I work for a large Independant company and use KDE as desktop with Geoscience applications. We find KDE4.3.4 to be incredibly difficult to use with complicated windowed applications. The "cashew", lack of support for multiple user logins and the need to lock down some functions for commercial are very disruptive. We may as well switch to Microsoft as this looks like that is where it headed. I work in a networked environment and this KDE4 has really impacted our environment. Has anyone been able to have menus on network instead of locally, make taskbar appear on multiple monitors and get rid of the cashew?

KDE 4.3.4 is extremely old - first step would be to upgrade if it is possible.

In regards to eliminating the cashew, this is not supported (even by latest versions) officially, although there is a 3rd party applet known as "I hate the cashew" which can eliminate it.

Lack of support for multiple user logins is not the case - there certainly is support for this within KDE. It depends on your login manager being configured to support it however. Based on your old version of KDE, I suspect you are using RHEL? If this is the case, your login manager is likely GDM so you will need to refer to their documentation.

In terms of locking down functionality, this can be done using the Kiosk framework - which is supported by many parts of KDE. Documentation for this can be found on KDE Techbase. In particular though - which functionality do you need to restrict?

Can you clarify what you mean by menus on the network? Depending on how your systems are setup, it should be possible to setup a shared directory mounted by all systems which contains the necessary *.desktop and *.menu files to share menus among all users.

Greta, a much delayed YES response to your question. I am one of several users of KDE 4.3.4 in a chip design engineering environment.

It is old, indeed, however it is also a part of Red Hat Enterprise 6.5 which is the corporate environment here.

Used to be we could get a backport of KDE from the KDE Redhat project but as far as I can tell that is no longer provided. I and several others attempted to build KDE from source in the RHEL6.5 environment with mixed success. It was quite involved.

The items you mention that I have experience with: the cashew is ever present and the taskbar only shows up on one monitor.

Tony

i not use KDE for business, but i will try it for my business