Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I installed Kubuntu as well and went back to Mandriva, Kubuntu has a long way to go.
Choices! I find myself alternating every so often, but really prefer KDE (v4 is looking good).
I have mostly used Gnome, but since I got the EeePC, I've been using KDE, but I've set it up so it both looks and acts like Gnome. I'm pretty sure you can also do the same in the other direction.
The actual desktop environment really doesn't matter so much as do the applications.
Neither.
It just means you prefer GNOME to KDE. That's all. Saying something is more superior because you prefer it over everything else (without any other grounds) is something the Slashdot crowd should recognize from a mile away: fanboism.
Personally, I prefer Fluxbox. Does that make Fluxbox superior? No, it just means that as a minimalist user, a more trimmed window manager does the trick for me.
...for gnome.el and kde.el, but not finding them.
Are gnome and kde part of this new-fangled "X" thingy people seem to be on about lately?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
No, it's to give you two areas where you effectively only have to worry about accuracy in the X axis. Having it only at the bottom only gives you one. Twice as much space, for practically no cost.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Most decisions of this sort are driven by laziness. We end up using the system/interface/whatever that allows us to get the most done with the least effort. Sometimes the multitude of options available in the default KDE setup allows a person to get to an application faster. Sometimes the uncluttered default GNOME setup gives you the feel of a more lightweight window manager without sacrificing most of the creature comforts. In either case, laziness is the underlying driver for our decision-making. It's the underlying driver for most software decisions.
In fact, it's one of the reasons software was invented: So I can sit on my ass all day getting paid to turn my day-dreams into reality.
Damn it. There are times when you just look at the article title and you know that a long, delicious, juicy flamewar is coming up...
:(
And I just lost my mod points, too.
we discovered a new way to think.
In the article, the author describes several uses he had when using Kubuntu. I have had similar issues, but all is reduced to the fact that Kubuntu is a hack "KDE-patched" version of Ubuntu. When you use Kubuntu after using Ubuntu you can "feel" that it seems as they just threw the kde libraries and desktop into the Ubuntu distro. There are a lot of integrity issues. Particularly I have also had the wireless network issue, while it is working flawlessly in Ubuntu, Kubuntu is a complete mess.
But that does not mean that KDE is better or worst than Gnome, if you use a KDE-oriented desktop (such as SUSE or Mandriva) which have KDE preconfigured out of the box, the experience will be different...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I think you are making a false dichotomy here, and that at least a third option should be considered: Kubuntu might not be the best KDE desktop around. Bear in mind that Ubuntu was initially Gnome-only, and that to this day that's the desktop that gets most of Canonical's resources. Kubuntu doesn't get nowhere near the same level of attention, and that shows. Kubuntu mostly lacks polishing, ie, the "little things" that end up making a substantial impact on the user's experience. Moreover, there have been in the past a number of serious, potential data-loss bugs in Kubuntu that festered for *months* because there was just not the manpower to fix them. That is substantial evidence that Kubuntu is a second-class citizen for Canonical.
While I find KDE overall a superior desktop to Gnome, I have to agree that Ubuntu is generally a better desktop experience than Kubuntu. However, I just wish people would stop equating Gnome==Ubuntu and KDE==Kubuntu, and therefore Gnome > KDE.
I will say that it's interesting how even with longtime users like Roblimo, the "linux experience" is really becoming the ubuntu/gnome experience and the kubuntu/kde experience. From this review, it sounds like the base operating system could be FreeBSD, solaris, whatever, and Roblimo wouldn't have a clue. I think this is probably a very good thing, but also speaks to the changing skillsets of linux users.
A few statements: even humble things like the closest application I could come on a Mac to my beloved Bluefish editor cost money, even though they were no better than -- and in many cases not as good as -- the free software to which I had grown accustomed.
open a Terminal window (I use csh) and type "sudo port install bluefish"
That was it. I'm sure fink has a package as well. While X apps are slightly different under osx, I don't think comparing the experience or process to Wine is at all correct. And here's the funny thing: Windows feels a lot more Linuxlike to me than Mac OS. In many ways it seems as if it's a slightly clumsy knockoff of KDE. Yeah, you think WINDOWS is ripping off KDE? I'm not going to argue that windows is the king of originality, but I think it came about the other way around... Ditto the way you store and find individual files, for which Windows uses the same "folders and subfolders" metaphor as both KDE and GNOME, and Windows gives me a Linux-style horizontal list of open programs across the bottom of my screen, which Mac OS does not. Confused again. Mac doesn't use folders and subfolders? That's news to me. Horizontal list of open programs--that's called the dock. Ok, so it includes launcher buttons as well, but virtually the same thing. Backing up my data in Windows is lots harder than backing up a
and one from the next section... Except for one thing: as far as he knows, he doesn't connect to the Internet or use email software. He connects to AOL, which to him is the Internet. Including email. AOL is indeed the Internet. When you connect to AOL, you're on the internet, and you can ping, use firefox, etc to your heart's content.
umm..
That's probably not helping, is it.
Says the guy who's got a sig that mocks Mac users.
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.
Is there a KDE user out there who doesn't change every single panel and menu around first thing? My impression has always been that the KDE devs don't care much about defaults because 1) That should be left to the distros and 2) The user is going to change it all around anyway. Criticizing the default UI for KDE is dumb. You're not supposed to use it.
This is the polar opposite of the Gnome policy of assuming the user is too stupid to know how they work best.
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
As long as we all agree that Captain Picard used Emacs while he spread all measures of awesome throughout the galaxy. That is in stark contrast to Kirk, who used Vi to compose love notes to alien whores in his quest to spread space AIDS to as many planets as he possibly could before being canceled.
I started with KDE back in 1999 since we were using Sun workstations and CDE was unusable. I managed to compile KDE 1.2 and added a Solaris sound driver to ARTS and have been using it ever since. I have tried Gnome on a number of occasions, but I always go back to KDE since it always feels like my hands are tied behind my back with Gnome. Yes, KDE is cluttered (much better in 4.0), but I often use a lot of that "clutter". There are a lot more menu options, but I've frequently found them useful.
Some things in Gnome I absolutely detest, like their file dialogs. The KDE file dialogs are a lot more friendly and powerful, and I've found that the integration seems better. They're also consistent across applications and not limited to just local files, but http, ftp, fish, etc.
When it comes to things like burning CDs or DVDs, I have yet to find anything that comes close to k3b, or for music, Amarok.
I still use Thunderbird for email due to some issues Kmail has with IMAP, but I'll switch in an instant once those are fixed. For the web, I have found that Firefox has slowly adopted a number of features I've been using for a long time in Konqueror. Both Firefox and Thunderbird have some nasty issues still when your home directory is mounted via NFS. I.e. if I have Firefox open on one computer, I cannot open it a second time on another computer in the lab without killing it on the first.
I've fallen in love with some of the features in Konsole, like searching the history, which it's had almost forever.
I've also found DCOP to be extremely useful since I can script things or even control applications remotely. I.e. I needed to change some parameters on a remotely running ktorrent and was easily able to do that via dcop without having any access to the desktop.
For file browsing I have also found Konqueror to be quite powerful, since I can use it rather seamlessly whether I'm browsing files locally, via FTP, fish, on my camera, etc. And if I click on different files, the part for displaying or editing that file is integrated. If I click on a PDF file, kpdf displays it. If I click on a text file, kate is integrated.
Also, each time I tried dealing with the configuration of Gnome to tweak things I was always disappointed in the lack of options.
KDE has also been fairly consistent with the menus.
And lastly, I've found that the embedding of different applications to be quite powerful. For example, I am writing this in Akregator, but all it has to do is add a tab with a KHTML part.
I may try Gnome again one of these days, but each time I do I'm left wanting for a lot of the features and options I take advantage of in KDE.
It's like Gnome goes for simplicity and in the process discards functionality and caters to the most common needs, whereas KDE is much more of a swiss army knife of tools that can be combined together and tweaked to the hearts content.
I might add that I've used the straight KDE distribution (for Solaris) and SuSE distributions.
I won't say KDE is the prettiest environment out there, but I rather have functional over pretty, and some of the other themes for it are rather nice.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Are in this order?
/. going to update the reverse layout of the "older news"
Cancel = Back (Left), OK = Forward (Right)
Slightly off-topic: When the hell is
YesterdayDate | DayBeforeYesterday
It should be:
PrevDate | SelectedDate | NextDate
And there sould be at least button of whitespace between Preview and Submit.
Noob UI designers...
And I just lost my mod points, too.
Happy hunting! First one to get forcibly rejected from Slashdot gets a bottle opener key chain! Double points for a k-line, and Quad for a z-line.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Yes.
In the U.S., we refer to these people as "straight".
-Dave