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CDE vs Gnome
EmilEifrem wrote in to tell
us that
32BitsOnline
review where CDE vs Gnome
duke it out. Not sure
why exactly KDE isn't in the shuffle, but I'll spoil it for
you: GNOME wins.
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Here's my opinion of the state of GNOME:
The core of GNOME is three modules:
gnome-libs - very stable, powerful, fast and good;
gnome-core - pretty stable, powerful, fast and good, a few wrinkles to iron out;
gmc - pretty stable, powerful, fast and good, a few wrinkles to iron out.
The other modules are more or less ready, ranging from excellent and stable to barely functional; but the GNOME 1.0 release wasn't the release of these modules. These modules are in many respects independant but related development efforts with their own release cycles.
If you want a high quality, functional GNOME system spoon fed to you, RedHat 5.9 Starbuck offers it, right now. Download it from RedHat or buy it from CheapBytes.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Fetchmail retrieves your mail as the name implies. It is very powerful. It can handle a wide variety of servers and multiple mail accounts with ease.
Procmail processes your mail in virtually any way you can imagine. At the most simple level, this is sorting it into different folders. You can have it run scrips or play sounds or virtually anything else on specific conditions.
Emacs / XEmacs is the programmer's editor. If you already know Emacs, you will find composing and editing mail with Emacs a godsend.
VM is XEmacs' major mode for reading mail. It is quite powerful. I only use XEmacs so I don't even know if it is availible for regular Emacs, but that apparently doesn't matter to you. VM in Xemacs is fully graphical. You can even view image attachements inline. There is a toolbar and everything.
Reviewing your requirments: Graphical interface. (No Pine!)
Like I said, Xemacs is graphical and quite functional and reasonably attractive. VM is also fairly nice to look at. Everything can be keyboard driven if you like, but there are also menus and such.
Powerful filtering capabilities
Procmail is about as powerful as you can get. It uses regular expressions and can perform just about any action based on your regex's.
Stability
All of these programs are well-known for their stability. Certainly I've never had a problem with fetchmail or procmail. Xemacs has crashed on me once or twice, but never in VM, and it was always because I was messing around with stuff that I didn't know about. And obviously, if one component crashes, your Linux box will be quite unaffected!
(Optional)Capability of importing Eudora mailbox-setup and filters
Can't really help you here. VM uses the standard Unix mailbox format. If you can export your Eudora messages to this standard format, you're set.
Don't get me wrong... there is a relatively steep learning curve with all of this. Fetchmail isn't hard to set up. Procmail isn't hard at all to do some very basic things if you follow the examples given. If you want to do more powerful things, you will have to learn about Procmail. Xemacs / VM is well, Emacs. If you don't know basic Emacs editing commands you will have some learning ahead of you. I think you will find that it was well worth it. I can't think of a more powerful mail agent than these programs. Emacs is the kitchen-sink editor. If you are going to do any programming on Unix, you really need to learn Emacs.
It took me about a day of dedicated fiddling (and FAQ reading) to get fetchmail / procmail / VM configured just like I like, and I am a relatively experienced Unix user. Like I said, the learning curve is fairly steep compared to Eudora, but you are investing in learning a really first-class system.
Good luck!
As if CDE has a much freer license than KDE
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
CDE is the standard desktop environment for commercial Unix workstations. It's based around Motif.
You can find more information and screenshots at this page.
KDE has little to do with CDE.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
The Halloween document was correct on at least one point: Usability isn't something that can be easily 'grafted on' to an otherwise finished system, any more than security or stability.
This is a very valid point - unfortunately, the whole KDE vs Gnome thing often gets boiled down to a pretty widget issue (see any comments on themes or icon sizes.)
For those of you who might not have touched a Macintosh in ten years, here are several technical features which are key to it's usablity. I'd like to see the KDE or Gnome projects rip some of these ideas off.
* You can drag an application or alias anywhere and it will still work. This works because the Finder automatically updates a "desktop database", so the system can go back and find that app. This eliminates many common problems newbie Windows users have until they figure not to touch anything. (Obviously a Unix implementation will need to accomote security and path settings, but it could be done.)
* Drivers load directly out of the "Extensions" and "Control Panels" directories, not some initilization file. If you are having problems with a driver, just drag it out of the folder, or drag an updated one in. (This is a "designed in" feature which is possibly impossible to do with unix. However, it would be nice to see a good virutalization.)
* Every file stores a "Type" and "Creator" value, which means you can have some JPEGs which open in a viewer, and others which open in Photoshop. Makes a double-click interface much easier for the user, because the right application always opens. (There should be no reason one couldn't do this in Unix, if a standard could be developed.)
* All applicaitions store their icons, windows, dialog boxes, text strings, etc. in a standard resource format. (Which is why Macs have the wierd two fork files that no other OS has.) Anyone can launch the ResEdit applicaiton and customize the GuI for their apps. I would assume that QT/Gnome has something similar, it's just not exposed to the user.
* Drag-n-Drop just works. For example, decompressng a file involves just dragging it to the Stuffit Expander icon. Compare this to WinZip or the KDE equivalent.
The MacOS is lacking in many places, but these little bits and pieces make it nicer to work with from a mouse-wielding user level. I haven't tried Gnome, but using KDE, CDE, LinuxConf, or even MS Windows, you always feel as if you are working with a similcrum of somehthing else which may or may not be decieving you, whereas the Mac is super predictiable enough from the mouse pointer level that you can actually feel comfortable there.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
While CDE is the old standby, I would guess that very soon now both the KDE and Gnome user base is going to be larger than CDE's. There just isn't that many Unix workstations out there relative to people playing with and using Linux. In fact, FWVM may already have a larger user base than CDE just to it being in RedHat.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Being able to cut-n-paste is hardly a laughing matter (that's part of OLE). Obvously he was talking about X.
And it's a good point. The unix community will never rally around any desktop enviornment, not while CDE costs money, that is. So they should focus on defining base-line standards, not all encompassing projects that are destined to be incompatible forever.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I use the Blackdown jvm daily. It's not as fast as c code, but it's not bad at all. I use a java text editor quite a bit, performance is fine.
Applications with Java? Sure. A desktop environment with Java? No. Java could be
used for commercial applications on Linux,
but a desktop would be a bad idea. This would
be controversial due to licensing like Qt is.
We wouldn't want to be totally dependant on
Sun for what could be eventually condsidered
a core component for a Linux system to function.
Spot on AC!
Having recently installed and experimented with both Gnome and KDE, my honest and impartial assessment is pretty much summed up by you.
I like Gnome, I think it is "tres cool", but at the moment it does not seem to be as functional as KDE, which conversely does not have the cool look of Gnome, but does have the edge in usability and ease of installation and configuration (just!).
And as you so succinctly put it - the operative word is *NOW* - they are indeed both in development and destined to improve with time.
P.S. I do love the little Gnome foot symbol - very chic!
I, too, have experimented with both...
I like Gnome, I think it is "tres cool", but at the moment it does not seem to be as functional as KDE, which conversely does not have the cool look of Gnome, but does have the edge in usability and ease of installation and configuration (just!).
On the area of functionality I'm afraid I must disagree. WindowMaker crashes far more than either; I've never had either Gnome or KDE crash my machine. In terms of functionality KDE excels in areas Gnome does not, but Gnome too is way ahead of KDE in some areas. I'd call it a flat-out draw in that area.
In terms of looks I doubt anyone can argue against the assertion that Gnome wins, so I won't go into that one here. The Gnome team obviously thought out their aesthetics much more than the KDE people did (though the KDE team was also aesthetically hobbled by Qt, and still is to a large degree; this will probably be fixed with Qt 2.0, though it remains to be seen whether or not KDE will get some better looks out of the deal).
Now, we come to speed. With stock installations, Gnome wins hands down. Put both DE's on the same windowmanager, however, (I use WindowMaker since it seems to be the only one which currently have good support for both), and the speed again comes to roughly even; KWM is a BIG problem for KDE; it makes E look stunningly fast and stable. I'll call it a draw here too, then.
Now there's the matter of resources. I'm afraid Gnome wins it here. It appears to use far less in the way of resources than KDE does. The one exception I found was GnomeICU, which does occasionally start draining CPU cycles at an unbelieveable rate.
Filemanagers? KDE takes it. GMC has the potential, but it needs to first get stable, then get the FTP link of the "plain" MC working right. I don't care for Konqueror (KWM's Web browser) myself; give me Netscape/Mozilla any day. Konqueror reminds me far too much of a certain OS from Washington, if you know what I mean...
Ease of setup - KDE, hands down. The Gnome guys could take a cue from KDE's install process. A very large cue.
Raw toolkits: Strip out the desktop environments, and GTK wins out over Qt. This is simply a matter of functionality: GTK offers more than a few things which you can't get with Qt alone (look to the many things you can do with toolbars for just one example). This isn't the fault of the KDE team, however, and hopefully their widgets will be incorporated into Qt at some point in time. The language issue is irrelevant; several C++ bindings exist for GTK and a set of C bindings is being worked on for Qt; it should be noted however that many more language bindings are available for GTK.
In the end, I'd call it a draw. Use whichever you like, but keep the libs from the other one on your hard drive also. Until we have a clear winner you're going to want both.