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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.
I know that a "cohesive user experience" is what the masses want, and what Linux really needs to become a truly viable mainstram desktop OS, and that doing so is probably a good thing.
But from a personal preference standpoint, I much prefer the "bunch of random bits" approach. It annoys me that both gnome and to a lesser extend KDE are heading in the "one big giant thing" direction where everything is interdependent and it's hard to just run the bits and pieces you want.
I use openbox plus bits of xfce, but I like dolphin as a file browser and gnome-terminal is pretty decent and there's a few other bits and pieces from both that I like. For awhile this was no problem, but now trying to get dolphin to run properly without a full KDE install and a gazillion services running in the background is a huge pain, and I've completely given up on anything gnome (partly due to systemd as I'm trying to hold onto openrc for as long as I can.. but even before that it was pretty coupled to itself).
And again, I acknowledge that this is probably the directions things should be heading in for the good of humanity and all that, everyone using more open software is a good thing, it's just not the Linux I started with (over a decade ago) and grew to love.
What I found interesting about the quote in the summary is I have the opposite impression of the desktops being discussed. To me, GNOME feels like a collection of thrown-together tools that sort of work together. There does not appear to have any consistency or cooperation between the applications and utilities. KDE, by contrast, seems to work well as a "product" to me. All the components work together, the desktop all ties into the KDE System Settings, widgets "recongize" similar widgets, allowing them to be swapped out for widgets with similar functions.
On the whole, one of the reasons I tend to prefer KDE over GNOME is the way the pieces of KDE fit together to make a great whole out of the parts. GNOME feels to me to be too bare, to chaotic.
I'm not saying the author is wrong or that I'm right. I'm just pointing out the observations we've made are subjective feelings, not objective facts that should be used to promote one desktop or the other.
I wish more people would do the 'imaginary ideal language' thought experiment, amongst other things. Suppose I want a window with no UI controls, and all events sent to a simple handler, for the purpose of displaying an image or drawing, all one needs to write informally to make a program which does this is (as an illustration, using a python-style syntax with a few Ruby-isms thrown in):
UI.App:
w = Window().title("Image").handle(key=self.keyHandler,mouse=self.mouseHandler,midi=self.midiHandler) # see later comment
i = Image(argv[1])
w.canvas.drawImage(i,mode=:stretch)
def keyHandler(e):
if e.key.lower() = 'q':
sys.exit(0)
def mouseHandler(e):
pass # do something when we can be bothered to decide what
def midiHandler(e):
pass # I wish event stacks would treat keyboard, mouse, pen tablet and midi, amongst other things, in a uniform way*
[ The following comments are not related to the point I am making above, but my fingers decided to add them before I thought
to make this remark.]
* If midi events were integrated into the event stack in the same way as mice and keyboards, it would be straightforward in, say, krita,
to have a midi CC control something like brush size or colour mixing.
* If the event stack was written in a way which permitted more flexible routing (consider something looking like puredata, max/msp or, on the mac,
controllermate)
John_Chalisque
I admittedly just skimmed the article, however as one who is running the KDE flavour of Mint I would point out that the login screen looks nothing like the one he complains about (it is actually more elegant than either the gnome or kde screens on fedora) and I can look at printers without entering my password.
Basically he is comparing Fedora's version of KDE to Fedora's version of Gnome.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Perhaps the debate is which desktop environment to recommend to first-time users of X11/Linux so that they don't get a bad impression and misblame it on Linux.
"KDE 5" (that is, KF5, Plasma 5 and new KDE Apps releases) are actually going the opposite way - it's becoming exceptionally modular.
Even a bit too modular for some tastes, as you don't have anything called "KDE 5" now, which results in having bunch of apps based on new KDE Frameworks 5, and bunch still on old KDELibs 4, which results in funny problems with KDE4 Dolphin not seeing the same KIO resources as Plasma, because you don't have Qt4 version of that KIO handler installed...
Anyway, I'm a proud user of Plasma 5 desktop now and I really like the direction. This is now what KDE 4 should have been.
Hipsters, their attitude, and their philosophy are what ruined GNOME. Just like with web design, Firefox and even Windows, these things were just fine until hipsters got involved. Then it all went to hell, because their ideas are incompatible with good software. They always put appearance over utility, which makes their user interfaces unintuitive, inefficient, and hard to use. They also always think they know better than the user, especially when they actually don't, which prevents their broken user interfaces from ever getting fixed. In general, they're also very repulsive people, in that interacting with them even at the most basic level is a real chore. Their inflated egos make it damn near impossible to have any sort of a reasonable discussion with them, especially if it involves changes to something they "designed". Normal people find it's easier just to move on to something else, rather than continuing to interact with hipsters. It's hard to believe, but hipsters have single-handedly managed to ruin many of the most successful software products of all time.
For perhaps the billionth time since I've been involved with Linux as a user and writer, here's the ridiculous GNOME/KDE/whatever food fight.
As others have pointed out already, if people have a choice it doesn't freaking matter.
But!!! If Linux is to ever become more than a toy/tool for the ubergeeks, then at least one distro has to offer people people the ability to do what they want without a lot of senseless bullshit, like being forced to use a command line or worry about packaging and library dependencies. For a mainstream audience, Linux has always been a train wreck, going back to long before the installation hassle was killed off.
The fundamental problem that I've seen play out countless times is that a large proportion of the Linux community simply doesn't understand that for mainstream users the OS is nothing more than a necessary evil, something they have to endure so they can do e-mail, browse the web, play media, run PhotoShop or Office, etc. Give them something low hassle that lets them run their apps (not FOSS replacements, but the apps they've used for years) and they will put up with an OS most people on this site wouldn't consider usable.
You can make Linux the most beautiful elegant, efficient OS in the history of computing, but if it doesn't do what people want then the "cost" is actually much higher than the price of Windows.
Get this: I do not want NM running at all. I don't even want to install it. But it is a preqreq to gnome in debian, so if I'm prepping a dozen desktops with static ips, I'm screwed.
And no fucking way I'm going to fire up NM on each one of them manually.