Slashdot Mirror
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."
Are you dissatisfied with GNOME ? Then take your chance to participate to Project GoneME.
I haven't RTFAed yet, but Kmail is my favorite email app for commodity x86 hardware. Simple, clean, stable, fast, basically everything that evolution isn't.
I run KDE 3.2 but have various GTK/Gnome stuff installed. It drives me batty to find "gconf" and "orbit" directories automatically created in my home directory. If there's a way to change that, I'd love to hear it but that one little bug is enough to make me warn people away from Gnome and on to KDE.
...like I'm going to listen to eWeek.
I've got "MyYahoo" set as my homepage and their tech news stories are particularly disgusting. There was an exploit tool that was to be released under the GPL so the headline was " Open-Source Exploit Tool: 'Point, Click, Root' ". Mind you the tool attacks Windows and OSX machines, not Linux. But since it was released under the GPL, Open Source==Bad!
FUD! Just like when IDG reported the "double-free" CVS flaw in a story titled: "Search finds new holes in open source tool" (Notice, they reported this in July of 2004). After a little looking around I noticed that CERT released an advisory Feb. 2003!
Get your Unix fortune now!
I don't like KMail's html rendering. I have been using mozilla mail for over a year, and it renders beautifully. I have only had a couple of problem emails in the whole time I have used mozilla -- and those problems always were due to bad html.
just my $0.02
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
I am starting to like the simplicity of Gnome these days. You may notice the menu insanity of KDE (eg konqueror 'other tabs' menu when you have websites with long titles...). But unfortunately neither completes me and I switch between the 2 all the time. Just to keep things even the thing I dislike about Gnome is it GUI slowness. A new kernel + staircase or nick's scheduler does help though. Strangely it is fine with plain nv drivers, but who the hell would use those.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Another poster remarked that they're both bloated. Well, that's not entirely fair. Both use a very plug-and-play software development scheme, so there's really no need to install/use components that you don't want.
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.
Alternatives to X really haven't gotten very far. I am unaware of any distros which use Berlin / Fiasco, for example. I've not even seen any announcements for it for some time, and am unsure if it's even under active development still.
Lighter-weight graphics drivers for X don't seem to have progressed well, either. GGI and KGI aren't nearly as well-developed as I'd have expected at this point. One can only assume that there just aren't many people who feel that particular itch.
The growing use of networking systems such as CORBA is also not helping much. CORBA is fairly bulky, and if you're running the processes on the same machine, then you really don't need the capacity to run objects on remote systems. I don't even know if those CORBA applications for GNOME or KDE even support a distributed environment of this kind. It's certainly not obvious as to how you'd go about creating one.
Also, CORBA implementations are not as interchangable as they should be. You can't just pick up an application that has ORBit in mind and use it with MICO, TAO or some other CORBA engine. This does start to get a little heavy, as it means that any software not designed for the CORBA engine your GUI is set up to use is going to have to have its own CORBA engine installed. That's plain ugly. It's also a design problem of CORBA, and NOT a problem with the design of Gnome or KDE.
Personally, I think the whole concept of the "desktop environment" is archaic. It stems from the time of the "paperless office", which never materialized. I think we should be looking to see what people actually want to do on their computer, because it's very clear that 80s/90s thinking was wrong on this point.
If the desktop metaphor is the wrong one to use, in the first place, then no implementation of that metaphor - however good it may be - will ever satisfy users. Since the metaphor is also almost wholly owned by certain corporations hostile to FOSS in the first place, changing the battleground would seem wiser than trying to compete in an area users might not even be wanting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IceWM is still my favorite, it has all the basics, window management, task switching, task bar and application launcher. Then you get the Anti-aliased fonts support with gnome/kde hooks.
Gnome and KDE are more than just desktops, they include functionality for the OS, auto-mounting drives, smart interaction of programs with data sharing. They try to simpifily the whole interaction experience. You shouldnt have to work to get a task done. It should be a click away. This is why they include lots of applications, its easier when applications work with the desktop.
One thing KDE/GNOME has over MS Windows, no front priority windows (pop ups). Nothing pisses me off more than applications that have its status window pop up and take focus when I'm typing.
Typing code, and all the sudden you have some Dialog box in your face.
Gaim is really bad about this on windows, even with the option to turn off popup messages, the split second it pops on the screen takes focus.
I remember desktops before the taskbar, I'm not giving it up.
If they like better Outlook-style mail clients, why they didnt evaluate Kontact instead? It uses kmail as its email engine, but also integrates notes, tasks, calendar, etc like Outlook and Evolution, "embedding" other KDE applications.
I had never compiled and installed KDE from the source, it just felt too huge and complicated. But I gave it a shot this week and it turned to be a brainless exercise with konstruct. You just run this script and it automagically downloads, de-compresses, compiles and installs everything!!
:)
Three cheers to the KDE team
I run fluxbox. I use KDevelop and I launch it from a gnome-panel. Then I write a letter in KWord, and bring up gnome-terminal to edit something in /etc with SciTE.
This ability to choose is why I like the OS. There's nothing about KDE that precludes Gnome or vice-versa.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Yes, and this is exactly why KDE will succeed. One camp proclaims why their system is good, while the other listens to how it could be better. The only thing is I can't tell is if its the Gnome users or the culture of the actual developers, but their comes a point where it doesn't matter.
Feedback is feedback, if you want things to be spoon fed, I'm sorry, you woke up on the wrong side of the world.
But being hostle about the kind of feedback your actually getting really takes the cake. No-one said users had to be developers in order to be heard. If we in the OSS community can't bridge that gap then it is our failure, not theirs.
Quack, quack.
I have continually looked around at alternative e-mail clients to Kmail. Apart from Outlook, I have yet to find another mail client that has a key piece of functionality - the ability to clear out old messages from a mail folder automatically.
I read a lot of mailing lists - some such as Debian-User with several hundred messages a day. I filter each mailing list into its own folder, and then set purge dates on the folder to delete messages.
I tried evolution, thunderbird, balsa and a few others - none of them have this function. Why doesn't this lack of ability to clear unwanted mailing list messages worry anyone else?
GNOME, KDE Aim at Windows
They wish! Both GNOME and KDE are a whole lot better than Windows, just by the looks! I'm not even talking about the underlying OS, ability to run on older hardware (both GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3 run like charms on a P333 with 128 MB RAM), and customizability.
It's rather Aqua that has to be afraid; Windows has long lost out and can hardly fall any further.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I've been using debian with KDE for nearly 2 years on my PC at home but GNOME seems to be getting really cool. I really like the automount thingy they have and the interface seems simpler which is great since that my main machine now is an iBook.
I think when I get home (in about a year), I'll give ubuntu a spin.
To this day it really looks like someone said "don't know much about unix, but how about we put a windows style registry in linux - all these files in /etc/, it's just too messy, and I don't want to know what a socket is, I'll do some weird OLE thing, oh and XML is cool this week, so I'll do a non-standard impelentation of it that will only work with gconf.".
If you like MS windows but have no say in it, why not do a MS Windows the way you like it on linux, it's a big world after all? That is how I see gnome, and it has turned out very well all things considered, but I still prefer to do things the unix way. You can make it behave a lot like MS windows, but eventaully the user is going to go looking for the "C:" drive and you have to let them know that things are done differently.
I've seen this repeated twice in this thread. I call bullshit. I had a system with a decent Via motherboard, Ati videocard and 1GHz AMD cpu and with 128MB of ram the thing ran like shit. Oh yeah, you could "use it" - so long as you only opened one app at a time. Anything beyond that you had about a 70% chance of the process just dying - no error message, no warning, nothing.
You can make blackbox or ice dance with 128mb, but a late model gnome or kde desktop with only 128mb ram is about one step above useless.
But Gnome is way more responsive on a Pentium II with 64MB of memory. There is quite a difference between Gnome 2.4 (although I realize I may be a bit behind with it) and KDE 3.3. In any event, I can never decide which one I prefer. When I have the resources I install both, and switch depending on my mood and application need.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
This is a classic FOSS old-wives' tale. The fact that we would like it to be true unfortunately doesn't alter the fact that it is complete nonsense.
In the real world diverse choices at one level (KDE vs. Gnome, let's say) result in reduced choice at another (I chose KDE but now need to run Eclipse etc.).
The trend is therefore precisely the opposite of what the parent poster pretends - rationalization will happen in response to the compatibility imperative and marginal products (XFCE etc.) will decline rather than increase.
QT's theming just isn't that flexible. In GNOME, you can easily exchange the theme engine, that's what made the GTK-QT Engine possible. Also, GNOME has enough applications of it's own, so that would probably be a huge waste of time.