Someone from the GNOME community
June 21, 2007I switched my Ubuntu installation over to Kubuntu. I see more future in KDE4 than I see in GNOME (as I have said many times before). If I don’t see someone from the GNOME community stand up to bring GNOME to the next level, I don’t see why I should invest time in using it and reporting bugs on it. As a user, I expect my platform of choice to have (what I consider) a viable future, and at this point, I just don’t see a viable future in GNOME (and no, some bug fixes and minor changes to the 2.x tree do not count as a viable future).
Sure, KDE3 lacks polish here and there, but at least KDE has set out a path for the future. And it has Kopete and Konqueror, which kick GAIM Pidgin and Firefox’ asses any day.
Konqueror is not nearly as good as Firefox IMO, it is in fact bad for usability. But yeah, even without the sponsorship that used to enjoy in the past, KDE moves along faster than Gnome.
I can’t use KDE though, because I don’t like its bloated menus and icons and I don’t like how it looks. And I am not talking about the theme, but the Qt look in general (e.g. not enough space between elements like toolbar icons).
Comment by Eugenia — June 21, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
I don’t want to make this into a big KDE/Gnome argument. I’ve been using Gnome on Ubuntu simply because it’s the default and it’s doing what I want it to do. Saying that, I’ve always preferred KDE. Mainly because of the technology behind its development. I believe it is built using much better technology. Having learned Qt very quickly, it just seems to be a common sense approach to programming. GTK has always seemed more complicated.
I can’t wait until KDE 4 hits final release. I used to try all kinds of early releases & beta software, but these days I just want it to work. I may try a beta in a virtual machine, but only to play for a couple hours.
As far as it’s look, I think the new icons and themes will make a huge difference.
Comment by John S. — June 22, 2007 @ 1:13 am
>Mainly because of the technology behind its development
I have been saying this for ages. KDE has a better dev environment and libraries, Gnome has a better user usability though. Kinda sad.
Comment by Eugenia — June 22, 2007 @ 1:27 am
Beg to differ.
Firefox kicks all asses all the time…specially since it has a dedicated developer community.
Comment by Shannon — June 23, 2007 @ 12:54 am
I agree with you, Kopete is amazing, voice/video supprt, all that.
I just don’t like Konqueror, for either file browsing or web browsing :) Maybe once they let a little of the bloat (IMO) out with Dolphin coming I’ll be able to use it.
Comment by blag — June 23, 2007 @ 1:48 am
Gnome definitely has a better look out of the box than KDE. I use KDE because I love all the features it has, but you have to put some work into it to make it as slick as Gnome. Cutting out the overly bouncy animations, and removing unnecessary toolbar icons and overly large panel. Once you do that, it is pure bliss to use. Simple, but incredibly powerful.
Also, I’ve done some development with GTK, and from an engineer’s point of view, I can’t in good conscience use an environment with the knowledge of the cruft that it was built on. I’ve written apps in many different languages and toolkits (Java swing, GTK, GTK#, Qt, MFC, Winapi, Mozilla XUL, Windows.Forms, WxWidgets), and Qt is so far above anything else that it is painful when you have to use the others. Just the knowledge of how efficiently code is reused in KDE makes it more appealing to me, but I see how that is very geeky :)
Comment by Leo S — June 24, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
The development that has been going on in GNOME since the release of 2.0 is a lot more than “some bug fixes and minor changes.” You might even go as far as to say that the changes that have occurred during GNOME2 are just as large as the leap to 2.0 was five years ago — without the need for API/ABI breakage.
Actually, the evolution of GNOME2 might make for an interesting article.
Comment by Markus Berg — June 26, 2007 @ 11:42 am
I’ve been mainly using Gnome but lately switched to KDE.
IMHO, the difference between Gnome and KDE is that the latter can be customized to look as minimal as one wants, whereas Gnome is just featureless.
Comment by Dante — July 19, 2007 @ 9:17 am
I don’t understand how you can tell anybody that a browser is better than firefox. of course, if you install, for instance, too many extensions, it will start up slower etc. but page draws are still pretty quick for me, second i can’t seem to understand how you want to compare konqueror with firefox ?? gnome equivalent would (in my eyes) be something like epiphany, or galeon.
Comment by Casper — October 28, 2007 @ 9:33 am