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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.
" 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"....so, it's just like every other part of UNIX, then....
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Why should there be a debate? If you like one of them, use it. Otherwise, try XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, Ratpoison or whatever suits you.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Can we discuss systemd vs init next?
All power to you if you like GNOME Shell and KDE. Personally, I find them both to be bloated and buggy. KDE comes with a lot of crapware (my apologies if you actually do use Calligra Suite, but everyone everywhere I know of uses LibreOffice or MSOffice), and its colors & icons are very gaudy and dated. GNOME Shell is even worse--it's like if Windows 8's unintuitiveness had a drunken affair with Unity, and their bastard offspring refused to dress in anything but dark, depressing colors laden with stupid, random shapes.
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.
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 ...
The default DE for Fedora is Gnome, but you can also get a KDE spin as well, so you can try both DEs on the same distro for a fair comparison.
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What you are looking for there is Squeak and Smalltalk. Very cool system.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Some shitty Phoronix post about KDE vs GNOME? Is Dice running low on clicks lately?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
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.
ugh, who cares?
It's all a matter of personal preference. That's the beauty of Linux, you can use whatever GUI you want to use. If you don't like it, don't use it and use one of the many other options available. I don't understand this debate. It's even better that at the end of the summary, the guy goes back to KDE even after saying Gnome is better. lol
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.
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).
I stopped reading when I reached the point of him complaining that the additional buttons in the login and lock screens are "distracting". That must be some kind of a joke - if your computer is locked or you haven't logged on, then you are not currently using it! How can you be complaining of it being distracting? Are you just staring at the lock screen? The problem with all these moronic reviews is that the reviewers don't actually use computers for a purpose other than reviewing. It creates an absurd situation where the reviews are not only useless, but laughable.
"Lubuntu is a fast and lightweight operating system. The core of the system is based on Linux and Ubuntu. Lubuntu uses the minimal desktop LXDE, and a selection of light applications." ref
NetworkManager.
STOP OVERWRITING MY /etc/resolv.conf
And forget about aptitude purge or hold.
Many KDE users were lost and feel displaced to this day. I am among them. I used KDE from version 1.x through 3.5 but... all the criticisms of 4+ are valid. I've met many others who feel the same--that the loss of KDE with the advent of version 4 was the biggest technological tragedy ever. It was fast, intuitive, and comprehensively functional. It was very practical and a joy to use... not perfect but very near to perfect. And it was the most preferred desktop for Linux, even if not adopted as the default for any major distributions. I think that said a lot, in and of itself.
At the time, Gnome had done some things better but not much. Mostly, Gnome had a great menu layout. It's file browsers, however, couldn't even sort dates as dates but rather as strings. I haven't looked at Gnome for some time. At the moment, I am using the awful slow and non-intuitive thing Ubuntu defaults to. On my laptop, I run Trinity--and that's where I do all my programming.
Trinity is an effort to keep KDE 3.5 alive.. It seems the maintainers are struggling to keep it functional. It has some nuances and broken aspects that didn't originally exist in KDE 3.5 (such as K3B not always working). However, I want to give the people who took it up all the credit I can. Even as they seem to be struggling to keep it functional, it's in many ways the most practical desktop system to date.
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.