“I’ve been using KDE2 exclusively for three weeks shy of a year
now — by that, I of course mean the development stuff that has
coalesced into KDE2 — so the improvements have been incremental
here, not at all like the stunning difference the user switching
from KDE-1.x will experience. I actually had to go back and play
with KDE-1.1.2 for a few hours to refresh my recollection. And
while KDE-1.x was an Open Source landmark, stable, configurable,
easy, bright, and fun, it doesn’t hold a candle to the new version.
The differences are as striking (and I do not equate them in any
other way) as the differences between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
KDE2, though differing from the Microsoft product in that it is
stable, shows that much more depth.”
“Gone is the solid but basic KFM, the file manager that also
really handled many of the desktop functions. It is replaced by the
remarkable and robust Konqueror, which is a file manager, file
viewer, web browser, ftp client, and so much more. Gone, too, is
the familiar KPanel, replaced by Kicker, which performs the
functions of KPanel plus taskbar and pager. The KMenu has been
greatly improved, now grouping KDE and non-KDE applications
together. KOrganizer actually works and is now useful, and its
integration with applications such as KMail has been created. New
Internet applications include Kit, an AOL Instant Messenger
program, and KNode, a more-than-decent news reader.”
“The underlying architecture has been improved everywhere and
completely changed where needed. The whole thing is object
oriented, so that in one application you will find things that are
familiar to you from other applications — greatly reducing the
learning curve — and built in large measure from powerful and
cleverly designed reusable parts. What makes this so cool is that
as new parts are added, existing applications will be able to make
use of them with a minimum of recoding. Third-party developers are
already at work on additional KParts, leading for instance to the
Kivio flow-chart application that theKompany.com released in early
beta last week.”
“It’s a major release in every sense of the word.”