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."
Here are some GNOME and KDE screenshots.
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.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
How are these any worse than a .kde or a .qt directory? Seriously.
...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!
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.
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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)
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
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.
Evolution is not useful for everyone. Some people actually consider that bloat an advantage, and the application is designed for those people.
I personnally use Mozilla --mail. Don't you just love having choice?
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
Check your /tmp directory--gconf and ORBit will create temporary directories named like that in ~ if /tmp is unwritable.
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.
I've found that KDE is quite a bit more responsive than Gnome, especially running applications remotely, it's difficult to tell when KDE apps are remote but performance wasn't mentioned. Has this changed for the latest versions?
Deleted
I have HTML rendering disabled on kmail.
Make It Secret . Free JavaScript implementation of AES for your browser
Agreed. When switching back from Linux to Windows, the only app which I was really sorry to lose (besides sKill) was Kmail. It does everything an e-mail client should do, with one of the least cluttered interfaces I have ever had the pleasure of using. Configuring filters was a breeze, and I never got the feeling of being dumped into someone's pet project. It really felt like it came from the UI and application designers from Apple, working from a very non-Apple "Power is Good" mantra.
I wish someone would do a Kmail Windows port. In the meantime I just have to subsist on The Bat! Yes, the punctuation is part of the name. Just look it up on Yahoo!
The ______ Agenda
The spam filtering issue they discuss isn't a minor UI "niggle."
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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
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"
No, only the brainless secretaries at work like HTML mail, because it let's them send email with floral backgrounds and blinking text.
Most people just don't care enough to turn it off. Going through my email trash, about 95% of HTML email doesn't use any formatting at all, so the use of HTML is wasted.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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'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.