One of the great things about KDE is that it makes heavy use of DCOP.

My kdesvn and kompare now work together in perfect harmony ... Finally! kdesvn is a really great gui svn tool for KDE, but it doesn't play nice with kompare by default. Kompare is a really great gui diff app for kde.

The problem is that although kdesvn comes preconfigured to use kompare as an external diff tool, the default is to pass both revisions in as stadard input, so kompare doesn't know where to save the merge file when you are done. I have been living with this for a while now just using the command line, but it was really bugging me for a couple of reasons.

Ever want to shutdown a KDE application so that it goes through the normal shutdown procedure? Ever want to talk to an application from a script? Enter dcop and kdcop. dcop is a interface that lets you talk to KDE applications from the command line. kdcop is a nice gui interface to query kde's dcop server and see what commands are available for any running appications.

Personally I love KDE, but admit that all the bells and whistles take some getting used to. If you are a Windows user you will feel much more at home in kde than gnome. The default KDE desktop looks very much like Windows with the taskbar on the bottom, a start menu on the left of the taskbar and the clock in the right of the taskbar, but don't be misled KDE is not Windows. Before getting into to many details, here are the features of KDE that make it my desktop of choice.