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.

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.

Yeah....

[ImaLamer]

...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!

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.

Complaints about gconf

[mrroach]

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

Re:Complaints about gconf

[Brandybuck]

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?

Re:Complaints about gconf

[FooBarWidget]

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!!!!!").

Re:what's wrong with Kmail?

[lphuberdeau]

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?

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:what's wrong with Kmail?

[Flower]

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

Running Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and WinXP

[ChaoticCoyote]

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.

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:I like both

[Kethinov]

Do you like both vim and emacs too?