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From GNOME to KDE and Back Again
Slashdot's own Roblimo has an interesting introspective on what makes us so prone to liking one window manager over another. More than likely it's just the inherent laziness of most users that precludes change. "I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"
Historically, KDE has been much more configurable than Gnome. All through the KDE 3.x days my first step on a fresh install was to reconfigure the toolbars to reduce clutter, set up the keyboard shortcuts so that I could reach for the mouse less, so forth - or of course, copying over the .kderc folder from a machine where I'd done this before. Doing this in Gnome is problematic, and often Gnome distros bundle applications that will pay no attention to your customizations. The KDE integration advantage really comes through here.
Right now, Gnome is being so conservative about their interface that you actually can't "do the same in the other direction".
Get over it, Roblimo. Windows does have a /home/ equivalent, namely the My Documents folder. Almost every single application will by default use that directory as the default location for any files you use, so if you do want to back up your data, just backup that directory.
Except that the /home/username directory in Unix stores a lot more than just data. It's also where configuration information, and even the applications themselves, go. In Windows if you back up only your My Documents folder, you get less than half the information you need. Program configuration is often critical, and when in files lives in at least 4 places, none of which are under My Documents. And then there's registry information, which isn't even in the filesystem. And then there's the chunks of the application that don't go into it's Program Files folder or wherever else you installed it, but go into Windows system folders. No, applications aren't supposed to do that. No, that doesn't stop them even in this day and age. Why do you think so many applications get heartburn under Vista (which is pickier about such misbehavior)?
Basically, on a Unix system if I save a copy of my home directory tree I'm pretty much guaranteed to have gotten not only all my data but all the configuration information and other things I need to restore not just my data but my application environment. On Windows, if I save a copy of My Documents I'll lose the majority of my application environment.
Right, true for now, but that's due to KDE4 being in early development, whereas the Gnome developers have stripped that kind of thing out over the years based on their design philosophy.
There are a few reasons for the impression that Windows seems to scatter data all over the place:
/home/, and applications respect that. Windows still suffers a bit from its history as unsecured system, where everybody was administrator and could write all over the place. Some applications took advantage of that, and this behavior is not completely weeded out yet.
;-)
1) Sloppy programming by application developers - not all applications use "My Documents". Not directly Microsoft's fault, but here Linux profits from its origins as Unix-like system:
In the Unix world, it is taken for granted that the user may only write to
2) Data redirection:
A questionable methods on Microsoft's part to fix problems with 1) in Vista.
See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160980.aspx for an overview. In short, Vista will silently redirect attempts to write to "forbidden" places to a place in the user's profile. This prevents the application from corrupting the system, but has of course side effects. For instance, take a group of users who used the same application in older Windows versions and were used to sharing data through a common directory (for instance a subdirectory of the installation directory). Now user A cannot see the data of user B anymore, and I doubt an average user will understand what has happened here
C - the footgun of programming languages
A desktop is everything from the libraries to the UI specs to the systems gui tools, etc. Some of the most important features of Gnome, for example:
...I tend to use the CLI for non trivial tasks...Then how can you stand it when Gnome's GUI doesn't incorporate standard commandline (CLI) shortcuts, such as ^u, when you want to clear to the beginning of the text dialog?!? or ^k when you want to clear to the end of the text dialog?
The ^u functionality is present everywhere I've tried it (so far) in KDE and I just cannot understand why Gnome, owing its heritage to the CLI, does not incorporate that functionality.
It is the sum of little things like this that equate to a completely dissatisfying experience when using Gnome; it just takes the fun out of using *Nix, which absolutely owes its heritage to the CLI.
Examples:
- Open a session of Bash, type some text, then ^u (Ctrl+u). What happens to the text?
- In the same shell, type 10 characters of text, then ^b five times, then ^k. What happens to the text?
- Now, open Nautilus, create a new folder and, in the dialog to name it, try the two text manipulation steps above. What happens? (spoiler: nothing, the text is not manipulated)
- Open Konqueror, and try the same. What happens? (spoiler: it behaves like the commandline)
Here's where I first notices this huge deficiency:It wasn't until I learned the major shortcuts on the CLI AND just how pervasive they are, such as at the password prompt when logging in, that I really saw how friendly to users, at least those with knowledge of these things, KDE absolute is and Gnome is not.
For those that actually want to know: Use gconf-editor and change the /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme key to Emacs.