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A quick follow up on my experience with andLinux

Because of the wacky way that my employer manages its network, andLinux cannot function on my work PC. Sadness. I'll keep plugging away at it, but there appears to be some complicated networking juju going on under the hood that is _far_ beyond my comprehension.

Ever the tinkerer, I plopped andLinux on my wife's Vista laptop this morning. 700MB , and a few WTFs later, KDE 3.5 applications are running seamlessly on Windows Vista. Apart from the massive gaggers that running a giant executable installer caused for Vista, the install was about the same as any other windows install.

But, because andLinux is an Ubuntu derivative, installing the Gnome Aps I miss the most when I'm in Windows was a simple apt-get install away.  Mmmm... Bluefish on Windows, finally.

I can't speak to the security (or lack there of), nor am I willing to give the project a full five stars until sound is running. I mean, the main reason for installing KDE on anything is to get at Amarok. If you can't understand why putting Amarok on as many of your computers as possible would be a life's mission, you're not running Amarok.
Installing andLinux also opens a massive security hole. The fact is, andLinux can read and write from anywhere on the windows partition, and the C:/ drive is set up as the default mount point.  Regardless of who's logged in. So yeah, andLinux can do things to Vista that even vista can't do. Wow!

Anyway, this is, far and away, the _easiest_ way to install linux functionality to your Windows PC. Try it out.

I just spent a few minutes, literally only a few, tooling around in KDE 4, and I come away with this impression:
Big. Fat. Hairy. Deal.
It's a new skin and slower than molasses. I guess the comparison's that people have been making betwixt KDE4 and Windows Vista are on target.
Now, to be fair, I'm sure there are some things going on in KDE4 under the hood that are impressive and even nifty. But from an end-user standpoint -- and a fan of the GNOME Desktop-- I'm not impressed.
I'm going to wait until a version of Ubuntu is up and running with a full KDE4 livecd before I make any final decisions, but let me address just this one thing:
Why does the default setup for KDE insist on having that gigantic tool bar at the bottom? Why? Why? It's absurd.
It's as ridiculous on the MacOS insistence on putting the tool bars at the top of the screen instead of on the window.
I'm not saying that KDE doesn't have some magic, I guess the new skin is pretty and all, and I've been told, over and over again, that KDE 4 is the "start of something amazing." I just wish they'd tell me what goodness is to come. Also, KDE has widgets now. Something in the startup que for me to turn off. Goodie.

Bottom line: I'm just not impressed. Once again, instead of focusing development efforts on stuff that will make using Linux _functional_, the major development efforts have focused on a prettier shell.
Sigh.
Look, I'll use the command line if you'll just make my webcam work out of the box. Isn't plug-and-play that actually works a better place for KDE-- as well as Linux development to be focused?

Also, just for fun, I wrote this post in Kate. The KDE text editor, and one of the best text editors in all of programming, with the stupidest name.