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You lie.

You lie.

Linux : going from competing desktops to competing desktop initiatives...

Has anyone used Kopete? It looks pretty sexy. It's built into Xandros so I wonder how useful it is. I use Gaim at home and I have a few quibbles with it.

Has everybody forgotten the GPL'd fork of Qt? Qt is under the GPL. KDE hasn't had licensing issues for a while now.

There is even a native Win32 port of the GPL'd version of Qt3 going on here as a part of kde/cygwin.

See "the status of KDE mirrors" to find a fresh one.

bollocks... if your desktop crashes on you every 30 seconds then its your setup and your admin capabilites that are lacking. there have been interface guidelines around since before sun decided to commercialise gnome. icons are the easiest thing in the world to change or modify, stop complaining.

get back to your trailer park education you dick.

Does anyone know how many of Apple's changes have made it into Konqueror?
It would be interesting to know how useful the Safari team's contributions have been.

KDE 3.2 Feature Plan

I have been wanting to setup a the mirrors site for a while... however, none of the mirror sites are updated. Now that I'm looking... several of the mirror sites never even posted the KDE 3.1.5 Release.

Why doesn't this mirror correctly?

Remeber the mirrors http://www.kde.org/mirrors/ftp.php Rus

If you'd like to help improve KDE, you don't necessarily have to be a developer.

The best and easiest way is to find something you don't like and then file a "wishlist" bug report. It doesn't take very long, and provided you search for an existing report first, and make your request polite and concise, you're definitely contributing. You can also get involved in discussions via the mailing lists or the forums.

Of course this is not limited to KDE, either - most projects have some sort of bug reporting facility, and if all else fails you can email the developer.

If you'd like to help improve KDE, you don't necessarily have to be a developer.

The best and easiest way is to find something you don't like and then file a "wishlist" bug report. It doesn't take very long, and provided you search for an existing report first, and make your request polite and concise, you're definitely contributing. You can also get involved in discussions via the mailing lists or the forums.

Of course this is not limited to KDE, either - most projects have some sort of bug reporting facility, and if all else fails you can email the developer.

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

Mamboserver - Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP - Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars - and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

GNUCash - Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
Mr. Project
KOffice - has a great technological underpinning.

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

Mamboserver - Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP - Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars - and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

GNUCash - Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
Mr. Project
KOffice - has a great technological underpinning.

I avoided mentioning it at first, I didn't want the conversation to derail into a fight about specific clients. But, my personal taste leans toward the combination of Procmail and Mutt. It's an acquired taste, and probably not for most new users. I know better than to push it to any but the most hard-core Unix-philes. There are certainly other clients, with GUIs even, that match Mutt's power and may even surpass it; it's just what I use. (For what it's worth, I've heard exceptional things about KMail (KDE) and Mulberry (cross platform) from people I personally know and trust who have to juggle heavy mail loads.)

Actually, no. KDE, from the beginning, has been a UNIX desktop, not a Linux desktop. GNOME was the "Linux desktop" from the start, at least until Sun got their hands on it and started to weed out the Linuxisms in their code so that they could actually build their desktop on Solaris.

You KDE developers just can't help taking a stab at GNOME, eh ;-)

I remember the original KDE slogan now. It was "Is Linux Ready For The Desktop" and it had a picture of a laptop running KDE pre-1.0. I remember it was very exciting at the time because the only other decent options for a Linux desktop were a non-free CDE port (teal?) and FVWM95.

(If you want, you can pull a copy of the KDE web pages out of CVS from the appropriate dates - KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998, so the web pages from those days are what you'll probably want to look at.) All of the graphics and text specify KDE as a UNIX desktop, not a Linux one.

The CVS seems to go both ways. Some of the pages talk about UNIX. Some talk about Linux. I remember the slogan was for Linux and the ALT tag in this page contains that slogan. But I'll concede the point because it certainly seems there was a directed effort to support all UNIX, not just Linux. My mistake.

That was it's best feature! :-) Dreamcast was very cool as a friend of mine had one (Dead or Alive is one of the better games to come out for it as was Power Stone), not sure why it didn't catch on....probably the controllers (but the memory packs had their own little games on them that played independantly of the system).

I was just snooping around the KDE website today and I think the 3.1 version is definately making a move towards encroaching on Windows' "prettier" category. However, I still give the "Prettiest OS" award to Mac OS X and it's Aqua interface... B. E. A. -utiful.

How about Ruby and Python?

I hear someone is working on CL bindings for Qt, too.

Peformance isn't a big deal for GUI apps, since all of the above languages have FFIs that let you call C/C++ functions for speed-critical parts. And Psyco has the potential to do nice things for Python performance, and a preliminary CLR implementation of Python is already quite a bit faster.

rather that it makes no sense to implement the base API in high level C++ and shut out every other language in the process.
----------
Whoa. Now *that's* dumb. C++ interoperates just fine with other languages. KDE includes many language bindings.

Fixed link here.

I don't think the initial mockups show all that the new GTK+ API can do, but yeah the KDE dialog is well implemented.

KDE's browser, otherwise known as Konqueror, does exactly this. It takes how MS uses Windows Explorer to a whole new level. With KIO-Slaves, any type of thing that can be browsed can theoretically be browsed. There is now an apt kio-slave for Konqeror (apt:/search?blahblah), you can browse an audio cd and rip it with audiocd:/mp3 or audiocd:/ogg and just copy the contents of those directories to wherever and it will auto-rip and encode each track of an audio cd. There's also sftp:/ for secure ftp (ftp over ssh). Go to www.kde-apps.org and look for kio-slaves.

Actually galeon has this capability too, but it is not developed nearly to the depth, or as well as it is under KDE.

- GTK's poor resize performance compared to Qt.
- GTK's poor expose handling compared to Qt.
- For practical purposes, lack of component technology. Bonobo is there, but almost no apps use it. Meanwhile, tons of KDE apps use KParts.
- For practical purposes, lack of a network-transparent filesystem. gnome-vfs is there, but not many apps use it, and its not supported through the standard file dialog. Meanwhile, every KDE app uses KIO.
- Nothing comparable to DCOP (until D-BUS comes out).
- Lower-level UI framework, compared to KDE's higher-level framework. GNOME's button Ok/Cancel button order is dictated by the HIG, while in KDE, its dictated by the framework, and would take a single line of code in kdelibs to change for all KDE apps.
- Lack of UI integration at the technology level. KDE apps use XML-GUI to define their layout. GUI layout can be change without touching a single line of code. KDE apps support customizable toolbars at the framework level, so all apps get it for free. The HIG is great, and GNOME's UI is very polished compared to KDE, but it would be nice if GNOME did like KDE and enforced a lot of those things in the code framework level.

Let's look at some of the upcoming GTK+ 2.4's features that Qt/KDE already has.

File selector (#29087)
------
KDE has it.

Combo widget (#50554)
------
Qt has it.

New action-based menu API (#55393)
-------
KDE has it.

Toolbar improvements (#55393)
--------
If you click on the feature request number and look at the proposed features, you'll see that Qt/KDE has a lot of these already, like customizable toolbars.

Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry (#69613)
--------
KDE already has this.

XCursor support for GDK. (#69436)
---------
Yep, this too. And they even mention Qt right in the first post of the feature-request thread, how nice!

- GTK's poor resize performance compared to Qt.
- GTK's poor expose handling compared to Qt.
- For practical purposes, lack of component technology. Bonobo is there, but almost no apps use it. Meanwhile, tons of KDE apps use KParts.
- For practical purposes, lack of a network-transparent filesystem. gnome-vfs is there, but not many apps use it, and its not supported through the standard file dialog. Meanwhile, every KDE app uses KIO.
- Nothing comparable to DCOP (until D-BUS comes out).
- Lower-level UI framework, compared to KDE's higher-level framework. GNOME's button Ok/Cancel button order is dictated by the HIG, while in KDE, its dictated by the framework, and would take a single line of code in kdelibs to change for all KDE apps.
- Lack of UI integration at the technology level. KDE apps use XML-GUI to define their layout. GUI layout can be change without touching a single line of code. KDE apps support customizable toolbars at the framework level, so all apps get it for free. The HIG is great, and GNOME's UI is very polished compared to KDE, but it would be nice if GNOME did like KDE and enforced a lot of those things in the code framework level.

Let's look at some of the upcoming GTK+ 2.4's features that Qt/KDE already has.

File selector (#29087)
------
KDE has it.

Combo widget (#50554)
------
Qt has it.

New action-based menu API (#55393)
-------
KDE has it.

Toolbar improvements (#55393)
--------
If you click on the feature request number and look at the proposed features, you'll see that Qt/KDE has a lot of these already, like customizable toolbars.

Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry (#69613)
--------
KDE already has this.

XCursor support for GDK. (#69436)
---------
Yep, this too. And they even mention Qt right in the first post of the feature-request thread, how nice!

windows will look more and more like unix every version.

Yeah, because linux isn't trying to change to look like windows or anything...

Retard.

<rant> Funny, I'd say the reverse. GNOME icons are colorful, tasteful, and usable. KDE's default icons are so gaudy, garish, and poorly thought out (IMHO) that it's much harder to easily identify them.

Look at the average panel, for example (see this picture). Konsole has a monitor with a seashell - clever, but useless and confusing when you're looking for a terminal emulator. The control center has this weird gear thingy with an indistinct background - are those supposed to be micro-sized widgets? "Home" looks like a doghouse. Konqueror has this sort of half-spiky circle that's supposed to look like a globe, but doesn't. The hard disc icon on the desktop has worms growing out of it. And I have no clue what that smiley thing is supposed to be - it says nothing about it app it represents.

None of those icons makes it easy to find the program at a glance. When you think "control center", do you look for a purple-green-blue gear? Does "web browser" conjure up images of a spiky sphere? What I like about GNOME's icons is that a) they're not all blue, so you can tell them apart, and b) they seem much more intuitive, because they actually bear some resemblance to the thing they represent. </rant>

> Next step would be "replacing" GTK's file/print/... dialogs with the KDE-counterparts and voila, a nice unified desktop.
FYI, this work is being done and it's working already.

Don't just take my word for it, download the Mandrake's 10.0 alpha and see KDE 3.2 beta today, combined with Kernel 2.6, this baby is FASTER than the boxes!

Anyway, here is more reasons why Gnome will be Killed!

Gnome Zealot Translate-o-matic 2004

Ever since Gnome 2.4 (and the BETA 2.5) was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Claim : Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code. Most companies agree, the majority of commerical software for Linux is written in Motif and Qt, and NOT GTK. Apart from Ximian's desktop, there is no major product using GTK.

Claim : Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves (gnome-vfs can't compare, sorry) and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines. The latest version decided to copy Windows 95, complete with a my computer icon on the desktop.

Claim : Gnome is easier to use than KDE
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here. Gnome was a lot more usable back in the 1.4 series, before sun came along with their usabillity "study".

Claim : Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS. Gnome themes don't even let you change the colour scheme. Looking at sites like art.gnome.org you will see that the majority of themes are the same one in different colours!

Claim :Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light! Epiphany is also a faliure, it has gone through 6 major bug fixes and none of the major distrobutions use it because they stick with decent browsers.

Claim : Gnome is more popular than KDE
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, bruce perens decided to make a gnome based distro and everybody hated it because KDE wasn't in it.

Klaim : Kou KDE kuys kust ke kick kof khe K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome, gstreamer.

Claim : Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't
to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we
will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.

Claim : Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files.

Zealot : My Gnome work station.

Michael wrote: There's also a story on the dot. [sic]

He really should have linked to the story on dot.kde.org

Michael wrote: There's also a story on the dot. [sic]

He really should have linked to the story on dot.kde.org

> Where can I donate specifically to the team of programmers working to bring KOffice up to finished, final release quality on OS X

Since everything which arrives down at Mac OS X depends on what happens "upstream", use this:

http://www.kde.org/support/donations.php

Michael wrote: There's also a story on the dot.

He really should have linked to the story on dot.kde.org

"The dot" is "news for KDE-freaks - stuff that matters" so to speak. Hop on over, it's a nice place :-)

Because the Gnome guys don't want to see the ugly GTK file dialog on a beutiful OS like OSX. You will never see a Gnome Zealot use OSX!

The Gnome Zealot translate-o-matic! *updated*

Ever since Gnome 2.4 (and the BETA 2.5) was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Claim : Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code. Most companies agree, the majority of commerical software for Linux is written in Motif and Qt, and NOT GTK. Apart from Ximian's desktop, there is no major product using GTK.

Claim : Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves (gnome-vfs can't compare, sorry) and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines. The latest version decided to copy Windows 95, complete with a my computer icon on the desktop.

Claim : Gnome is easier to use than KDE
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here. Gnome was a lot more usable back in the 1.4 series, before sun came along with their usabillity "study".

Claim : Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS. Gnome themes don't even let you change the colour scheme. Looking at sites like art.gnome.org you will see that the majority of themes are the same one in different colours!

Claim :Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light! Epiphany is also a faliure, it has gone through 6 major bug fixes and none of the major distrobutions use it because they stick with decent browsers.

Claim : Gnome is more popular than KDE
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, bruce perens decided to make a gnome based distro and everybody hated it because KDE wasn't in it.

Klaim : Kou KDE kuys kust ke kick kof khe K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome, gstreamer.

Claim : Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't
to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we
will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.

Claim : Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files.

Zealot : My Gnome work station.....
My 2Ghz G5 box my mum bought for me from PC world, that is made of
made to break components and running Debian

Kopete is one of them, and AFAIK it is (or will be?) the official KDE IM client. It supports multiple protocols and is based on a plugin system.

And just in case you're wondering for its name, Copete is like we call here in Chile to the alcoholic beverages (like booze), and the main Kopete developer and author is chilean.

Regards!

i recently bought a 17" g4 powerbook (lappie) after having run a more-or-less full-time linux desktop for work and home for 5 years. OSX is nice enough (but not *that* much nicer than full KDE IMHO), but the finder (file browser) application is just terrible IMO. konqueror walks all over it for the purposes of file management, not to mention being able to browse ssh logins/port forwards (eg: sftp://matt@localhost:60022/home/matt), ftp sites, you name it, chances are konqueror can browse it, and all without feeling clunky and over-simplified. konqueror is pretty much on par with safari, but with better frills for use as a web development platform.

also, i am still trying to find an open source GUI editor for OSX that i completely like. bbedit is the best i know of so far, but is ridiculously expensive for what it is. i would much prefer to use kate (the KDE editor). seeing as i'm on holidays maybe i'll get off my arse and see about porting it to qt/mac too ;-)

There are KDE 3.1.4 packages built with forte.

Apparently, it's getting better.

Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots
who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide
to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code. Most companies agree, the majority of commerical software for Linux is written in Motif and Qt, and NOT GTK. Apart from Ximian's desktop, there is no major product using GTK.

Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines. The latest version decided to copy Windows 95, complete with a my computer icon on the desktop.

Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here. Gnome was a lot more usable back in the 1.4 series, before sun came along with their usabillity "study".

Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.

Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light! Epiphany is also a faliure, it has gone through 6 major bug fixes and none of the major distrobutions use it because they stick with decent browsers.

For newbies, Gnome is the ideal choice
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, bruce perens decided to make a gnome based distro and everybody hated it because KDE wasn't in it.

You KDE guys must be sick of the K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome, gstreamer.

Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't
to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we
will tell you to fuck [gnomedesktop.org] off [gnomesupport.org] and go back to Windows [apple.com] or KDE [kde.org].

Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files.

My Gnome work station
My 2Ghz G5 box my mum bought for me from PC world, that is made of
made to break components, but it has a GEFORCE RADEON 9000 card and a CUTE one button mouse, so it must be
good. Too bad my mum's six year old pentium III 300Mhz thrashes it in performance everyday with her KDE works station.

Gnome allows mac like operation.
We have a shameless expose ripoff, with a cheezy name. Next thing you know we
will scrap the panel for a cheezy dock clone. Despite the fact that x86
compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy
t

... I must say for one thing, that was probably one of the worst articles I've ever seen... A monkey could figure out how to stick the Solaris Companion CD in the drive and install KDE.

That aside, I would personally recommend not installing the sun provided KDE, but rather, the packages assembled by Stefan Teleman, available through ftp.kde.org. This is version 3.1.4, whereas the Sun provided version is 3.1.1a.

Unfortuantley there isn't. You gnome zealots can't spread your propoganda here. Here is the latest translate-o-matic translated from Zealotish into English.

Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots
who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide
to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code. Most companies agree, the majority of commerical software for Linux is written in Motif and Qt, and NOT GTK. Apart from Ximian's desktop, there is no major product using GTK.

Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines. The latest version decided to copy Windows 95, complete with a my computer icon on the desktop.

Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here. Gnome was a lot more usable back in the 1.4 series, before sun came along with their usabillity "study".

Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.

Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light! Epiphany is also a faliure, it has gone through 6 major bug fixes and none of the major distrobutions use it because they stick with decent browsers.

For newbies, Gnome is the ideal choice
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, bruce perens decided to make a gnome based distro and everybody hated it because KDE wasn't in it.

You KDE guys must be sick of the K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome, gstreamer.

Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't
to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we
will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.

Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files.

My Gnome work station
My 2Ghz G5 box my mum bought for me from PC world, that is made of
made to break components, but it has a GEFORCE RADEON 9000 card and a CUTE one button mouse, so it must be
good. Too bad my mum's six year old pentium III 300Mhz thrashes it in performance everyday with her KDE works station.

Gnome allows mac like operation.
We have a shameless expose ripoff, with a cheezy name. Next thing you know we
will scrap the panel for a cheezy dock clone. Despite the fact that x86
compati

On the web server this may be true. In Germany it is even > 89% Apache.

But Microsoft still is strong in the Desktop market. Soon KDE 3.2 will be released and as Linux quickly matures on the desktop I don't see a reason why it will not be the default plattform in the enterprise desktop market.

Only software patents can stop Linux now, but today software patents and patent privateers harm Microsoft (eolas, SPX ecc.). But Microsoft performs well in the armsraise.

Sure, Microsoft will die away. It's only a matter of time.

Been there, done that

Except that KDE is getting the same accessibility support as GNOME, the OO.o KDE integration project is alive and well, WalMart has already been selling KDE systems in the form of Lindows, and many of the articles you link don't even mention GNOME, or don't exist.

We made it now https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-debian.

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and to a somewhat lesser extent the KDE Style Guidelines fufill the same purpose as the MS and Apple guidelines.

I'm not really a developer. I've compiled and configured an entire network of free software, but I could not code "hello world" without looking at a "{programing language} for dummys" book to save my life. I've used Gnome 2.4. I used if for a month both at work and at home. At the end, I was *so* happy I could go back to KDE. KDE just works. Now. I couldn't even get printing to be uniform in Gnome. I wish OpenOffice and Mozilla would have the option to use KDE's dialogs, but at least I have a consistant printing system with kprinter. KDE is lightyears ahead of Gnome. Gnome has no consistancy whatsoever. Things don't mesh well at all. It feels like a bunch of parts just thrown together. I have dabbled in programing. I've thrown together little bits and pieces to see how they go together. Never really gotten anywhere simply becouse I don't like programing enough. However, I do know that if I ever wanted to make an app, I would use QT. And it wouldn't matter if I wanted to use the GPL or make it commercial. The fee for a commercial license is pocket change for a commercial project. I would be able to call TrollTech for support. I have easy to read documentation for every single funtion in QT. I have no one to call for gtk support. Also, I have the assurance that if TrollTech ever went under, I would have the QT code since they have agreed to release it under a BSD style licence if that were to happen.
Here's a quick test using google seaches:
QT toolkit Technical Support
GTK toolkit Technical Support
Now, if I were a comercial company, which toolkit would I want to use? One with full technical support, excelent documentation, and a contract that assures I'm never left without the code that costs money?
Or a toolkit with no technical support, inferior documentation, no guarantee that development will continue thats free?
Using Gnome for a distribution geared toward business is a bad idea. Mark my words: This will end badly, even if the distribution is successful.

> If TrollTech chose to make Qt non-free, then all previous revisions will still be available under the GPL.

Additionally, the last free version of Qt would become BSD licensed. As per KDE FreeQt foundation guidelines.

As anyone who follows linux polls would know, KDE generally is preferred over GNOME. The first two things I could come up with googling are:

1. Linux Journal's Annual Reader's Choice Awards. A quote from 2003's edition: With 44% of the votes, KDE is the winner for the sixth consecutive year. GNOME holds on to second place with 23% of the votes.

2. LinuxQuestions.org's Annual Awards, in wihch KDE also regularly beats GNOME (as far as I remember). This one is perhaps slightly more interesting since the site is meant for linux newbies.

As a last thought, there is probably a reason why all of the linux distributions made for the desktop (Lycoris, Xandros, Lindows, etc) use KDE. It has always been (IMHO) the more complete, integrated, and polished desktop -- the fact that it has had a usable file selector for years, and GNOME has just decided to try to fix theirs (although it doesn't seem to be much of an improvement) is just one example of why KDE is more inviting to average users.

On the usability front, here's a dot.kde.org article about a usability survey that found KDE and Windows XP to be comparable for the corporate desktop in terms of usability: http://dot.kde.org/1060717024/. A quote: The usability of Linux as a desktop system has been experienced as nearly equal to Windows XP. A couple of tasks were, in fact, easier and faster to solve on Linux.

Ever since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots
who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide
to some of their claims, and what they really mean.

Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell
and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now
that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under
corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with
your source code.

Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you
can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to
have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is
STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines.

Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of
settings. Want tear off menus? Want a useable file dialog? You won't find it
here.

Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit
stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still
reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.

Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx,
netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a
religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also
crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light!

For newbies, Gnome is the ideal choice
Despite the fact that the only mainstream Gnome based distro has been EOL'd,
and all the newbie distros such as Mangadrake, Lindoze, $u$E, Lycoris,
Xandroze, Gentoo use kde default, the Local unix geek showed me Debian, which
installed Gnome 1.4 by default, so it must be good if he uses it.

You KDE guys must be sick of the K
Our G's and monkeys are SO MUCH better, gedit, glib, gconf, bobono, ghex,
gless, same-gnome.

Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't
to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we
will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.

Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes
all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files

My Gnome work station
My 1.1Ghz Packard Bell box my mum bought for me from PC world, that is made of
made to break components, but it has a GEFORCE RADEON 9000 card, so it must be
good.On the other hand, no-one (well, nearly no-one) is suggesting that GTK+
is a replacement for Qt...

Gnome allows mac like operation.
We have a shameless expose ripoff, with a cheezy name. Next thing you know we
will scrap the panel for a cheezy dock clone. Despite the fact that x86
compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy
the whole macbar concept. Our auto apply implementation is broken and
dangerous, but you can always use gconf like a real geek.

Gnome is GNU software.
gnu/Yay, gnu/gnome gnu/for gnu/my gnu/debian gnu/linux gnu/500mhz /gnu/celeron
gnu/packard gnu/bell gnu/box.

Inspired by the gentoo translate-o-matic. Written using Kate on KDE 3.1.4

everything is set up and locked down by the admin

In which case KDE should be the only desktop shipped, as it has a framework for doing exactly that - locking down the desktop.
see http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdelibs/k decore/README.kiosk?rev=HEAD

You make a great argument. I would expand it by adding that all too often, when people think of "accessibility," they picture a person in a wheelchair, or a person who is completely disabled in some way. Even the post at KDE.news (linked-to in this post) is in the category "accessibility" and the logo is a wheelchair.

But accessibility has advantages to all, in ways not necessarily pre-conceived by the authors/designers of software. For the web, different devices emerged in the past few years - mobile phones, PDAs, toilets :) - that had different boundaries for even fully-sighted, mouse-pointing folk, namely small screen sizes and limited/no Javascript. The "accessible" sites still worked, though.