Re: GNOME vs KDE

[Damon Muller <damon@empire.net.au>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999 01:59:00 +0200
Daniel González Gasull <gasull@altavista.net> wrote:

> Yep, I know.  This is a old flame war.  But I don't
> want your personal opinions.  What I want is some
> links about comparisons between GNOME and KDE.

Hope I'm not just being trolled...

IMHO KDE is a little more stable at the moment, and all the parts seem
to work together better. It's not exactly speedy, but it's not too bad.
It has documentation for just about everything, and isn't too bad a way
of hiding all the cli stuff of linux. The themes are pretty easy to
install now too, and some of them are approaching the coolness of some e
themes.

GNOME, I think, looks much better, but it's still pretty slow and buggy.
You have a little more choice of which WM to use, but it seems to look
most impressive with e. You have lots of e and GTK themes, which can
make the whole system look really amazing. But I think the best
difference is that the GNOME panel is actually useful, whereas the KDE
panel is pretty much just an app launcher. Many more GNOME apps will
embed themselves in the panel and live there, providing useful (and
useless) information. Few KDE apps seem to use the panel for anything
more than a button to launch them.

Debian GNOME (in slink at least) is prolly stable enuf for day-to-day
use, but despite the versioning, GNOME really doesn't deserve to be
1.0x, more like 0.5, I would think (it's political, so I'm told). It's a
lot more useable on debian than it was a few weeks ago tho.

With a decent DM, there is no reason you can't have both on your system
and change between them (WDM does this really well). Provided you have
the disk space, i guess (yes, disk space is cheep, but some of us are
still poor students.

KDE 2.0 may change things a little - i don't really know how much. QT
2.0 looks like it will be as configurable as GTK, and they claim it wont
be as slow (GTK with a pixmap theme is *very* slow!)

Don't know how much more I can say. I started with KDE, then installed
GNOME, and tend to swap between them. GNOME is more fun if you are a
compulsive tweaker - but expect to break things. Both of them are much
more bloated than a standalone WM like Afterstep. Neither of them look
great at 800x600 (something about linux hackers is they always seem to
have much bigger monitors (or better eyesight) than us mere mortals with
15in screens!).

HTH,

damon

--
Damon Muller              | Did a large procession wave their torches
(damon@empire.net.au)     | As my head fell in the basket,
Network Administrator     | And was everyone dancing on the casket...
EmpireNET                 |                      - TBMG, "Dead"