KDE and digiKam Receive TUX 2005 Readers' Choice Award

With its Issue #6, TUX Magazine published the winners of its first annual Readers' Choice Awards, placing KDE in the first place in the "Favorite Desktop Environment" category and digiKam first in the "Favorite Digital Photo Management Tool".

In addition, KDE applications were placed second in categories "Favorite Communications Tool" (Kopete), "Favorite Web Browser" (Konqueror), "Favorite Mail Client" (KMail), "Favorite Productivity Tool" (KOffice), "Favorite Music Player" (amaroK) and "Favorite Media Player" (Kaffeine). KDE applications Kate and KWrite, which are in fact one application only, won second and third places in the "Favorite Text Editor" category, and would have got the first place if their votes were added together.

The KDE Project and its contributors are very proud of these results, considering they are the users' choices and votes that counted. Congratulations to everyone involved!

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Comments

by fast_rizwaan (not verified)

Kopete is a real gem for kde, But I find 2 annoying things in kopete,

1. Can't login to googletalk (jabber with my gmail.com) id
2. Removing an account does not remove the contact list.

1. I can logon to googletalk using gaim, but kopete won't log me on :(

2. add user account "Joe" say in yahoo, and remove "joe", then later add "MOE", fortunately/unfortunately MOE will get all contacts of "JOE" :( this is not nice.

Apart from those 2 annoyances, I find kopete wonderful!

by ac (not verified)

Try the settings from the screeny, those work perfectly for me.

by Patrick Davies (not verified)

Hmm... 'QCA TLS plugin not installed on your system'
:/
I'll find it tho.

by ZeD (not verified)

Install PSI. It's the only app I know providing that QCA-TLS plugin

by anonymous (not verified)

kopete can do it, too. You just need to install qca-tls plugin on fc3.

by T. Middleton (not verified)

Google Talk works with Kopete fine. The previous reply with the settings screenshot attached holds the secret...

The secret is that it seems you need the "SSL" connection checked...

by Ivan da Silva B... (not verified)

Kopete does not connect behind firewalls, because you can't tell him to use port 80, just like GAIM can do. I like kopete, I want to use kopete, but this, and not having a toolbar in the chat window to access account functions are an obstacle.

by blacksheep (not verified)

How is the IRC integration on Kopete going, btw?

It used to be quite good on the first releases it was shipped with KDE, but sadly it got worse and worse. I can't seem to be able to even connect to an IRC server at my KDE 3.2 version. Hope it improves because I hate to use another application for IRC.

by rinse (not verified)

Hmm, I never experienced any problems with connecting to a irc-server using kopete.
Your problem must be a configuration error or something

by Christian Loose (not verified)

> I can't seem to be able to even connect to an IRC server at my KDE 3.2 version

The following information helped me to get IRC working again:

http://kopete.kde.org/faq.php#id2291930
http://dot.kde.org/1080892495/1081381765/1101217681/1101694059/

Hope it helps...

by Víctor Fernández (not verified)

Take a look at the Kopete wiki:

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Google+Talk+support

Just my 0.02 eur. ;)

by Patrick Davies (not verified)

"Favorite Distribution: Kubuntu/Ubuntu"

And I most certainly agree. :)

by Youssef (not verified)

Can you explain what makes Ubuntu the Favourite Distribution ?

by ac (not verified)

Free cdroms. Lots of hype. Pretends to be beginner-friendly (is not, but how should beginners know?). Commitment to free software (this one for real). Some things just work. Many don't just work, but see lots of hype :)

by Rich (not verified)

Well it's the first distro I've got installed on my laptop that got the sound, networking (incl. wifi), display (1280 x 800 at last!), ACPI, touchpad, USB etc working first time. It tries hard to present things in a smart and easy to use way - kde looks very clean.

BUT, it's buggy as hell ATM and it's not a beginners distro IMHO - I'd also recommend staying well clear of adding universe to your sources unless you're prepared for regular re-installs.

It's got promise though - if Ubuntu can work more closely with debian we might just end up with the so far "mythical" desktop linux success story that we all want!

by gat (not verified)

After much work in the terminal, building madwifi, etc. I finally got Hoary working just about perfectly on my laptop. I still had to dig through forums for hours almost every time I installed a new app -- but it was pretty solid all around -- even my Wifi, Sound, Touchpad, and ATI wireless were working fairly well.

Then I read Breezy had much better laptop support, so I did the dist-upgrade... That was weeks ago, and I'm still not back to the level of functionality I had beforehand. Mpeg video almost always fails now (kaffiene used to ace everything -- now it's consipcuously missing from the repositories) -- the touchpad is prone to fits of random behavior, and the sound is not as reliable.

I agree, this is as close as I've ever gotten to the "promised land" of a desktop linux. (Other distros either seem to give 70% working hardware OR 70% working software -- Hoary was at about 85% on both scores. Breezy seems to be prettier and maybe run a bit faster, but is less reliable for both hardware and software.)

We all want this to happen, I think -- a free, powerful desktop that's not in the pocket of a mega-corp. As an overall OS, Linux probably already has M$ beaten. Still, any windoze replacement is going to need strong laptop, peripheral, USB, 3d graphics, sound, midi, compressed video, wifi, etc. "All the modern conveniences," as they say.

by Will (not verified)

I'm a complete beginner with Linux and not too tech savy at all, yet I've managed to get Kubuntu working on my creaking old iBook. Loving it.

Now my only question is: can anyone explain to a dummy like me how to get a Risc OS theme working on it?

by Youssef (not verified)

I think it is strange that KDE is the favorite desktop but the other competing KDE applications are not the winners of their categories. One thing that makes a desktop environment a good one is the consistency between its applications.
And that is the reason why I use KDE and along with it : KMail, Konqueror, KDEwebdev, ... What is KDE without Kopete, Konqueror, KMail, KOffice, amaroK, Kaffeine, Kate ... ? The answer: kdesktop, kicker, kwin.

by Paul Eggleton (not verified)

answer: kdesktop, kicker, kwin.

Don't forget kioslaves. Of course they don't work without applications, but they are an important part of KDE that shouldn't be overlooked.

by blacksheep (not verified)

If you don't use any KDE application, ioslaves are useless. Youssef as a point IMHO.

by Roberto Alsina (not verified)

Not if you are using FUSE with that gateway stuff someone mentioned a while ago.

by blacksheep (not verified)

FUSE is KDE independent.

by cm (not verified)

Yes, but with something like kio_fuse non-KDE apps can benefit from the power of KDE's IOSlaves.

See http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+Gateway

Dunno what state that gateway is in, though...

by Ookaze (not verified)

I don't think it is strange at all, given I've seen ordinary users with KDE. The desktop may be good, that's not the equivalent to say all the apps are the best. My wife uses Gnumeric continually for example, despite its KDE desktop, and she never *got* the fact that the application is not a KDE app (she does not know what KDE is anyway). She uses MPlayer (with plastik skin) without any second thought. She uses Galeon for web browsing because she prefers it. She does not know the difference between Gnome and KDE apps, she just chooses what suits her best.

Every user is not fanatic about its desktop. Fortunately, I'm not either, or I would have given her a Gnome desktop like mine.

by martin (not verified)

the funny thing is that gnome people assimilate every non-qt non-KDE app as an gnome app. but in fact that is wrong.

indeed, it should not matter whether it is written in QT or not. We need a better integration of nonqt/nonKDE apps into the KDe desktop.

by Morty (not verified)

The main reason in some categories KDE applications don't win, are pure lag in user base. Lots of users are conservative and don't change the applications they use easily. Only in cases where the new application are clearly better will we see a sudden shift of the userbase, like what happend with X-CD-Roast and k3b. The way people stick with such antiquities as XMMS are beyond me, and honestly Noatun was the better application 4 years ago. Even if Noatun or Juk managed to dislodged it, but it seems like amaroK has got the hype and momentum to finally do so. In other areas I think it also will shift, as the quality of the KDE applications increase even more and more and more people realize it. I think Krita is applications it will be interesting to watch. Besides it took a KDE application to end the vi-emacs war:-)

by Yrrebnarg (not verified)

And what KDE application is that? I find myself using KDevelop/Kate and sometimes kyzis instead of emacs and command-line vi, but I'm just about the only one around that does. Of course, nobody uses vi. It's mostly a battle between emacs and the slickedit windows guys.

Now for me, I stopped using emacs for mail (gnus) when I found that kmail was actually useful and emacs again for aim (tnt) when I decided gaim might be worth the hassle of windows. I tried kopete, but it was a little frustrating having it crash every third message back then. It does seem to have stabilized a bit in the past few months, though. Kudos to the team.

Now, can anyone tell me what it is that evolution is supposed to have over kmail, except maybe organization in the configuration hierarchy? Kontact really needs to try and contain its schizophrenia...

by Morty (not verified)

As you already stated, Kate. It has started to really take on the old boys, vi and emacs in popularity. In the last year started to split the top duo in popularity contests. And you should have seen this little gem from the article blurb:
"KDE applications Kate and KWrite, which are in fact one application only, won second and third places in the "Favorite Text Editor" category, and would have got the first place if their votes were added together."

Saying that nobody uses vi is somewhat correct, as I guess they mostly prefer vim. But it's customary to lump them together as one, same as emacs and xemacs. Looking at it that way there are a few somewhat well known nobodies using vi, like that Thorvalds guy.

I remember trying gnus years ago, back in the days when X only was used as a way to have many terminal windows open, but I decided it was not worth it. I went for Pine insted, as it was both userfriendly and powerfull(for my needs).

Perhaps it's time to consider Kopete again then, for me it has been stable for the last two years. Nearly whitout crashes, had a few on svn/cvs versions. But that's the price of bleeding edge tho. The only small problems have been the times when MS and the likes, plays silly buggers and change the protocols. And even then the total time of outage until Kopete got updated are lover than the outages I have had caused by the MSN server being down.

by Matt (not verified)

Is kde-look.org down?

by rinse (not verified)

Not anymore :)

by Anonymous (not verified)

Should somebody update http://www.kde.org/awards ?