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The Definite Desktop Environment Comparison

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the prancing-in-a-row dept.

Gentu writes "OSNews posted a very long and interesting comparison between the most popular desktop environments today: Windows XP Luna, Mac OS X Aqua, BeOS/Zeta and Unix's KDE and Gnome. Some of the points in the article can be thought to be 'subjective', but overall many good points are made and it seems that there is room for improvement for all DEs."

3 of 536 comments (clear)

  1. underlying technology by g4dget · · Score: 4, Informative
    Therefore the technology used behind these DEs is an important factor on this comparison. In fact, this factor can be what allows a DE to do, or what locks a DE to not be able to do because the back-end functionality is not there or because architecture or legacy problems might prevent the creation of new cool stuff (and that's bad for the future potential of any DE). [...] MacOSX takes the lead here regarding the technology used. Double buffering everywhere, non-flickered UI, vector icons, good font rendering engine, "real" transparency support, PDF-based, QuartzExtreme for 3D assistance on the 2D space of the desktop and my personal favorite "smooth window dragging" (for lack of a better naming of a VSYNC'ed desktop).

    It's a myth that Mac OS X has any advantage here over either X11 or Windows. X11 has support for all those features, including VSYNC (which has been in there since the mid-1980's). X11, in fact, has support for pretty much exactly the Mac OS X graphics model through DisplayPostscript.

    The reason why these features are not used much in Gnome and KDE (or XP, for that matter) are partly historical and partly technical. Technically, it is not clear whether they are even desirable at this point. In particular, while the Mac does a few things like dragging windows around really well, on most normal graphics tasks, it is quite slow and consumes a lot of resources.

    Basically, this guy's review is essentially a reiteration of common pre-conceptions: "XP is usable", "OS X is technically superior", and "Gnome/KDE is just third rate". Well, that's not news. It's also wrong.

  2. Re:stability by Trogre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uhh, the konqueror isn't just a web browser, it's also the KDE file manager.

    What file manager do you use?

    To have a great DE but a buggy file manager effectively renders the DE useless if you use the DE for any kind of file manipulation.

    You say that KDE has never crashed on you but Konqueror has? What's the difference? Were you browsing the web, or a list of files at the time?

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  3. Definitive? I don't think so. by Daimaou · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone who has visited OSNews more than twice knows that Eugenia has an unhealthy infatuation with Windows XP (it used to be with BeOS, but perhaps she has finally come to grips with the fact that BeOS is dead).

    I usually skip over any "definitive" or "unbiased" OS reviews from Eugenia since the outcome is always: Linux sucks; OS X is okay but still sucks; XP has some minor flaws, but they pale in comparison to how absolutely dreamy XP is.

    Anyway, I found the article ill-informed and very biased and a far cry from definitive (more like diminutive). It must have been a slow news day at OSNews.