KDE Rulez!

I went to my LUG meeting today. We were 17 people and there was another woman! She just installed Linux on her PC and is not interested in the technical things. But she is very interested in philosophy so she quickly understood the freedom concept. We had 2 presentations, one on Slackware and the other about fonts. I learnt a lot. We also talked about what we'll do for the Free Software Week in Quebec in the end of September.
KDE is taking now a big place as people desktop. The guy that did the font presentation said KDE Font Installer is the best, he used Kate, Konq, Quanta and seemed to know all about KDE in deep. He also said Qt was not so great with fonts and he'll talk to Trolltech about that. K3b was mentionned by another as 'The Linux Burning Tool'. The other day at the Linux meetup a guy (a young guy in IT studies) praised Umbrello. What I note (from my small world so this is not a sociological analysis) is that even 'geeks' (as coming from the Unix world and terminal+emacs||vim adepts) use KDE and are proud to say so (versus the previous mumbling about it-s-not-free a few years ago). This is great to see our beloved project recognized that way. For new users, KDE is also praised for its simplicity and, over all, for its quality. KDE-Edu is quite known as well as we have in Quebec an educational distribution called Edulinux and based on Mandrake 10 with KDE as default and all of KDE-Edu.

I learnt a lot about fonts this evening and now I need a presentation about utf8. I got some data files for KTurtle for Serbian (Cyrillic) and the parser does not want to work on that. It works for Swedish, German and French but today it choked on Cyrillic. My KTurtle co-developer who takes care of the parser is touring in Asia so I'm on my own. The parser is C++, not Qt. I turned towards Albert (TSDGeos) who I see as a kind of wizard because he is so good. He fixes a lot of stuff in kdeedu and I learn a lot from his commits. He said he'll have a look :-)

'Over troubled waters memories soar Endlessly, searching night and day
The moonlight caresses a lonely hill With the calmness of a whisper'