KDE Desktop Environment of the Year 2007, Apps Finish Strongly

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is. But also KDE applications have been very popular among the voters on Linuxquestions.org. Read on for more details.

KDE applications also score very high in users' popularity. KDE's CD and DVD burning application K3b has won in the category of multimedia utilities with nearly 2/3 of the votes: 63%. Amarok continues to amaze its users. 57% of the sample in the Linuxquestions survey prefer Amarok above other tools, making it the clear winner in the category Audio Media Player. Konqueror wins as most famous filemanager with 38% of the votes.
The discussion whether to use Vi or Emacs is history now. Kate wins a second place behind Vi and scores much better than Emacs. KDE's email client KMail follows up Mozilla Thunderbird. In the category of IDEs, Quanta finishes second behind Eclipse. The category messaging application lists Kopete as 2nd most popular, following up Pidgin.

The KDE community is really happy about all the awards and the confidence users have in KDE4 living up to everyone's expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved in those projects!

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Comments

by riddle (not verified)

I've voted too: now a total of 35 votes.
Still doesn't show very good support.. but better!

by AP Widodo (not verified)

I love KDE as I love Gnome too. I'm sorry I can't say longer cause my english was poor.
I love Kubuntu and I used it, but I also love Ubuntu (Gnome)
Thanks

by Wil Palen (not verified)

Amarok undoubtedly has the best functionality, but isn't a finished product IMHO.

crashes when (starting) playing, crashes when drag/dropping to collection, sometimes skips tracks because it cannot open the sound device, etc.

hope amarok for kde4 will be better polished..

by Tim McCormick (not verified)

Sounds like a problem with your choice of base system, or a packaging bug to me.

I've been running Amarok for a while, and haven't had any of the described issues since 1.2 at least. Perhaps there's a problem with the sound engine you're using?

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

I don't develop Amarok, I develop Quanta and Kommander. Your comment looks familiar though. I had someone say Quanta was slow once when it is very fast... turns out he had lots of very long if/else statements in his PHP which identified a parser bug. Someone else complained about behavior I wasn't experiencing and it was choices Fedora had made packaging kdelibs. It took a day and a half for our lead developer to find that. Statistically at one point we were tracing over half our bugs to packaging issues... in user terms, things that happened in the chain of bringing the software to you after it left our hands.

Whenever you state your experience with a piece of software, never forget you may have some difference in your hardware, configuration or libraries that make your experience utterly foreign to the vast majority of users. Here's a clue to your subjective analysis. Programs don't win user awards and accolades when they don't work right and don't seem finished.

You wouldn't complain to an auto manufacturer that you were stuck in a traffic jam after you bought their car. Instead of accepting you have a problem you should check with your distribution to see if they have a solution.

by Wil Palen (not verified)

Programs do win awards if it's the best FOSS has to offer, regardless of their shortcomings. And I'm not that clueless that you should slap me with your car/traffic jam analogy.

I manage multiple systems with the same distribution, using the same backend, etc. On my main system Amarok works flawless. On two other systems I see intermittent crashes and track-skips. Might be the backend, might be the hardware, but apparently it's not the packaging.

Also, when dragging/dropping multiple tracks to the Collection view, many times only 1 of those tracks ends up in the local Collection folder, without any feedback to the user that not all has been copied.

It's often the error conditions that are badly handled, as is the case with Amarok.

by Max (not verified)

Amarok 2.0 isn't finished yet.

Most everybody knows that.
I just hope it will be in time for KDE 4.1

by whatever noticed (not verified)

"I just hope it will be in time for KDE 4.1"

Why?
Amarok has its own release schedule, it isn't part of the KDE Core Packages.
So it could get released before or after the release of 4.1.

by Steve (not verified)

Will a new alpha of Amarok be released anytime soon?
Maybe with KDE 4.0.3? A wider audience should get to test it.

by Mark Kretschmann (not verified)

Yep, we're shaping up for another alpha. Stay tuned.

by Max (not verified)

Awesome. I'm already on the edge of my seat!!!

-Max

by Mathieu Jobin (not verified)

I'd like to see the same poll answered by KDE developer only.

what distribution do you prefer to compile KDE4 on ?
what distribution has best and always fresh KDE4 packages?
editors, method of compiles, etc.

favorite language/bindings,environment?

qtruby/kommander/C++

all this could be updated frequently, or all member of http://www.kdedevelopers.org/ could simply update their information at anytime and the stats would be always dynamic.

that would be great.

by Steve (not verified)

Wouldn't this cause controversy?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

I'm a KDE developer (maintainer of Kompare), but as I'm also a Fedora KDE packager, I don't think I can give you an unbiased answer to your second question. :-) You can guess my answer to the first one. ;-)

by Steve (not verified)

I suspect this is all going to go in the opposite direction with KDE 4.X.

by knifemonkey (not verified)

it's not the only desktop environment!
personally I prefer jvwm-crystal with rox desktop but still use most of the kde apps.