Attempting To Reframe "KDE Vs. GNOME"

jammag writes "Setting aside the now tired debate about whether KDE or GNOME is the 'better' Linux desktop, Bruce Byfield compares their disparate development approaches and asks, not which desktop is subjectively better, but which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years. 'In the short term, GNOME's gradualism seems sensible. But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems. It means being reduced to an imitator rather than innovator.' In contrast, 'you could say that KDE has done what's necessary and ripped the bandage off the scab. In the short term, the result has been a lot of screaming, but, in the long term, it has done what was necessary to thrive.'"

Comments

Both have evolved too in leaps and bounds

[G3ckoG33k]

From the article you get the impression that KDE use radical changes whereas Gnome strive in little steps...

How in accurate. Both evolve in little steps and both occasionally make radical changes.

Gnome had a major remake for 2.0 which reduced the older clotted layout.

KDE had a major remake for 4.0 which vectorized most of the gui.

Otherwise, changes are small. For both.

.

Re:Warning - Honest opinion below

[lbbros]

Removal of icons on the desktop - Seriously, WTF?!! (as far as I know) EVERY OTHER FUCKING DE ALLOWS THIS!!! (I believe it might be back in now, but in the form of a hack..?)

Appearance Settings > Desktop Activity Type > "Folder View" (4.2 or later) Very hackish... so hackish there's even an option to do so.

Re:Written by a KDE user.

[marsu_k]

He even calls D-bus "inspired by DCOP" but ignores the fact that D-bus is not part of gnome, but gnome has instead switched to a universal standard that is not desktop-specific, and was already used by non-gnome applications on the system, including low-level components such as udev and hal. I'd wish KDE would do the same, no one needs a 2nd seperate message bus system on his machine.

...which is why, probably, KDE4 uses DBus. But don't let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

Re:gnome better than kde

[ion.simon.c]

The first thing which was really annoying is, that the "Dolphin" file manager eats about 200mb of ram almost instantly.

Hi. Many things have changed since KDE 4.1. Over here (running KDE 4.2.1), Dolphin has a virtual size of ~71MB and a resident working set of ~20MB. You might want to look into upgrading.

$ ps -eo vsize,rss,comm | grep dolphin | grep -v grep
71652 20868 dolphin
$ dolphin --version
Qt: 4.5.0
KDE: 4.2.1 (KDE 4.2.1)
Dolphin: 1.2.1

Ah. Something that I just thought of... is your version of KDE an optimized build? (I'm not sure that this would make *very* much difference at all, but...) Over in my full debug version of KDE SVN trunk, Dolphin has a virtual size of ~128MB and a resident size of ~28MB.

$ ps -eo vsize,rss,comm | grep dolphin | grep -v grep
128268 28532 dolphin
$ dolphin --version
Qt: 4.5.0
KDE: 4.2.68 (KDE 4.2.68 (KDE 4.3 >= 20090327))
Dolphin: 1.2.80