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Has GNOME Become LAME?
auferstehung writes "Nicholas Petreley (should that be KNicholas KPetreley) of LinuxWorld and VarLinux.org has taken his gloves off in the latest article in his KDE vs Gnome series. An unabashed KDE supporter, Petreley uses some choice fighting words in re-acronymizing GNOME as the Language Agnostic Morphable Environment
(LAME) Franken-GUI. Despite the sensationalistic flamage throughout the article, several of his GNOME criticisms (Gconf, file selector, features) echo those already voiced within the GNOME community itself. A happy GNOME user myself, please someone...tell me it isn't so."
There's something to be said about innovation...
HA! Mod parent up!
The Free desktop that Just Works
I say that, because I know if I explain my complaints with Gnome, I will be criticized that "that's not the latest version of Gnome, you can't say anything about Gnome if you don't use the latest build". I use the Gnome that comes by default with RHAS 2.1. Not by choice, but for business evaluation of the default install of RHAS 2.1, and I must say, it sucks. Just a few examples: can't lock the screen! Yep, click on the lock button, and nothing happens. Furthermore, all the "Alt+something"shortcuts don't work. I noticed that they are defined with the metakey, but obviously, that doesn't work with our (finnish) keyboards. (AFAIK, RHAS 2.1 is roughly equivalent to RH Linux 7.1).
Another little annoyance is the Gnome terminal, that does not scroll when using the shift+arrow keys. It may, again, seem like a little problem to you, but we do so much work on the command line that this does annoy us. Expecially after being used to the friendlyness of Konsole.
What we are used is KDE that comes with RedHat 6.1. My humble personal opinion is that Kicker and the other components of KDE are much more polished, snappier and powerful, even in that relatively old version of KDE, than Gnome from RHAS 2.1.
Oh, now I see, I will be criticized that "hey, that's not Gnome, it's how RedHat packaged Gnome". Sorry, I thought that, if anyone, RedHat payed particular attention to how it packages Gnome. After all, it's the default choice in RHAS 2.1 installation! So you see, you still can poke holes in my complaint, because I have not bothered to download the latest Gnome, isn't it.
Sigged!
As I final word, I have to say my main concern about gnome these days really, genuinely is gconf. I know about it being not evil, not really a registry, XML based, easy to modify, and such. I don't buy it. It is a registry.
Yup. I don't like GConf either.
That being said...that's the only thing I agree with of the original article.
Some of the most egregious things in the original article:
Plenty of alternate language-bindings have emerged for Qt and KDE, so nobody is limited to writing in C++.
Uh, huh. And the most common UNIX language is C. And it's what most GNOME programmers choose to use. And KDE doesn't cope with it.
KDE has consistent dialogs for reconfiguring key bindings...
Read "I can't reconfigure any keybinding in any app, as GNOME lets me do, due to the fact that KDE's approach is less flexible."
The KDE picker also lets you navigate through the directories the way a browser does.
*I* use the keyboard to move around the system. I want good tab completion (including partial). GTK provides this.
It has that ancient, Macintosh-like pull-down list that includes the directories above the one you're in.
Oh, the one that lets me get where I'm trying to go without rabidly whacking an "up" button? That one? Is this guy's entire experience with Windows Explorer, not with the Mac OS, and can he handle anything that differs from it?
KDE file-picker slam-dunks the GTK equivalent in terms of
By having shitty keyboard support. Yeah, it sure does...
The reason the file-picker is so easy, feature-rich and consistent is that it is a standard part of a cohesive, maturing framework.
Umm....gee, you mean *exactly like the GNOME file selector*? Read as "I read KDE developer propaganda, but have *no* idea how GNOME works."
One of the nicest things about KParts is how easy it is to use from a programmer's perspective.
*Every* toolkit I can think of has a easy-to-use standard open/save dialog. The Mac had it back in '84, for chrissake. Has this guy ever written a line of software?
Read my lips: no new file-pickers.
Yeah, *there's* a good way to ensure consistency. Keep changing the fucking file-picker each minor release. It was changed in the last major release. Just because KDE can't keep a single consistent interface doesn't mean that GNOME should fall to the same problems.
No consistent interface-components.
What is this guy, *stupid*? All the higher-level GNOME widgets (see glade) are precisely consistent. That's what they're *there* for.
The full-featured sawfish window manager has been ripped out, and a weaker-featured version has replaced it.
That's funny. I'm using sawfish as we speak. Perhaps that's because *GNOME* doesn't suffer from WM compatibility problems out the ass. The change was made because most users don't code in Lisp. The ones who *do*, like me, install sawfish. Not *that* complicated, except evidently for this guy. Also, if he doesn't like the simpler metacity WM, why the hell does he like the *ass simple* KDE window manager?
Nautilus, the file manager, is basically stripped down to a bare minimum of features.
I.E. it is not also a web browser. No shit, friend. Some of us don't consider the pinnacle of a desktop to be cloning a dumb decision that was made by Microsoft *completely* for political convenience.
One of GNOME's biggest problems is that it can't make up its mind
regarding what it is. GNOME started out as a framework, a panel, the
Enlightenment window manager and GMC, which is the graphical version
of Midnight Commander. At some point, Enlightenment was replaced with
Sawfish as the default window manager. The incredibly buggy and slow
GMC was eventually replaced with what is now Nautilus.
Of course, KDE did *exactly* the same thing over its major releases, but apparently that doesn't count.
Applications, on the other hand, are still using the old
GTK as well as the new.
Tell me when the *KDE* application base isn't spread out over KDE 1, 2, and 3. I still can't find a newer version of Kcheat, buddy.
Worst of all, by getting sidetracked and making language-neutrality
the highest priority, GNOME has been relegated to a fate of
disintegrating and reintegrating in a seemingly endless effort to find
some decent combination of file managers, window managers, panels and
components.
Read as "KDE sucks to code for in anything but C++ and reasonably supports only *one* file manager, WM, etc"
And where the hell did he pull multiple panels from? Just figured that he could toss a couple lies in there to flesh things out?
In conclusion, this is a pretty pathetic article. The author was wrong, showed bias, wasn't knowledgeable about what he was critiquing, and occasionally pulled stuff straight from his ass.
May we never see th