GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha

xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."

Comments

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[Bullschmidt]

Have you tried opera? No, its not open source, and the free version is ad ware, but I personally love their interface (pop up windows can't get out of control!) and the gestures are great! Small things, like the ability to turn off popup windows directly from the menu, are nice! Its really coming along!

Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow

[damiam]

and the gestures are great!

Note that the Galeon has allowed turning off popups forever, and the most recent development version has gesture support too.

Re:hmm fair comparision?

[Eloquence]

Non-biased -- well, that can hardly be done by a single person. But I've tried both to some extent and am very happy with KDE. True, it is overall significantly slower than GNOME, and if you're on a low-end machine you will probably want to run GNOME or WindowMaker or somesuch (I like ion for productivity tasks, a nice window manager .. "apt-get install ion" and give it a try). If you turn off all the gimmicks in KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs. (The performance differences reported by KDE users on CPU-wise similar machines may relate to different effects of disk access: A high-end SCSI system will probably not mind the frequent accesses, whereas some IDE hard drives / controllers do not regard your CPU with much respect.) Upgrading my memory to 640 MB has made little/no performance difference other than for the obvious memory-intesive tasks (Mozilla etc.).

KDE is very nice for people who migrate from Windows (or keep using Windows) because after installation it lets you choose a Windows-like theme and keybindings (without losing any of its functionality, of course). GNOME, OTOH, takes a while to get into, especially with sawfish as a WM, but can be set up in a Windows-like fashion, too -- so if you're planning to set something up for lots of end users it doesn't make much of a difference. Overall, I think KDE makes optimal use of existing Windows knowledge, whereas GNOME mostly requires you to learn from scratch -- if it's your first PC ;-) it will likely not make much of a difference.

Otherwise the differences are not so big. Konqueror is a nice browser, especially with anti-aliasing (which is not really satisfying on Linux, but that's not KDE's fault -- at least you can get ClearType-like subpixel antialiasing on LCDs, which is almost as good as Windows'), but apps are interoperable. The KDE task bar and GNOME task bar are similar, both support little applets, but those are not interoperable AFAIK. I found the GNOME taskbar somewhat more intuitive, but I'm not really happy with either one (yes, I try to submit bugs and suggestions, thank you).

As regards productivity, it should not really make much of a difference once you've gotten into it. GNOME may be the obvious choice on lower-end machines, although my university has some quite snappy low-end machines running KDE, so with tuning you can probably achieve a lot. Hopefully, KDE performance will improve over time. I think both GTK and Qt are versatile interface toolkits, of which Qt is, by default, more Windows-like, but you can probably create an almost exactly Windows-like look & feel with GTK as well. But I liked the KDE default settings a lot more.