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.

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Comments

by anon (not verified)

Always great to see KDE get more positive PR. Hopefully KDE @ Comdex will be a hit too!

by David (not verified)

Kontact's website hasn't been updated for a while. Shoudn't take long - just some up to date news on its status and some more screenshots and functionality descriptions.

by anon (not verified)

Looks like kontact.kde.org is looking for a maintainer to take over the task.

I'm a bit puzzled that I never before heard anything about arklinux...

Does anyone know which version of KDE they use? is it the latest?

/Dave

ArkLinux is in my opinion one of the most promising distributions. They have a quiet demeanor and seem to be working silently towards a very, very polished distribution.

I think they deserve more of the support of the KDE community as they are one of the few completely GPL distributions that is 100% behind KDE.

The installation takes 20 minutes. I encourage anyone to give it a shot.

Regards,

Gonzalo

by frappa (not verified)

A community driven, user friendly distro with KDE has been missing IMO.

by Imrahil (not verified)

If you are interested in a great community driven distro, look no further than Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) To see a sampling of the amazing super-vibrant community, check forums.gentoo.org. KDE is favored by many Gentoo users and some of the KDE dev team use and love Gentoo. I compile KDE CVS a couple times a week and use the build scripts (called ebuilds) provided by KDE developer and Gentoo ethusiast Caleb Tennis.

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

I use Gentoo and it seems that enough of our developers do that you can easily get Gentoo questions fielded on our list. I'm also surprised at times to find that seeming n00bs are asking questions about their Gentoo install. Gentoo is not focused on KDE or GNOME but instead offers these and other packages as the developers intended them. Also because you compile it for your system, set the compiler optimizations and only include what you need in the kernel it's amazingly fast. You should have broadband to use it though. As an extra benefit you can forget the CD upgrade merry go round.

by anon (not verified)

Also gentoo makes getting and compiling a copy of kde-cvs (or betas) as easy as getting kde 3.1.x, because it's a source based distro. No waiting for someone to update binary packages of kde-cvs for your distro because you can't build cvs properly. No wonder that as of late, a lot of bug reporters who use CVS/3.2b1 on bugs.kde.org are gentoo users.

by fault (not verified)

Erm, ever heard of two community based distros called Debian and Gentoo that offer great KDE support (including have KDE developers as the packagers)

Both are great, I currently favor Gentoo because of it's great forums, but I used Debian for a number of (3) years.

by frappa (not verified)

Yes, but I meant user friendly in a point, click and drool sense. Most people want this and Debian and Gentoo doesn't fit that description.