OneAndOneIs2

I don't like Windows much as an OS. I don't like Desktop Environments (DEs) in general either. I like GNU/Linux running FVWM2 with an Xterm always just a click away.

So you might think that KDE on top of Windows Vista would be pretty much the last thing that I wanted to mess around with.

And in many ways, you'd be right.

However, KDE is still, at heart, a Linux desktop. It has things like virtual desktops & lots of customisability. It's better than the godawful Vista environment.

So I thought I'd take a look at the KDE on Windows project and see how it was coming these days. The KDE-installer package was a quick & easy download, and duly ran me through a list of options, all of which I left as the default, and then asked me what packages I wanted to install. I selected everything but the foreign language packs, and then sat back as it downloaded them all - 52 in total.

It jammed at 65% of file 2 (KDEbase) so I cancelled, went back in, and chose a different mirror. This time, it downloaded everything fine. Until 92% when it jammed again. Another retry, and "third time lucky" - it finally moved onto the next file.

It motored through the next few files, which were rather smaller, then jammed again. Another restart, and it was at least clever enough to not try and download the files it already had. It was still a slow process - the KDE guys adding a "retry" option instead of just having to restart the whole process every time you hit a problem would have helped enormously.

Eventually, it succeeded in getting all the files downloaded, and then went through the installation. Around an hour after starting, it was complete.

What happens next?

Let's start by trying a KDE staple: Konqueror.

Up it popped, after authorising it to run (Yay Vista!) and I told it to look in my Home folder. It worked fine.. Pointed it at the web, aimed it at my blog - since I know this is both complex and fully standards-compliant - and was rather disappointed. Half the images weren't rendered, the page as a whole was way too narrow for no apparent reason.

There's a LOT of other KDE apps that I have yet to play with. But you don't seem to get any kind of actual "KDE" desktop - it's just the applications?

So.. first impressions: A long and painful installation process, and though you get a lot of *nix applications, you still have to stick with the Windows desktop. And it doesn't seem to come with some of the best-known apps, such as amaroK, konsole and K3B, which I find odd.

It's very impressive that, courtesy of Qt, they've managed to port so much across from *nix to Windows... but surely the whole point was to give you a consistent user interface? What's the point of having "the K Desktop Environment" available for Windows if you don't port the Desktop Environment itself..?

I'll look into it more later.. but right now, I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled. Which is a shame, because I'm a fan of Qt and some of KDE and I was hoping to say something nice at this point..