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What the GNOME Desktop Gets Right and KDE Gets Wrong
An anonymous reader writes: Eric Griffith at Phoronix has provided a fresh perspective on the KDE vs. GNOME desktop debate after exclusively using GNOME for the past week while being a longtime KDE user. He concluded his five-page editorial (which raises some valid points throughout) by saying, "Gnome feels like a product. It feels like a singular experience. When you use it, it feels like it is complete and that everything you need is at your fingertips. It feels like the Linux desktop. ... In KDE, it's just some random-looking window popup that any application could have created. ... KDE doesn't feel like cohesive experience. KDE doesn't feel like it has a direction its moving in, it doesn't feel like a full experience. KDE feels like its a bunch of pieces that are moving in a bunch of different directions, that just happen to have a shared toolkit beneath them." However, with the week over and despite his criticism, he's back to using KDE.
From TFA:
> "THE Linux desktop in the same way that Windows or OS X have THE desktop experience"
Disagree about Windows. Every version past WinXP feels like lets-slap-this-shit-together-and-ship-it. Proof: Why the fuck does Window's Control Panel constantly need to have different entries for every version of Windows when OSX's System Panel has more or less remained mostly the same throughout?
Never thought we'd still be having flame wars over which is better, Gnome, or KDE, in 2015 ...
Forget file browsing. Try finding a decent cdburner GUI frontend that doesn't pull in a bucketload of either KDE or GNOME dependencies!
I was a long-time KDE user and about a year ago decidedent to experiment with banning both Gnome and KDE from being installed and relying on lightweight window managers. It was only mean to be an experiment, I didn't really expect to go more than a week. Today I am using StumpWM combined with the pager (and only the pager) from Lxde. The only thing I really miss is K3b. Seriously, why does a program that is just a front end to cdrecord, which is more than capable of finding my burner rely on some integral part of KDE. If I install it without KDE it tells me I have no burners! Gnomes equivalent program did the same thing.
I guess I shouldn't complain too loud though. Maybe someday I will take the initiative and write my own burner front-end and not require a bloated desktop to run it. You can write the file manager!
Which is why you want a desktop environment that "gets out of your way", as page 1 of the featured article put it, and lets you get to the applications used for your task. You don't want to have to manually click through a bunch of crap just to save your credentials for logging in to other systems because the maintainer sucks at choosing good defaults (page 2). If it includes applications for doing specific tasks, the applications should be easy to understand and more importantly not broken for two years (page 3). The applications for the task of setting up peripherals likewise need to be easy to understand and work with the elevation means available to them, not needing a root password unnecessarily (page 4).
Totally agree - then I read the whole thing - never mentioned Dophin vs Nautilus. I mean - the most important part of a desktop was never considered?
BTW Dolphin rocks.
I applied the same lazy philosophy with NetworkManager. I simply just started using it. Actually, it improved my life on my laptop.
It is just a matter of vendor lock-in, and network effect.
Office desktops are like office copying machines. Nobody is really passionate about them.
Windows is just a standard issue office tool. It would be more trouble than it's worth to try to move away from Windows, so we stay with it.