The KDE team continues to make further progress on getting the KDE applications to run on Windows XP. It appears that they already have some of KDE’s most popular applications up and working: KWrite, Kate, Konqueror, and several others.
Those of you unfamiliar with Konqueror it is yet another Web browser. Actually, Apple’s Safari Web browser is based on Konqueror and I remember hearing about how a deal was setup where Apple would share any advancements that they made on the Web browser. Several years later they still haven’t shared any new code with the KDE team despite Safari having evolved quite nicely. This whole thing was in the news in a little while ago and I remember listening to it on one of the Linux podcasts that I subscribe to. They were interviewing a KDE developer and they said that Apple recently told them that they would share some of their code with the KDE team soon.
I don’t think that I would use the Konqueror browser that often, but it would be nice to have easy access to when testing for website compatibility issues. There are still a lot of questions in my mind about why the KDE team is so set on doing this. It’s cool and all that they want to port their applications over from Linux, but many of their apps have Windows counterparts that run natively on the operating system. I guess doing this does fulfill a dream though:
When I remember the beginnings (KDE 1 on Cygwin in 2001) there was a dream that it would be great to have KDE applications running on a Windows computer, and over time it evolved with KDE 2 and 3 on Cygwin and now KDE 4, natively running on Windows is on the horizon.
Web site capability is a big deal to me. I don’t have the resources to run a Linux, Mac, and multiple window machines just for the sake of making sure my web site look the same across platforms.
Native running applications would also be easier to get going verses running multiple OS through virtualization or multi-boot machines.
I’m just hoping for an amarok-port. Then I will die a happy man.
Why not just install Kubuntu ?
It is a great Distro.
I don’t want to run Linux. I have to much time, effort, and money invested in Windows based applications.
KDE on Windows? Cool! Are they also planning to release the window manager itself for Windows (as Explorer shell replacement)?
Same with me, I have tried to switch to Linux several times but trying to find workarounds for my programming applications (like Dreamweaver) is just too much of a pain. I know there are alternatives for Linux but none are nearly as good.
I don’t think that they are planning on releasing a complete Explorer shell replacement although that would be awesome.