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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."
If all of what this article implies is a reasonable "comparison" between the way KDE and Gnome function, why is it that so many prefer Gnome over KDE ?
I've used both for years and have finally settled on Gnome as I find it faster, more intuitive and less "bloated" than KDE, yet the authour of the article finds pretty much the opposite to be true.
I'm no programmer, so what happens behind 'the scenes' is not something I can use to compare the different desktops.
All I know is that I much prefer Gnome over KDE.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I belong to the "something has gone wrong with Gnome" school of thought. I dearly want Gnome to succeed. It's got a different sort of style and sensibility than KDE and Windows, and there's a lot of great stuff there.
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
The "Open File" dialog is a thing of shame, and I can't believe that it won't be until October until a replacement comes along. The fact that something so basic has been allowed to stay unchanged so long, in my mind, reflects the difference between KDE and Gnome.
I don't think that it's an organization issue, or even that one group is more clever than the other. My guess is that, at some level, Qt really is better than GTK. I don't know if it's C vs. C++, or KParts vs. Corba, Glade vs. KDevelop... Perhaps Nick's got it right, that it's the underlying objects. KDE doesn't seem to have suffered from having a C++-centric toolkit, and Gnome doesn't seem to have benefitted from having a C-centric toolkit.
The last release of KDE had some pretty cool stuff in it - I was eager to get my hands on it and play with it. In contrast, most of what I've heard about Gnome 2.2 has been about what it doesn't have in it anymore. It apparently won't even be featured in the next Knoppix release, since it's broken so badly.
But I wouldn't discount the future of Gnome. Maybe .NET/Mono will solve the problems (I wouldn't bet the farm on it). Maybe there are no problems at all - just a different desktop, with a different way of doing things.
But, gah... Please, fix that "Open File" dialog!
Petrely was talking about "clickable things", and I was simply using his terminology.
If [consistency] isn't a big deal to those people, then they won't mind if everything is consistent then, will they?
All things being equal, no, they wouldn't mind. But all things aren't equal: effort you spend on consistency won't be spent on other tasks. And you can't be consistent with everything at the same time.
Remote applications? That's something built into X, not specific to Motif.
As I was saying, KDE developers often don't even understand the issues... remote application usage isn't just about moving graphics from one screen to another, it's making configuration parameters, window management, and communications work correctly. Doing that requires toolkit and application support, but KDE and Qt don't even really try very hard.
Inter-app communication? Like DCOP and MCOP?
Yeah, that's the problem, like DCOP and MCOP.
Care to give an example?
Sure: the Konqueror window I'm looking at has about 50 distinct widgets and manipulable elements in it (buttons, menu entries, labels, scroll bars, icons, etc.), yet it only uses 7 distinct X11 subwindows. The intent of X11 was to use subwindows as a kind of structured graphics for building toolkits, but Qt and Gtk+ just do a whole lot of drawing inside big windows, and they have a whole lot of their own event processing logic. As an analogy, you can create graphics in PostScript by using its drawing commands, or you can create it by embedding a big bitmap. KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ are effectively doing the latter in a lot of cases.
So I'm giving KDE a try. It has problems too. The most annoying one to me is the way that it switches focus when I use my scrollwheel. It has options for what to do when clicking any of the mouse button (focus, raise, etc) but not the scrollwheel. When you scroll a window that is not focused and not on top, it gives focus to that window but does not raise it. This maybe wouldn't be bad, but then clicking on the window also does not raise it. You have to focus some other window then come back.
Another thing I don't like about KDE is that it is hard to add buttons to launch X (not KDE) applications to the sidebars. In gnome I could add a launcher easily. In KDE I have to add a non KDE app, it gives me a browse dialog. I don't know where my apps are, probably usr/bin/ or usr/local/bin, I don't want to hunt around, so I try to click on my terminal button so I can do a `which app`. The dialog has the sidebar. Doh.
The choices for applets in KDE is very underwhelming. In gnome 1 I was able to put applets for gaim and xmms in my sidebar. They are unobtrusive there and available on all my desktops. It was wonderful. KDE doesn't have these.
Sure the KDE apps all look the same and act the same, but they are not powerful compared to other stuff. I always use Mozilla as my web browser, open office as my word processor, etc. The KDE stuff are nice, but not as full of features. As soon as you add in non-KDE apps, you lose much of this consistency.
I think GNOME needs something like Sawfish -- something with useful features rather than just a Microsoft clone. If the GNOME people have gone off Sawfish, that's a shame, because there's nothing else like it.
In my experience Sawfish versions 1.2 and 2.0 are not even ready for beta testing. They crash readily and badly. Don't try them unless you're interested in development.
Sawfish 1.0.1 is fairly solid, and no other free window manager I have heard of comes close in features. It makes it easy to work efficiently. For example, if you maximize, restore and close windows a lot, you can put "Maximize window toggle" and "Delete window safely" on keys easily. You can do the same with about 251 other functions including XMMS controls.
John Harper commits some user interface howlers like the fixed-size "Edit binding" window, but you'll find that sort of thing in all software. Refreshingly, he doesn't readily make assumptions about what features users don't need. Don't want 251 other functions? Don't use them. If you want a particular window manager feature, try Sawfish 1.0.1 first. It's more likely to be there than in any other window manager, and it will probably be easy to use.
The Sawfish list is busy, John Harper is there, and development seems to be going on.
Most of it is written in the author's own personal lisp dialect. One language per developer is a bad principle, but in this case it helped Sawfish become very useful quickly. You seem to suggest that Lisp is the problem. Does it make software hard to maintain?
Metacity is good for Windows users. It's a better default than Sawfish was with that ugly Crux theme and the settings it came with in the old gnome defaults. But it's a shame that there's no longer a modern, sophisticated and efficient window manager in the project.
The article in question is obviously nothing anyone should take seriously. It does not even pretend to be an honest comparison between two windowing environments; it's basically one person's rant about why he prefers one over the other. Good for him, but mentioning only KDE's good points and only Gnome's bad points isn't a useful comparison to anyone else.
I'm surpised at how poorly informed the people who discuss Gnome vs KDE are. No one has mentioned any of the new accomplishments both environments has achieved. It's still all "file selector" this and "configuration options" that. Dudes, I stopped fretting over thing like that years ago. There's plenty of other things that need focus for a good desktop environment, and are being worked on as we speak, but no one has mentioned them in any of the comments I've read.
Anyone here even know about the massive time spent on building a rich and powerful "accessibility toolkit" ATK? Or the very well thought out multimedia framework GStreamer that's currently in development. I've only seen a few mentions of the establishment and accomplishments of freedesktop.org - whose goal is to set standards (such as the HIG) which both Gnome and KDE can follow to achieve consistency and inoperatability. How about the universal adoption of Unicode (using UTF8) throughout so that proper internationalization is finally possible?
These are important things, and much more forward looking than all the nitpicking that's so prevalent in these discussions. These articles and the bickering that ensues are no better than "celebrity tells all" and "other celebrity makes rebuttal" shows on TV. Totally pointless - fun to watch sometimes - but pointless.
One thing I need to add: Most complaints about GConf that I've read are miss-informed. Yes, the closest approximation is the Windows registry. But it was created with the strengths of that registry in mind, and steps taken to get rid of the problems that the registry had. For example, ALL keys are documented. Which is easier? Hand editing a text file, or going down a list of fully documented options in a gui editor - toggling boolean keys, editing strings, etc.
I'm obviously a Gnome user. I know KDE has it's own list of accomplishments, but I don't know them well enough to list. My point is, why the hell are you choosing a desktop environment based on which has a better file selector? There is plenty more to look at.
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
Both GNOME and KDE suck wind. Arguing one over the other is like arguing wich is better, a broken leg or a broken arm.
CDE is even better than either of them. If you want something that really works look at Xfce. The current "production" version is xfce3 and it can do everything KDE & GNOME can do, and much more. It also is very nice on system resources. It runs as light as BlackBox or IceWM and is just as fast. And the development version of xfce4 will blow your mind. It'll make you cry it's so good.
The fact is that GNOME and KDE are, functionaly and from a usability standpoint, damn near identical. Under the hood they are vastly different but for a regular user they are interchangable. Bluecurve proved that.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
You know, it's not even all about people like your Dad -- people like me want stuff to Just Work too.
I'm a Unix sysadmin by trade. (Mostly Solaris, but now some HP-UX as well) At work, I do nothing _but_ futz with configuration files and tweak things and make it go --- not so much because things are busted, but because I'm trying to make them run _better_. Things like setting the sd_max_throttle setting in Solaris, or various ndd commands to disable source-routed frames and so on
Anyway, when I get home at the end of the day, the LAST DAMNED THING ON EARTH I want to be doing is tweaking config files, downloading Widgetx 0.234567 and finding out it's incompatible with the libc libraries in my OS, so I have to upgrade to glibc and now Widgetx still doesn't work because glibc broke my window manager.
I remember those days --- the libc-to-glibc migration
March 24, 2001 I bought my first Mac. And I haven't looked back since
Now stuff Just Works. I come home and I can read my email, play games, connect to work, and even watch DVD's and edit home movies and play with my digital camera
Some folks can't see the forest from the trees --- The end-goal here should be for the system to just GET OUT OF MY WAY and let me work
And what about code-size? Every progam it's own parser. Shudder.
Ease of programming?
I'm intentionally taking this slightly out of context, but I think this is one of the biggest overlooked benefits of XML.
Sure, there might be slightly better data formats out there for specific cases in terms of speed or file size, but as far as development time goes, XML parsers can't be beat. You should basically be able to take a parser, wrap it with a few calls or a class to deal with your specific file, and you're done.
You don't have to re-implement and fully test your own parsing engine; you're using a parser that's pretty much optimized and tested to completion. This lets you develop more robust software in a shorter amount of time, and also lets you focus on coding the things you actually *want* to be coding.
Unless anyone you're someone that actually gets off on writing parsers (people like that are out there; I've met them...), I think there are very few reasons NOT to use XML.
It's only software!