Slashdot Mirror
Desktop Linux Usage Statistics
Ahkorishaan writes "Desktoplinux.com has put up their December 2004 survey results. Debian has fallen from their top rank as preferred Linux distro, and newcomers Thunderbird and Firefox have an impressive showing in their respective genres."
So that's still terribly inaccurate, but proves the point: Obviously, the non-commercial distros are strongly underrated in the study.
I like gnome, and despite what the popular opinion might be it's far better in usability in a lot of areas. It just doesn't have as many bells and whistles. Basically, gnome : mac :: kde : windows, which could also explain why it's not so popular.
Take for example dual screen support. The last KDE I tried (3.4) had the option of one continuous bar extending across both screens, so windows in the bar are usually on the wrong screen (where it spills over one screen, the buttons are just cut in half). KDE also had the 'option' of having exactly one window list in the entire display. This from a C++, object-oriented environment? Meanwhile in gnome I can have as many bars as I want and the windows move from lists to list dynamically as they are dragged between screens.
And you know what, this lack of usability for KDE is pervasive. Putting the kmix? into the taskbar and the default is like 20 miniture mixer controls, which look retarded and are very difficult to use. The volume control is similar, where in kde you get like maybe 20 pixels of range (depending on your bar size) whereas in gnome you click and get a popup slider so you can actually set the volume accurately. And the stock performance monitor in gnome shows a history instead of a vertical, rainbow colored bar showing the last sample. And it goes on and on like that.
So sure KDE has more bells and whistles and gnome does have its many flaws, but KDE just doesn't have that nice elegant feel to it; it feels like a bunch of hacks. And I didn't get into linux just for a free, better version of Windows.