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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."
When I upgraded to SuSE 8.1, I decided to give KDE another whirl since it had hit version 3. Pretty good, does a lot of stuff, appears to do it well aside from a couple of basic apps which would crash every time they were closed (not KDEs fault as such).
;-)
Why did I switch back to Gnome 2?
Speed. The two systems I was using KDE on were a dual p2-400 and a celeron 800. On both, there was an enourmous speed increase switching to Gnome - especially with lots of open apps. They definitely still have work to do, I like Metacity because it's nice+light+simple, but the configuration leaves a little to be desired. GTK2 based apps appear to run a lot slower than GTK1, but even then they're still much quicker than the QT based KDE.
Fortunately, with "big players" backing KDE and Gnome seperately, I don't see either going away - a good thing, although I do wish they'd agree on how drag+drop should work
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ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
My understanding is that they removed Sawfish because it is difficult to maintain. The original developer of Sawfish has moved on to other things, and he isn't working on it at all. Sawfish is lacking some major features (multihead support, accessability), and large parts of Sawfish are written in LISP. I guess the GNOME developers don't like working with the code base.
Metacity is simpler than Sawfish, and the theory is that it will be simpler to keep it bug-free.
I've switched to Metacity; I'm content with it.
The guys who get paid to work on GNOME are not doing anything with Sawfish. If its fans are dedicated enough, however, they could keep it going.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Bad analogy. Wheels are essential. That's like a mouse cursor or a basic window in GUI terms.
But KDE and Gnome also copy dialogs, start menus, taskbars, basic design conventions, and much more.
You can either copy forever in a futile attempt at winning the Windows crowd (yeah, let's give them half-assed clones of what they already have), or innovate and create something people will actually want to use.
You say Microsoft has good ideas that are poorly implemented. KDE and GNOME are just copying what's been done in that department, under the guise of making it more "customizable" (wow, I can move the taskbar and start menu around now).
Please, won't somebody create something new? The "killer app" I think Linux needs is a new GUI system designed from the ground up for desktop use. Don't give me "well, write it yourself," because I don't have the skill level, but more importantly, it's a ridiculous attitude to have to start with. Besides, if you want a graphic designer, I'm your man. Linux apps are always sorely lacking in the aesthetics department.
"Knoppix has always been about KDE (the whole name implies it)."
;)
Actually, the name comes from the guy who produces it, Klaus Knopper.
But then again, maybe he changed his name by deed poll
This was copied-and-pasted from here. It was originally a reply to an article posted on ZDNet in October of 2000.