The initiator of the KDE project, Matthias Ettrich, got the Federal Cross of Merit on Friday , 2009-11-06.
I’ve been a KDE user since I use Linux (I’m an old fart, my first Linux installation was back in autumn of 1998). My first impression was »OK, I just dropped Windows, and this is the operating system that shall do better?!?«. Since then, a lot has changed, and KDE 3 has been out for a while. It always did a great job on my machines.
I’m not that happy with KDE 4.2, though. I switched recently, and there are still glitches of stuff which worked flawlessly in KDE 3 but fail in KDE 4. For example, I always have excessively used the fish:// protocol, which lets you transparently work with and edit files on a remote computer as if they were local files. Since KDE 4.2, however, this protocol very often reports »No connection to server« which renders it rather useless. I’m now back using scp on the command line. No wonder that Linus switched to Gnome a couple of months ago :) .
There are other issues, but I’m pretty confident that KDE 4 will mature just as its predecessors did. So thanks a bunch, Matthias, for your work on KDE!
