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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 Workben
by andmarios 2y ago
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. :)
- jchmbrln 2y agoYes! 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.
- doubled112 2y agoWhat 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.
- bluGill 2y agoAmarok is preparing for another release. I wonder if it will come to mac.
- tvshtr 2y agoYeah, that's a surprising revival. I thought it died for good this time.
- bluGill 2y agoI 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.
- jraph 2y ago> I was coming from Notepad on Windows Ouch. You didn't use Notepad++?
- Symbiote 2y agoNotepad++ 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.
- distances 2y agoMy 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.
- lproven 2y agoNotepad++ 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_notepad_and_geany/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/veteran_editors_notep...
- reactordev 2y agoYou 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.
- andmarios 2y agoHaha, 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.
- jwrallie 2y agoAlso 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).
- xvedejas 2y agoKDE 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)
- lytedev 2y agoAgreed! 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.
- pimeys 2y agoExactly 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 https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager
- selbyk 2y agoKDE Connect has been around and amazingly useful since 2013
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. It's dead now.
- tvshtr 2y agoIt got revived suddenly, there's going to be a new release soon.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoGiven the response here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481383 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.
- lewispollard 2y agoI 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.
- andmarios 2y agoAnd I've long since switched to a streaming service. But I am still on a Linux desktop —and KDE. :)
- pests 2y ago> 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.
- JohnFen 2y agoInteresting. 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.
- andmarios 2y agoA 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.
- cullmann 2y agoNice 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.
- henvic 2y agoOh, 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.