”.

So I tried something new, replace KDE by Gnome. When I went to Venezuela this summer, I replaced Kubuntu by Ubuntu on these computers and gave them a brief introduction to the new system… Since then, no one has ever asked me how to do something with GNU/Linux. I made another test with an aunt of mine who lives here in Spain, who by the way drove me crazy saying “Linux is hard to use; it sucks”, and it worked too; she’s now a happy GNU/Linux user.

Although this workaround has not worked with my girlfriend; she bought a new laptop some months ago, and I suggested her to use Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu, but Ubuntu simply lasted three days (or so) on her computer: She got tired of its extreme simplicity, and asked me to give her KDE back as soon as possible.

To be honest, I don’t understand why KDE is seen as something hard to use (it’s actually the most similar to Windows!). Indeed it has far more widgets and options than Gnome, but this makes it harder to use? In my case, it makes me more productive and more comfortable when working on the computer.

In the end, the fact is that I’ll only recommend Ubuntu to newcomers from now on, with a brief mention of Kubuntu if they seem to be curious about computing, specially now when a new version of KDE (which will ship more widgets/tools/objects) is on the way.

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Free Software purists spend/waste a lot of time explaining why GNU/Linux is the right name for the operating system and why just “Linux” is wrong, so these are my thoughts…

Alright, if I use the GNU operating system with Linux running as its kernel, then I’d be using GNU/Linux. But wait a second! Isn’t KDE or Gnome one of the most important parts of my system? After all, I wouldn’t use my computer with the command line interface. Also, out of all of the applications I use, how many of them are KDE-based or Gnome-based? Much more than those applications from the GNU project.

So, my desktop environment also deserves to be appended to the name of the system I use and therefore I’m actually using GNU/Linux/KDE. Although… If they say GNU/Linux instead of Linux because the kernel without GNU is useless, then I shouldn’t just append my desktop environment but also its widget toolkit, so I’m afraid the right name of the system I use is GNU/Linux/Qt/KDE. And now I wonder whether I should also append the X Windows System.

This is a mess and I think there are many more important things to do instead of trying to find out what’s the accurate name of my system (I just care about it being freedom-respectful). To sum up, GNU is the base of the operating system and thus my operating system should be called just “GNU”, but it’s unfortunately best known as “Linux” (which is not that bad, after all, it’s the core of the base sub-system)… Also, a drawback of using GNU is that it’s an acronym, which would lead to a hard-to-remember name for a highly important operating system (what’s its name? GUN? UNG? NGU?), specially for non-English speaking people (who won’t remember what GNU stands for).

For the above reasons Linux has always worked, while I’d still prefer to refer to it as GNU (although I often use GNU/Linux to avoid ambiguity). In the end, the name is not so important to me, as long as it isn’t ambiguous.

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