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Has GNOME Become LAME?

Posted by michael on from the minus-one-flamebait dept.

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."

1 of 780 comments (clear)

  1. The Grasp Speaketh by Graspee_Leemoor · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It's been a while since I checked out KDE, and it's even been a while since I used a non-Windows platform, since I worked out that having 4 computers constantly on was costing me a lot in electricity, so I now only have 1 computer on all the time and it has to run XP because I'm a big emule user. (Yes, emule runs under WINE, but it runs like a bitch).

    However, it was always my experience in the past that KDE and gnome were both bloated as WMs, so I ran windowmaker instead. The majority of programs with guis that I ran used gtk since it seemed that the whole KDE death star infrastructure that gets started up the first time you run a KDE app was even more bloated and crash-prone than the gnome equivalent.

    My own programs that had a gui I wrote with gtk because I found it better using gtk with c; I am a huge opponent of c++.

    I know the look and feel is a pretty petty way to judge widget sets or WMs, but KDE always gave the appearence of striving for Windows-user acceptance, while gnome seemed to be about Getting Things Done. Gnome had rough edges- at the time it didn't have anti-aliased fonts, but I still refused to use KDE apps just to get the nice looking fonts.

    KDE apps always seemed less stable than their gnome counterparts. I had a lot of bad experiences with Konqueror crashing, especially in file explorer mode.

    Basically my experience of KDE was of a pretty gui that emulated Windows, but the code behind it was either not finished yet or buggy. "All front", you might say.

    Gnome started to go this way too- nautilus, despite being absolutely beautiful and useful too, was very much an example of "All front" with the bugginess and incompleteness.

    So what exactly am I rambling on about here? Hmm- I think the take-home message is that big bloaty window managers suck, windowmaker roolz, c++ sux but hey, I'm actually running Windows anyway.

    (But spreading it out over more lines makes it look less like flamebait ;) )

    graspee