eWeek Reviews Gnome 2.8 And KDE 3.3

prostoalex writes "eWeek Labs reviewed the latest editions of GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and for all the criteria that eWeek uses for evaluating the software products ranked 'good,' while usability, capability and reliability for both products ranked 'excellent.' The online version is missing the screenshots and ranking tables that the printed version has, but eWeek likes Evolution (for mail), Konqueror (for file management), Samba and Kopete. They dislike GConf (still complex and a hassle to use) on GNOME and KMail on KDE."

Comments

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some GNOME and KDE screenshots.

Re:Screenshots

[zapp]

Nevermind... it seems if I look past the 1st screenshot, the rest are somewhat normal.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a complaint about the coding. It is a philosophical difference between KDE and Gnome. KDE says "chuck in all the features", and many people love that. Gnome says "keep it simple", and others love that instead.

I was not complaining about the qualiity of KDE, I was simply saying that I disagree with its direction and think that they need to work on simplifying the UI. Others disagree. This is why I use Gnome and contribute to it on the rare occasions when I have enough spare time to do so.

The orignal poster was asking why use Gnome, KDE looks better, and I provided a reason why I prefer Gnome. Perhaps I showed my disillusionment with KDE a little too much, but what do I know? KDE must be more popular for a reason.

Re:Screenshots

[twener]

> Gnome also has excellent HIG guidelines, which mean that most applications perform in a similar manner.

There is no such automatism. Also there exists a KDE HIG with other stuff like margins being hard-coded into Qt/kdelibs. Can you give examples how KDE applications (of the KDE release, third party applications maintainers sometimes have 'funny' ideas), do not behave similar?

> I used KDE until version 2. That is when it started getting a bit cluttered. When you have more than 15 options in the right-click menu for a file, you know there is a bit of a problem. I think it is time for a spring clean.

You should revisit a current version. I have my KDE 3.3 configured to never show more than 10 items, and depending on the selected file type and what's installed there can be even less entries (no Actions/, Preview In/, Open With/).

Re:Screenshots

[twener]

Sure there are 'better' themes, visit http://kde-look.org. One popular is the within KDE included Plastik which will be the default of KDE 3.4.

So essentially you are looking for XFCE.

[reality-bytes]

You'd be looking for XFCE then.

XFCE is a powerful but lightweight UI for both older systems and 'power-user' implementations.

Both Gnome and KDE lead the way for moder UI implementations on *nixes and as such require modern hardware to go with them (in general).

Having said that, I've just installed KDE on a second user 1.7GHz Celeron M laptop with a piddling (by modern standards) 128MB ram and it positively flies! - No complaints here.

Re:KMail

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they don't like the fact that the down arrow scrolls through the message, instead of the message list. (In KMail, the left and right arrows are used to move through the message list.)

Re:what's wrong with Kmail?

[voisine]

Okay, upon RTFAing, the poster is mischaracterizing the article. What they actually don't care for is Kontact, which I haven't used, so I can't comment on it, but their concerns seem to be minor ui niggles which seem really more a personal preference.

Re:no for both

[Coryoth]

what linux needs is a desktop environment that uses a fast toolkit, and does what is needed without the extra bells and whistles.

For light desktops that aren't just pure IceWM or *box window management your best options are XFCE (which uses GTK+, but is still surprsingly light and fast), and E17 (if and when it eventually arrives) which uses pretty much all its own technology (of which there is a lot, and its all quite impressive).

Realistically E17 is stacking up to the "other" desktop given how much functionality the E Foundation Libraries offer. I'm not trying to dis IceWM or Fluxbox here, but realistically those are mostly Window Managers, while the new E is looking to have more of the "core libraries" approach of GNOME and KDE, providing its own widget toolkit and what have you. We're still to see whether people will actually pick it up and develop with it...

Finally you've got WindowMaker, which is a very nice window manager and integrates in with GNUStep to provide your widget toolkits and other core libraries. The downside here is that while Window Maker is great, the amount of developer uptake for GNUStep has been fairly limited, so you won't exactly see a lot of GNUStep apps.

There are some good options though, so don't go complaining too much.

Jedidiah.

Re:Gnome == Insanity Box

[Tyball]

Check your /tmp directory--gconf and ORBit will create temporary directories named like that in ~ if /tmp is unwritable.

Re:I like both

[dmaxwell]

KDE moved away from CORBA quite some time ago. Apparently, it proved to be a hairball that made things more complicated than they needed to be. KDE uses "KParts" for object embedding.

Re:I like both

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE uses DCOP, a lightweight IPC system.

Re:what's wrong with Kmail?

[Flower]

The spam filtering issue they discuss isn't a minor UI "niggle."

Re:KMail

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, everyone outside your mom's basement and your internet nerd friends loves HTML email. But don't let your isolated existance and loose grasp on reality stop you from commenting.

Re:I like both

[arodland]

KDE, for its day-to-day tasks, doesn't use CORBA. What it does use is lighter-weight and simpler. I never noticed KDE to be slow, even when I was running KDE3.0 on my 120MHz Cyrix with 64MB RAM, it wasn't any slower than anything else. Fortunately for everyone, that system is now dead. But anyway, my point was that most of your griping about CORBA only applies to GNOME, which in my experience is slow, and has apps with UIs that make me not want to use them anyway.

Re:what's wrong with Kmail?

[treke]

By reading the article, you would notice that they prefer Evolution for it's ability to connect to MS Exchange and Novell's groupware server. The feature is very important for companies that evaluate a transition to Linux. Since there are currently no viable F/OSS solutions available, they are all stuck with Exchange in most cases.

Luckilly there is some Kontact support for both of those servers in progress. The Exchange support in Evolution ( I don't know about GroupWise ) is still much more mature though.

Re:I like both

[nathanh]

I'll agree that there are probably more layers than you'd ideally want for a desktop (eg: KDE -> Corba -> Underlying KDE stuff -> QT -> Xlib -> X11 client -> X11 protocol -> X server) but it's not horrible and most of the problem is caused by X11's design, which is very much a concept of layers on layers.

Yes, well it would be bloated when you insert mythical layers. KDE doesn't use Corba and Xlib doesn't layer on top of an X11 client; the KDE application *is* the X11 client. And calling the X11 protocol a "layer" is a bit of a stretch.

Amended diagram: KDE -> Kparts/Klibs -> Qt -> Xlib -> Xserver.

KMail and HTML

[anduril1]

Quoth the review:

Another thing that annoyed us about KDE's mail handling was the way it dealt with HTML messages. By default, every HTML message appears in source view, with a security warning and a link to render the HTML for viewing. We could opt instead to have all HTML messages render by default, but we'd prefer that Kontact provide the option of rendering the message in a "sanitized" form-one that doesn't fetch remote images or objects. Evolution and Thunderbird work this way by default.

KMail (and therefore Kontact) does provide "sanitized" HTML mail support. The KMail docs claim that sanitized is the default, but it is an easy change regardless. The check box is located in: Configure KMail -> Security -> "Allow messages to load external references from the Internet". It seems they didn't look too hard for the option that is default anyway.

As far as the warnings before rendering HTML messages, this is just a question of how paranoid you'd like to be (or, how important the integrity of you system is). HTML parsers/renderers are very complex software, and therefore they may have bugs. Look to the recent JPEG exploits for bad bugs in seemingly innocent software. If there were a bug found in the HTML renderer used by your mailreader, reading email messages might present a threat to the security and integrity of your computer.

Like the documentation in KMail says "Displaying the HTML part makes the message look better, but at the same time increases the risk of security holes being exploited"

Re:KMail

[Daniel]

kmail has two killer bugs:

(a) It blocks while running filters! This is a royal pain if you want to use it with spamassassin, since it means the entire interface freezes for several seconds every time you download an email. This is especially painful if non-local tests are enabled in SA. If you have kmail set to download new mail periodically, it will randomly freeze up at the worst possible moment (for instance, while you're trying to compose a new email..).

(b) It blocks while checking GPG signatures! Even on a fairly fast computer, GPG signature checking can take a significant amount of time, and as with (a), you end up hurrying up and waiting instead of reading your email.

I've been trying out kmail recently, and I really like a lot of things about it, but these two bugs are making me seriously think about giving Thunderbird a shot.

Daniel

GNOME/KDE *APPLICATIONS* *WITHOUT* the *DESKTOP*

[knorthern knight]

I run applications, not desktops.

Something that many people seem to miss. You *CAN* run GNOME/KDE applications *WITHOUT* the corresponding desktop. Install *BOTH* GNOME and KDE and a lightweight Window Manager like BlackBox.

I have a Dell Dimension XPS, 450 mhz PIII, and 128 megs of RAM. It's over 5 years old. If my only options were Windows XP, or Linux with GNOME or KDE *DESKTOP*, the machine would now be sitting in the local landfill. The GNOME and KDE *DESKTOPS* are *PAINFULLY* slow on it.

Instead, I installed GNOME and KDE and BlackBox. I use BlackBox as my UI. I can still run KOffice (KMail, KSpread, etc) and useful GNOME apps like AbiWord, Gimp, gqview, etc, because the GNOME/KDE base libraries are installed.

In the next couple of years, MS will be bringing out Longhorn. Have you read the hardware requirements on it? Absolutely ridiculous. Instead of a contest to prove that Linux desktops can be just as fat and bloated as Windows, we should be working on a lean+mean GUI. When Longhorn comes out, businesses can have a choice between
- throwing out their old PCs and paying for brand new semi-mainframes to run Longhorn, or
- they can switch to a lean/mean Linux with useful applications, and not have to throw out all their current desktop hardware.

This will be our golden opportunity to push for a large switchover from Windows to linux. Please don't throw it away by dragging down linux's performance with useless eye-candy.