KDE-Forum.org

Don't know if this has been brought up here before or not, but you can run KDE on Mac OS X in the 'rootless' (is that the right term?) mode, and with it, do some pretty cool tricks.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v17/bl…KDEontehOSX.jpg

Apple got a lot of criticism for being a unix system with no Xwindow support, so in OS X 10.3, they started to include X11.app, this app runs on top of Quartz and Aqua (Apple's own graphics-thingy and desktop thingy...such technical terms I use ) However, the default setting uses their own Quartz-wm, which is nice in that it lets you minimize Xwindow windows to the OS X dock, and provides copy and paste support between 'native' apps and Xwindow ones. You can run it and KDE at the same time. (Of course, it does give everything an OS X title bar. if you don't want that, you can make Quartz-wm go 'proxy only' in which the only thing it does anything to is copy/paste.)

Quartz-wm is nice, but that's about it for programs or well....anything that X11.app comes with. You're on your own for getting apps, and most mac users are kinda scared of that. (well, programs like the 3rd party package manager Fink make it better, but people are still scared of the big bad command line normally needed to start apps)

The point here is that using KDE with OS X, you can have all of the perks that KDE adds to Xwindow by itself ....you know, like user friendly and not the eternally terrifying command line, something most OS X users are scared to pee of. With Quartz-wm, you can have (like I have set up) KDE's system tray and other things, but windows minimize down to the OS X dock, like most people expect. Genie effect! Oooooh. ...Or, more usefully, Expose, and the Open source multidesktop plugin Virtue all play very well.

I'm no programmer or anything (I use a Mac, it should be pretty obvious I'm an artist =P) but I think that more people should know 'bout this. You got the best of KDE and the open source fun, plus the eternally awesome OS X. Best of both worlds.

EDIT: OK, the picture stretched everything out something fierce, so I turned it into a good old link to be nice of those running anything below 1600 by 1200.