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Gnome looks nice and professional out-box. Kde looks a playground to Barbi’s. That was my first impression

After a closer look, and spending some time to tweak it, Kde looks a more sane desktop to me. It runs faster, it’s more customizable and, in a way I can’t describe, runs smoother than Gnome. There can be reasons for all these, and reasons to Gnome don’t include those features I like in Kde.

To start Kde uses QT, damn, that is fast! I’ve nothing against gtk+, and I use it to my development needs.

Kde is highly customizable, you configure many many things. And I just love that! For instance, where can I change my theme colors in Gnome? The menu panel runs smooth and without problems, for instance I never saw my applets switching places after reboot, and the start-menu of Kde menu is much more useful. Also, I can easily customize the menus in Kde, the Gnome equivalent to that is nautilus based, and don’t work at least on FC3 neither at Gnome 2.10 where it was removed at all.

Kde panel don’t stop responding like it happens to me a lot of time at Gnome. Yet, not all are roses to Kde, its applets suck hard. I just love some of Gnome applets, and there aren’t such alternatives to Kde. Also, konqueror/file manager sucks, so I use nautilus even at Kde – but that’s a story to discuss a few paragraphs below.

Another thing that sucks really hard, copy/paste at Gnome, omg, I repeat, it sucks. Just try to open gedit type something copy or cut it, close and open again, just keep trying to paste… I tested it at Kde (with gedit) and it works fine… For some reason they don’t include a clipboard manager, so I have to setup xclipboard to start at login…

Nautilus is great, yet it have some problems, for instance there is no way of deleting/editing one file from root user is we open nautilus as our user. Also, a “Open Console here…” would be very nice. To finish the open file dialog concept is really nice, yet there are some problems with it, for instance I can’t type my own path, which can be frustrating when our file is on a hidden folder. Some things are better in 2.10 other suck even harder.

In general I’m a gnome applications guy, I don’t like most of Kde applications with very few exceptions, yet it gives me the ability to edit the menus, so, for now, I’ll keep using Kde as desktop, but mostly with gnome applications. For instance, I replaced help, find, browse home, and many other default Kde applications by my Gnome preferred alternatives.

I really don’t think this can be a definitive solution, yet I think Gnome guys are really busy creating libraries, integrating applications with each others and sadly forgetting that the most important part is the desktop itself. Evolution and the clock applet integration sounds great, but on other hand I can’t work without a proper clipboard.

I really think there should be less integration between the desktop and session manager. Desktop is one thing, the libraries for application are other. I should be able to use the Kde menu panel with the desktop of Gnome, and the menus for both should come from one source. Having menus in Kde that don’t exist in Gnome can be frustrating. Again…. freedesktop will be saving my day, some day….

Well, I guess there is nothing in “market” to me at this time…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 6th, 2005 at 18:55 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.