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.

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?

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?