Solutions Linux 2007

there are a billion things in KDE 3.5 which are cool...

tell the ppl it 'just works', while windows does not, and they don't even notice it anymore cuz they are so used to being constrained. they will look weird at you, and say you're crazy.

now go on, and give these examples:

try the scrollwheel, it doesn't work in windows. ??? what doesn't work??? well, scrolling... look, i move the mouse to this scrollbar (inactive window). it doesn't scroll. move the mouse over these tab's, and scroll. why don't they switch? why don't task switch when i scroll over the taskbar, instead my webbrowser scrolls! why doesn't this horizontal scrollbar scroll??? i scroll over the volume icon, expecting to raise volume. no go. i select some text in MS Word, scroll over the font size. does it change? hell, no! all these things DO work in KDE (koffice, not openoffice, btw)

Another thing - drag'n'drop. drag a tab from one konqi window to another. drag it to the desktop. drag it from the desktop back to konqi. now, do a split-window, go with one to your (gmail?) email to upload 5 attachments. in the other half, go to your local disk, and drag'n'drop the icons in the input fields in gmail. of course, this works. of course, doesn't, in windows. try drag'n'drop a file from a ftp site, or from within a zipfile - it'll transparantly work. NOW tell them about KIOslaves, and they'll REALLY understand what it is about...

of course you can work with windows or other DE's, but these things make KDE much more efficient. you'll simply be able to do more in an hour.
what about klipper, for example? select & ctrl-c 3 pieces of text, then use klipper to paste them. you don't have to switch windows 3 times, just once... imagine this for copying content of 20 documents to a wiki (just did that yesterday). saves you what, half the time?

if they are more technical, you can show Konsole: open 5 tabs, set 'send input to all sessions' and for example ssh 5 times to your home. you type it all once, no having to type the password 5 times... lovely with 12-character passwords (i do that here, actually with 8 tabs...).

and kwin? assign a shortcut to a specific window! add a always-on-top window, open a kwrite and use middle-click to quickly copy between the underlying window and kwrite. how's that for efficiency???

really, KDE shines in these small things. and what dit Microsoft do, the last 5 years? they addes transparancy and shadows to their interface... yeah, right.