Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [51]
KDE is in ever-continuing development, but every few months the KDE team puts out a so-called official release that is considered very stable and suitable for end users. The KDE team makes these available in source form, and most distributions provide easy-to-install binary packages within days of a source release. If you don't mind fiddling around with KDE and can stand an occasional bug, you can also live on the bleeding edge and download daily snapshots of KDE, but this is not for the fainthearted. At the time of this writing, the current stable release was 3.4.2. To stay current with KDE development, visit http://www.kde.org, the official web site of the KDE project, often.
General Features
One of the goals of the KDE team is to make everything in KDE configurable by GUI dialogs. Underneath the configuration system lies a set of text files in a fairly simple parameter=value format; you can edit these if you prefer, but you never need to. Even the most experienced users usually admit that in order to do simple things, such as change the background color of the desktop, it's faster to click a few buttons than to read the manual page, find the syntax for specifying the background color, open the configuration file, edit it, and restart the window manager.
Besides easy configuration, KDE sports a few other features that were previously unheard of on Linux. For example, it integrates Internet access fully into the desktop. It comes with a file manager that doubles as a web browser (or the other way around), and browsing files on some FTP sites is just the same as browsing your local hard disk. You can drag and drop icons that represent Internet locations to your desktop and thus easily find them again later. KDE integrates search engines and other Internet resources into your desktop and even lets you define your own favorite search engines and Internet links with ease. In addition, almost all KDE application are able to open and save files in remote locations, not just via FTP or HTTP, but also to and from a digital camera, or using SSH encryption, or in other ways.
Drag-and-drop, commonplace on Windows or the Macintosh, is also widely used in KDE. For example, to open a file in the text editor, you just grab its icon in the file manager window and drop it onto the editor window. This works no matter where the file is located; if it is on a remote server, KDE automatically downloads the file for you before opening it in the text editor or whichever application you choose to open it with. The same goes for multimedia files. Just by clicking an icon for an MP3 file on a remote server, you can download it in the background and play it locally.
Although manual pages are designed well to give programmers instant access to terse information about system libraries, they are not really very well suited for end-user documentation. KDE therefore uses standard HTML files (which are generated from XML files in the background) and comes with a fast help viewer, the KDE Help Center. The viewer also knows how to display manual page and Info files so that you can access all the documentation on your system from one application. In addition, most KDE applications support context-sensitive help.
For the past few releases, the X Window System has supported a feature called session management . When you leave your X environment, log off, or reboot, an application that understands session management will reappear at the same positions and in the same configuration. Unfortunately, this very user-friendly feature was rarely supported by X applications. KDE uses it extensively. KDE provides a session manager that handles session management, and all KDE applications are written to behave properly with that feature. KDE will also support other modern X11 features such as anti-aliasing if your X server supports them (most X servers do, by means of the so-called RENDER extension).
KDE contains a window manager, kwin, and an excellent one at that, but that is only one part of KDE. Some of the others are