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eWeek Reviews Gnome 2.8 And KDE 3.3

Posted by timothy on from the cross-*nix dept.

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."

4 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Complaints about gconf by mrroach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The complaints about gconf seemed pretty useless to me. What gconf is really about is providing a nice library to encapsulate preferences storage/updates. the Gconf editor is not meant to be something that you use on anything resembling a regular basis.

    Declaring it difficult to use, compared to the alternative (your text editor of choice) seems a strong enough claim that it should have been backed up by more description.

    -Mark

    1. Re:Complaints about gconf by Brandybuck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      the Gconf editor is not meant to be something that you use on anything resembling a regular basis

      Yet whenever someone complains about an option being removed from the main config dialogs, the standard response is, "use GConf." So what is it? Are we supposed to use GConf or not?

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
    2. Re:Complaints about gconf by FooBarWidget · · Score: 4, Insightful

      GConf-editor is supposed to be only used by advanced users. The kind of people who don't fear editing text files. Average users don't even care about the option that was removed. Really, which average users care about the "Use FVWM window manager hints" checkbox (or whatever it was called) from the GNOME 1.x days? Or the "Display icons on desktop" checkbox (average user: click, disable, "Oh my god, my desktop is gone! How do I get it back?!?! HEEEELP!!!!!").

  2. Running Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and WinXP by ChaoticCoyote · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll never understand the religious wars about these issues. It's technology, folks -- use whatever works for you.

    Freedom is predicated on the availability of diverse choice; we need different philosophies and approaches.

    For day-to-day work, I use KDE, though I prefer Thunderbird to KMail (or Evolution, which is overkill for my purposes). I've run Gnome quite a bit, too; my Opteron system has both Gnome and KDE installed, and I spend about 90% of my time in the latter. I can live with either one, though I prefer the customization available in KDE.

    Gnome and KDE both have high overhead (disk space and processor use) as compared to XFCE, which is the GUI for my dusl 600MHz Pentium 3 and 300MHz Sun Ultra 10.

    My Pentium 4 box dual-boots between Gentoo/KDE and Windows XP. I find XP limited in many (many) respects, but some things (games) just work better under Windows.

    Competition is a good thing.

    --
    All about me