Instead of a search engine what would be useful is an equivalents app with lots of choices including non-KDE software in many cases. Most of the time the best of breed for an app is a KDE app. Nothing approaches K3b in my opinion though there are now imitations of K3b for Gnome and other desktops. However there are some apps like Gimp that there is no KDE app which comes close and realistically no point in writing a KDE app to do what Gimp does. Gimp does what it does extremely well and duplicating efforts makes no sense. Sane with apps like Audacity and Cinalera, etc. The reason I say choices is a lot of KDE default software to be blunt is pretty sorry. I'd be eternally frustrated if I had to use Dolphin on a regular basis. For me Krusader is MUCH more efficient and intuitive and powerful. There are a few things which Dolphin is easier to use but very few. In terms of playing music I want it simple so I use XMMS or Audacious. For Winamp users using Audacious or XMMS is going to be almost no learning curve and that's one of the key things about helping people new to Linux is to reduce the learning curve without transporting M$ insanity to Linux. KDE is by far the best desktop for people migrating to Linux from Windoze. KDE uses the same key strokes so no re-memorizing shortcuts, the look and feel is easy to grasp even if you've never seen Linux before, the display is simple but can be stunning with a little modification. The feature rich environment just says "USE ME I LIKE IT" lol. However we need to give folks good equivalents and easy choices. Try to avoid inflicting really bad software on them. New Linux users are used to being dictated too. There is one and only one way of doing things and if the default sucks tail pipes they will think Linux sucks tailpipes. Most distros are guilty of using some really horrible apps as defaults. Something that KDE cannot help. The distro itself is responsible for that, BUT KDE CAN integrate and equivalents finder which will help new and even experienced users discover new software and old standards they never knew about because they just never needed to do XYZ before. I'd be happy to work on the project though my C++ skills have atrophied to nothing. I can still hack out Python code though. Gambas even better. Shouldn't be too difficult to do something like http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20070701111340544/Equivalents.html or http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software
Then programatically check to see if that distro and versions repositories support that software and offer easy options to install what is supported by repositories.
I was thinking that if there could be an application
for kde or linux distros in general which could be used to put up
a query and you could get a set of answers pertaining to your
queries.
The source for answering these queries not being one but many,
like askubuntu.com,
askfedora.com,
ubuntuforums.com
etc.
More generally what I am talking of is to pool in resources from
the net and then as a "search engine" of sorts to answer the
doubts of a newbie to open and free software. It would greatly
reduce time for such a person to get accustomed to the knowhow of
Linux.
I know that this sounds against mailing list culture, but if we
can make some mini-search app for FOSS queries I feel it would be
welcoming to the newcomer.
Also if someone is willing to mentor me upon this in creating such
an app, i would gladly be willing to do so.
It may be too late to answer this, but everyone, including Google
came to the conclusion that the default Google search is the best
for the purpose.
Cause at one time, Google too had search engines for certain
specific purposes, like for Linux, for government issues etc... but
it was also filtering out results which had the answer.
