[Gllug] KDE or Gnome

[home at alexhudson.com]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 10:50:49AM +0100, Nathan Matthews wrote:
> I've been looking with interest at the recent KDE developments.  Javascript
> with konqueror, CSS, kparts etc, but I haven't been keeping up to date with
> the gnome developments.  Whats new in gnome and whats peoples personal
> experience with the two desktops?  I dont want to start a religous flame war
> but am genuinely interested to know if its worth going to the trouble of
> switching to gnome.

I have to say, I like GNOME a lot. I'm currently running latest Ximian on
Debian r3 (from Linux Expo - btw; has anyone else had problems with these
CDs? There were a couple of small dpkgisms which needed fixing on this 'ere
computer..), with Evolution, Gnumeric, Moz, et al. Nautilus rocks (although
many don't like it - personally, I like my desktop simple like a Mac, so I
love it), and the performance isn't as terrible as people make out (it's not
nippy, but certainly not slow). 

I don't like KDE for a number of reasons. Firstly, Freeness. KDE has always
had problems with Freeness and continues to have problems - and personally,
I don't use non-Free software whereever possible. I don't agree with the
plans of the Kompany, I don't like the way Aethera/Magellan was handled, I
don't like the planned integrations with KSG/Kapital/ReKall etc., and I
don't like what appears to be going on the future. What's worse is the KDE
group appear to accept this all, so it's definitely not for me.

GNOME, in it's Ximian incarnation, is pretty good. Evolution is very good
(pretty stable, but not feature complete..), Gnumeric is good, the Ximian
packaging is okay (using RedCarpet and it all seems to work - doesn't get on
great with apt though, for some reason), although it doesn't fit with 'pure'
Debian especially well. The integration is excellent, and the user interface
is pretty good. It's not finished by any means, in that many Gnome-specific
apps aren't quite there, but I can say this about it: I find it easier to
use than Windows. And there's very few Linux apps I can say that about. 

Cheers,

Alex.

-- 

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug