Great KDE applications - The KDE Experiment - part 4
8771 - Falkon
Falkon is a KDE web browser. It looks and feel every bit the KDE app, with a nice clean interface, and some powerful features by default: it ships with some themes, it has an ad blocker integrated, a download and password manager, and even has some extensions, such as Kwallet integration, autoscroll, and even vertical tabs ! It renders webpages competently, being based on webkit, and is fast and stable. I use it for almost all my web browsing sessions on KDE these days. Falkon is available in Discover and is a well integrated, good looking, and powerful browser. In my opinion, it lacks Firefox Accounts sync, but apart from that, it handled anything I threw at it.
2 - Kdenlive
Of course this one was going to make the list ! It's my video editor of choice on Linux, even when I'm using elementary OS. It is powerful, full featured, and look great. Kdenlive has a lot of effects and transitions you can apply on the fly, with a built-in library to download more, supports multiple audio and video tracks, can render in a lot of different formats, and has a good project bin where you can organize media within folders. Kdenlive has a lot of effects you can apply on your audio and video, such as increasing gain, blurring, movement tracking, compositing, color calibration, and more. THe only downside of this fantastic piece of software is its stability: depending on your drivers, your system, it can behave erratically from time to time, crashing regularly, or refusing to apply some effects for no reason. Thankfully, it autosaves pretty often and can recover from crashes very quickly without losing any unsaved work. It's in my opinion the best oepn source video editor out there for Linux.
3 - Digikam
Digikam is a photo library and ediitor. Compared to gwenview, it has a lot more features ! Its interface might even seem cluttered by moments, with tabs and navigation options layed out vertically on the right and left of the main photo library. Digikam handles RAW files as well as standard image formats. It has a powerful editor, with a lot of transformation tools to shear, rotate, adjust perspective, flip, and crop your photos. It also has a complete library of effects, including oil painting, charcoal drawing, film grain, embossing, etc... Ou can tweak and enhance any picture with red eye reduction, color and white balance, adjusting brightness, curves, and levels, anything you can want in a photo editor. On my computer, some effects were a bit slow to apply and did not preview in real time in the application, but for users with a beefier PC, I think Digikam is a great option to tweak and make their pictures really shine !
4 - Krita
Krita is a digital painting program. It can be used like oe would use GIMP or photoshop, but it's more suited to digital artists using a tablet, with lots and lots of paint brushes to get results quickly, fantastic color selection tools, as well as a ton of filters, shape editors, and layer tools. I'm not the best suited person to talk about this great piece of software, but here are a few examples of what you can do with it: https://krita.org/en/features/gallery/
For anyone willing to apply their digital painting skills, Krita is the most powerful open source tool out there.
5 - Kontact
Kontact is a shell that integrates most KDE personal information management (PIM) software in one application. It handles Mail, contacts, calendars, todo lists, feeds, journals, and notes, in just one program. THink of it as KDE's Outlook ! THe interface of each module can be daunting at first, with options, toolbars and settings everywhere, in true older KDE fashion, but everything here is customizable to look and feel however you want it to. If you don't want a full integrated PIM suite, you can obviously download and start each module as a separate app, for example Kmail here. All these apps are pretty powerful, even though some start to look a bit dated, such as Korganizer, the calendar.
6 - Other applications
Obviously, there are plenty more KDE apps I can't cover here, such as Kdevelop, the KDE IDE, which is the complete package to code on Qt or KDE applications, Dragon Player, a very simple video player, AMarok, the eteranl beast of a music player, packed to the gills with features and plugins, or the Calligra suite, which is a full featured office suite with programs ranging from the word processor, to the vector drawing applications, including spreadsheets, presentations, and databases.
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Also Watch my Experience with Manjaro Budgie on a Full AMD Linux Build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZdj4Q08fBg
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