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No, they do so much more. For example with KDE activities you can save states of your desktop (which apps are open, their position on screen, their open tabs,
by andmarios 12y ago
No, they do so much more.
For example with KDE activities you can save states of your desktop (which apps are open, their position on screen, their open tabs, files etc) and restore them whenever you want.
So you have ready layouts for your usual tasks and you can start/stop or switch between them in seconds.
Another small example that exists since KDE 2 maybe: you get a clipboard with history. How one may live without it?
Also you get all the small perks like easily setting your keyboard layouts, shortcuts etc.
You get a very fast search utility. Navigating to a file through your file manager is so ineffective when you can type a few letters and find the exact file or folder you need. Searching through your email with gmail (or better) speed from your system tray without having to go to your browser is so useful.
There are a ton of small nice apps, like a ruler or a color selector or a screenshot utility. You may connect to a VPN with exactly two clicks or send your music from your speakers to your bluetooth headset.
Your music or video will autopause when your Android phone rings. You get notifications synchronization with your Android.
Your archive utility can preview any type of file even with color highlighting if it is code. Your apps can edit directly any file on remote file systems (even ftp or ssh).
There are so many things a well designed desktop environment can do for you.
- gcr 12y agoDoes KDE do these? It sounds like the setup you describe is only possible with a huge amount of configuration. With enough configuration, Emacs could do all those things too.
- andmarios 12y agoKDE does most of these and many more out of the box. ;) The only one it doesn't do by default is the Android integration but you only need to install kde-connect and pair your phone. Kde-connect will probably be part of the default installation in the near future, so it will be out of the box too. KDE always had such cool features. For example when audio CDs were still a thing, whenever you inserted an audio CD in your drive and open it in KDE's file manager it would show you folders with mp3 and flac versions of the songs. Once you tried to copy them, KDE would rip and encode them on the fly for you!
- rikkus 12y agoHi, I came up with the CD ripping idea and wrote the original implementation. I remember being dissatisfied with the existing programs that did the job, and preferring the idea of simply inserting the CD and then dragging and dropping the (virtual) audio files from it. You can see [almost] the original documentation from ten years ago here: http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdemultimedia/kioslave/audiocd/index.html http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdemultimedia/kioslave/au... I think it probably confused a few people when it looked like their Red Book audio CD contained folders, one of which contained Ogg Vorbis files, ready tagged. I had actually forgotten about this, thanks for the reminder!
- andmarios 12y agoThank you for your work on KDE!
- pyre 12y ago> Another small example that exists since KDE 2 maybe: you get a clipboard with history. How one may live without it? There is a tool called glipper on the GNOME side that does this. I don't know how it fared in the GNOME 3 / Unity conversion though. I do remember that at one point it only needed a systray + GTK, but then they made it dependent on some GNOME stuff so I couldn't use it in a more stripped-down environment (e.g. xmonad + alternate systray).