Re: KDE = Kmail
There's nothing stopping you running Kontact or Dolphin under a different desktop environment if you prefer, of course. Theme sharing between applications built under different toolkits and running under a different DE isn't perfect, but it's not too bad (although it probably wouldn't hurt if they all collaborated a bit more closely on this).
And the fact that you can sftp: or smb: (or whatever) seamlessly to remote servers through your file manager is common to pretty much all Linux file managers, I think? It is a fantastic feature, I agree (and a great example of modular design). It's a little annoying that MacOS only supports this for smb: and you need to acquire additional software there if you need to connect to other servers (especially sftp, which should surely be regarded as a "first class citizen" on any unix-based OS, bah!).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
