Report: Visitors to Linux World Frankfurt Give KDE A Thumbs Up

Continuing the successful run of trade show presences, the KDE team used the opportunity of this year's Linux World Expo and Conference in Frankfurt, Germany to show off the latest K Desktop Environment. The booth staff presented the latest KDE pre 3.2 snapshots hot off CVS as well as the last stable release KDE 3.1, to a broad audience ranging from home users to system administrators, professional developers, IT managers and government representatives. The most common question from booth visitors: "I can't wait for 3.2 to be released, can you tell me the exact release date?"

The KDE usability study got a lot of attention. To show the marvelous ease of use of a corporate KDE desktop, basysKom and Relevantive AG presented the results of the usability study along with the test environment and videos from the tests. Of course, an introduction to KDE's KIOSK mode, which e.g. allows for enterprises to lock down their employees' desktops, was included. "We enjoy KDE for its simple and uncomplicated administration possibilities in large scale setups" said one visitor.

Many people asked about Kontact, and were happy to see it included in the next major release. They were amazed to see that all the KDE PIM components can now act in an even more integrated way. IT managers from companies and public authorities were interested in employing Kontact as soon as possible.

During the fair, KDE's Tobias König and the eGroupware folks finished a proof-of-concept eGroupware connector for Kontact based on XML RPC which was shown at the eGroupware booth. This once again demonstrates the amazing flexibility of the KDE PIM framework.

People were also amazed by the brand new KDevelop 3.0, dubbed Gideon, which will have its initial stable release with KDE 3.2. It features support for more than a dozen programming languages, several build environments and reversion control systems such as the broadly used CVS, the new Subversion and Perforce. The new improved help browser with lots of documentation, which crowns the feature palette, as well as as-you-type syntax check and syntax-completion won a lot of visitors over to KDE development with KDevelop.

People were also surprised when Eva Brucherseifer showed the ease of platform independent programming with Trolltech's Qt, the flexible C++ toolkit which serves as the foundation for KDE.

ArkLinux, a distribution devoted to bring Linux on the desktop with great ease, was featured at the computer show "3Sat neues". They portrayed KDE developer and ArkLinux founder Bernhard Rosenkränzer installing his KDE based distribution on an Athlon64 system.

Personal discussions at the fair proved that KDE is running successfully in many companies and at public authorities and its success and popularity still increase. The KDE team is looking forward to Linux World Expo & Conference 2004.

Thanks go to HP for sponsoring hardware, basysKom for even more hardware and manpower, and finally to credativ and the Debian team for running the infrastructure of the OpenSource booth.