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?"

Comments

Re:Here we go again

[Azuma Hazuki]

Sorry, but sometimes some things *are* better than others, even to the point that they go beyond the "right tool for the right job"/"can't argue with taste" argument. Three years ago I would have said the same thing, but since then, Gnome has mutated into an unholy, shambling, crawling mess of God knows what. There is only one other desktop I've seen that has so little functionality for so much bloat: Windows XP's Luna. Yes, I went there.

Worse, Gnome has reinvented the triangular wheel; pull up GConf and tell me that doesn't look at least superficially like the Windows registry. Yes, there *are* corresponding flat text or XML files, but the fact that I need to know that says that GConfEditor is unintuitive and weak. KControl is probably just as messy internally, but I have never, ever needed to check this to verify; it exposes tremendous amounts of the DE's look and feel, perhaps *too* much for a beginner, to the user.

What really tears it is that I much prefer the look of GTK, the fact that it's written in C, and that it uses the LGPL. Luckily, we also have XFCE, which I have taken to calling "what Gnome always should have been" since version 4.3.9x. All XFCE is missing is some drag'n'drop support (apps menu --> panel launcher, for example) and some more functionality in Thunar (which can be added via Thunar's plugin system) and it will make Gnome utterly pointless. XFCE might not be quite as friendly (read: patronizing) as Gnome, but even my mother, a longtime Windows user, said she "felt like the computer was insulting her intelligence" when she used Gnome.

Not to say KDE doesn't have its own issues; I hate Konqueror for web browsing, though prefer it just slightly over D[3/o]lphin for file management. Most of the apps I need are GTK, and the QT/KDE alternatives just don't do it for me. It's perhaps a bit *too* configurable for a beginner, though I personally appreciate how much can be changed. Theming is also a pain in the neck for beginners since there are so many separate things to change and it's not always obvious what each one does. Still, given a choice between Gnome and KDE, I would take KDE any day. ...I'd just rather have XFCE or IceWM or one of the *boxes instead =P

Window managers?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

All you people who prefer the window manager KDE over the window manager Gnome are morons. They aren't window managers. And quit calling it X Windows. There's no 's' on that. There's no 's' on Lego either. Morons.