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Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

Kate was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in 2004/2005.

I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge.

In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this?

Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)

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Also k3b was an amazing software for burning CDs back then, its interface easily rivaled contemporary proprietary software.

KDE 3.5 was one of the peaks (if not the peak) of graphical interfaces on GNU/Linux.

Experiencing KDE at the time I was used to the Windows XP interface felt amazing, and soon after Vista promises of innovation on interface were nothing compared to what could be done in Compiz (More on the Gnome 2 side).

KDE is still great! I continue to see improvements and KDE6 has some killer features like KDE Connect. (we still don't talk about KDE4 though)

Agreed! I recently switched from a very custom Linux setup with a tiling window manager and all kinds of bells and whistles. The Plasma 6 release in combination with running NixOS which makes trying things out both easily and safely convinced me to give it a shot and I simply haven't left. It took some setup, of course, but Plasma is wonderfully configurable and has everything I wanted available with some tweaking.

Whereas GNOME and others required extensions, which are often out of date or somewhat sketchy -- before I could set things up how I like.

Big fan so far.

Exactly what happened to me too! Been using a Sway setup on NixOS for many many years, and I was just curious to try out Plasma 6. After a small config change, I had the desktop up and running, and I was impressed how it felt like. You can even use plasma-manager to store your KDE settings to a nix configuration, which make it easy to have a unified configuration across different computers.

https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

KDE Connect has been around and amazingly useful since 2013

KDE4 is a sad story. It ruined the reputation of KDE for a very long time. I loved KDE 3.5, but then came back to KDE only in 2021.

It's mostly just a problem of communication. KDE 4.0 should not have been marked as stable and should not been used by distros. If they baked KDE4 for two more years and on the side maintained/developed 3.5, the transition might be much smoother.

That version thing was frustrating because it was an unforced error. Surely someone, at some point, brought up that people would expect the version number to mean that it was ready for use. But they chose to proceed with using their idiosyncratic version scheme, and unsurprisingly suffered a reputation hit for it.

KDE4 ruined Amarok too. That's why there's Clementine and Strawberry now, which are forks from Amarok 1.4.

Amarok did 'die' because the dev team dissolved due to multiple issues.

Huh, interesting. Well it still supports my point that when people looked to which version to resurrect, they did not pick Amarok 2.

Amarok became unusable with KDE 4 before it died.

While there were some bugs in early KDE 4, those were not the main problem.

No amount of baking could have saved it.

The main problem was caused by the completely different purposes of the new developers, who have removed all the outstanding customization features of KDE 3.5.

For me, indeed KDE 3.5 has been the best graphic desktop that I have ever seen. Neither before, nor after and neither on Apple or Windows have I encountered anything as good.

The main reason for this was that KDE 3.5 allowed extreme customization, so you could make your own graphic desktop that did not resemble at all the default desktop.

After the shock of experiencing the garbage KDE 4, even if I had waited a half of year before making the transition, with the hope that any major bugs would be solved, I have reverted to KDE 3.5 for a few years, until it had become much to painful to make upgrades in such a way as to not damage it.

Then I have switched to XFCE, which does not provide as much as the old KDE 3.5, but at least it does not get in the way of your work with undesirable and hard to remove features. Moreover, any useful KDE applications, such as Kate, work perfectly fine on XFCE, together with any useful Gnome applications.

The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application has characterized the developers who have converted the Mozilla browser into Firefox, which is another unwelcome change that I have greatly hated.

> For me, indeed KDE 3.5 has been the best graphic desktop that I have ever seen.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I miss KDE 3.5.

Another problem with KDE 4 was the buzzword technologies pushed everywere - semantic desktop with Nepomuk (nice research project but not fit for normal use), plasma applet UI added to applications (why?), activities replacing virtual desktops but not really.

> The same kind of developer philosophy, that users are dumb and they must be prevented from customizing the application

The more holistic view is that every customization path incurs a support burden.

If you have 3 options to support, you can engineer and test the heck out of each option. 15 options? Not so much.

So having those 12 extra options not only creates permanent extra workload, as dev time is finite you’ve effectively made the 3 aforementioned options worse off.

kde6 has lost the ability to change the window manager :( I have a wonderful xmonad + kde5 setup on my work laptop but had to stick with mate on my personal machine (not worth fighting with my distro to downgrade to kde5)

Konqueror and KHTML was also the basis for Google Chrome IIRC.

By way of WebKit

I had a love-hate relationship with k3b because years ago it was the only cd burner program that was both somewhat stable and otherwise not terrible on Linux, but also it was the only KDE program I just had to have on my XFCE Gentoo system, which meant compiling allllll of kde libs and qt and losing a bunch of disk space to them.

Ah, k3b. Good memories. Seems the project is alive and well!

I use it on a regular basis. It still rocks.

Yes! When I started using Kate on Linux ca. 2005, I was coming from Notepad on Windows and couldn’t believe how nice it was. I believe it was my first experience of syntax highlighting.

And Amarok! I haven’t thought of that in a while. Losing Amarok was my single biggest regret when I became a Max user. I’ve not used anything since that came close.

What about Clementine or Strawberry? Clementine was a fork of Amarok 1.4, and Strawberry a fork of Clementine.

I recently discovered Strawberry would play music off of my Subsonic server (Navidrome really) and was thrilled to have something for music that didn't feel like a web app.

Amarok is preparing for another release. I wonder if it will come to mac.

Yeah, that's a surprising revival. I thought it died for good this time.

I think people who got excited about streaming (one low price and you get whatever music you want on tap) have started to realize it isn't as nice as it seems (music disappears, they push music you don't want, and don't support artists like CDs do) and so developers are coming back to local clients that you control managing music you own.

> I was coming from Notepad on Windows

Ouch. You didn't use Notepad++?

Notepad++ would have been very new at that time. I don't know what those early releases were like.

But there were similar editors. I remember using SCIte which was similar to Notepad++. SCIte was first released in 1999.

My editor of choice back in the Windows days was EditPlus, from 1998 (and looks like it's still maintained). I think it had syntax highlighting from the start too.

Notepad++ is based on Scintilla, for which Scite is sort of the demo program. Scintilla is also the basis of Geany.

I explained this recently on the Reg. Read the Reg. ;-)

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/veteran_editors_notep...

You forget, on windows, we had WAMP with phpmysql so we could run queries in our browser. Not being able to do them within an IDE until around 2001 with Dreamweaver and Microsoft InterDev…

Kate is cool but it wasn’t the first to have this.

Haha, indeed! I was pretty frustrated with configuring WAMP, though. Once I started spending more time on Linux and noticed that Linux was using the slash instead of the backslash for directories and all other OS differences, suddenly, the WAMP configuration made a lot of sense and became one more reason to switch permanently to Linux.

Interesting. I think it was a couple of years earlier than that(?) when I tried using Kate, but it was so buggy and crashy as to be unusable.

Since I tried it pretty close to its initial release, I'm certain those problems were resolved. However, I developed work habits that didn't include it and so I still don't use it to this day.

A few years later, I also switched to Emacs on the terminal. I just find the terminal a better place to work. But I still do use Kate for some tasks.

Oh, I loved Amarok back in the days! Nowadays the only end-user player I know that has some of its abilities is Apple's Music.

> It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function.

You're forgetting Pandora somewhere in that timeline, probably between iTunes and Spotify.

That was my first introduction into the concept at least.

Nice that Kate did help you to make the switch. The SQL plugin is unfortunately not that well maintained any more, help with that is welcome.

> Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player.

It's dead now.

It got revived suddenly, there's going to be a new release soon.

Given the response here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481383

I'm unimpressed.

This is to a bug that, according to their public communications, was fixed years ago. Except of course that it's still present. But other than that, it was fixed years ago.

I mean, it says quite clearly that no one has built an up-to-date version of Amarok for Windows since 2013, but the bug is fixed in the source code and has been for a long time. That no one has stepped up to package Amarok for Windows in that time isn't a bug.

And I've long since switched to a streaming service. But I am still on a Linux desktop —and KDE. :)

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