KDE 4...

Now playing at Windows machines everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but at least at Computer World's. Faced with doing a big of web work, I fired up into my Vista partition so that I would have the glory of IE 7 at my beck and call...and because we had been running some tests at work on it and I was too darn lazy to reboot into Linux. I saw the aforelinked article a little before this most auspicious occasion and decided to download KOffice on Vista. The reason? I wanted to use Krita for my image work, rather than gimp. The reason is a tired old one, but still true: I hate the way the gimp creates about a zillion windows, cluttering up everything. Usually, MDI is a bad thing, but image manipulation is one of the few occaisions on which I would personally sanction it. Heck, without virtual desktops (either the built in ones on Linux or through the fine add on Virtuawin for Windows) I'd say that the gimp is well nigh unusable. Anyway, I digress. The article on Computer World is actually pretty favorable towards KDE 4 apps on Windows. I really wish that the situation were as sunny as they made it out to be. I used, or tried to use, Krita and Amarok (which is the finest music player, IMHO, that I have ever used). Krita hung and crashed and Amarok, well, I gave up on Amarok: I have all of my music on my Linux partition which I mount on Windows as the L: drive. I figured that I would specify the path to Amarok for the collection and away I'd go, listening to my oggs happily (which is a pain to get set up on Windows Media Player: it requires a separate codec download and still fails to show any ogg files in the collection, just MP3) except for one glitch: in its current state, Amarok 2 on Windows will not allow you to select a directory on any drive except the C: drive. Now, I understand that Amarok is in alpha and that KDE 4 isn't much better than one, but I will say this: I can't really use the KDE 4 suites on Windows for my main work, yet. It is just too flaky. I hold out high hopes. As a developer, I understand that new software requires some work to get fully polished, but KOffice 2 isn't quite ready to challenge OpenOffice as the best Office clone (which is another rant for another time).