KDE instead of Aqua

Why would you want to?

I don't think you can access Mac (cocoa or carbon) software through KDE so you'd be better off just staying with Aqua,

 

If it is just for fun, why not just run it "on top" of aqua? Well, perhaps I'm missing the point...

Theoretically, I suppose you could should be able to if you boot into single user mode and run the required initialization programs... I honestly don't know, though. I had an old version of KDE (for linux) on my powerbook (G3 ), and what little fun it provided soon was overshadowed by the fact I had no real software for it. Heck, I couldn't even connect to the internet because I didn't have a driver for the apple internal modem. But I suppose if you want to, you could give it a shot...

 

If you really wanted to you could substitute almost any application for the Finder. Why would you? I don't know, but probably to confuse other people and yourself, eventually. Finder takes care of a lot of things we take for granted.

 

Why don't you look for a distribution of Darwin with KDE and/or GNOME on top of it? I seem to remember there are such things available.

 

Hmmm. Well, that's two things we have in common

Ok, so here is all I know. I am not even guaranteeing correctness, so feel welcome to set me right if I'm wrong:
The only way to boot into a unix shell without loading apple's desktop environment/window manager is to go into single user mode. To do this, you restart holding down apple-s. If you decide what you are presented with is a little too intimidating, you can type "exit" and I believe mac os x will continue loading. From this point, though, you are prolly gonna want to mount your drives as read/write instead of read only. I've done this before, but I forgot how! Sorry... when you don't do this regularly (more accurately, when you've only done this like 3 times) you forget. After here, you might be able to run KDE's startup programs. I have no idea what they include. It is possible that you have to start up apple's window server before running KDE, but I have no clue. The window server is located, I believe, in "/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer". Good luck

I would experiment with some of these, but I am currently trying to set a personal uptime record... don't wanna restart. I sincerely hope I haven't make myself sound like an entire "n00b," and that you find something here remotely helpful.

 

Ooh, that's a good idea. It would be a little tricky, though, 'cause that would involve installing another entire operating system. I'm not sure how peacefully Mac OS X and Darwin would coexist on the same system (does Startup Disk work with Darwin?). In this case, you would almost certainly need a separate partition... which means erasing everything on your hd if you don't already have one. Experimenting with single user mode might get you nowhere, but would get you there faster than Darwin . Still, if you have the partition, bousozoku is right that Darwin with KDE is more likely to work.

 

Oh, one quick question before you disregard me completely

Do you have KDE already running in X11? If not, that might be a good first step. If things I said in my lame attempt at providing instructions didn't make any sense, this is gonna be really hard.

KDE on Darwin is a project to make KDE compile and run on Mac OS X. Now, apple's window manager is still running in the background, but it should be more than enough to experiment with KDE. It has the added bonus of you being able to switch to a cocoa/carbon program any time you want. If you are looking for open source programs, you should check out Fink. It is a project to make open source software build on Darwin/Mac OS X.

I apologize if I've insulted your intelligence at any point here, but I don't know what you know and what you don't.

 

You don't need to throw away Aqua in order to use KDE. You can find KDE here as part of the Fink project. Go to the Fink home page to get started. Please read the resources available to you.