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.

Comments

Re:Let's spare the GNOME vs. KDE flames

[Millennium]

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.