KDE 3.5.5 For openSUSE 10.2

After the the previous problems I had, I managed to completely revert KDE 3.5.7 to 3.5.5 and fixed the desktop problem after lots of time spent playing with YaST2.

Although initially a frustrating experience, I’m finding 10.2 to be another great release. I’ve even started using smart again - although the GUI is still a bit unstable when doing a channel update this always works fine in shell mode. Of course, I’ve removed the KDE and GNOME channels which seem to cause no end of problems (in fact, my GNOME installation is still dysfunctional and unusable…) so the system is now updating smoothly and remaining stable.

I have to admit - I’ve normally preferred Xfce, Fluxbox or GNOME as a desktop/window manager, but KDE seems to have come a long way and has so far been very comfortable to use, flexible and allowing me easy management and update of my websites while the tasks can remain integrated. For example, editing a php file with Kate and immediately testing after saving directly to the FTP server. It’s this kind of convenience and integration that makes life quicker and easier.

Admittedly, Konqueror is a slow web browser in comparison to Firefox and has issues with GMail (which I use for my primary email address), admittedly through no fault of its own, but it looks to have a bright future as it has a lot of useful features already there (such as an adblocker and a user agent switcher) which have to be installed additionally for Firefox. I also found Akregator to be the nicest (and easiest to use) news feed reader that I’ve tried so far.

Linux has been my desktop OS for the past 5 years, I haven’t looked back since and I’m happy to say that it keeps getting better. Forget Vista, try out openSUSE 10.2.