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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 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.