Fwd: [SC.LUG] GUIs

[Russ Phillips]

On 11/09/2007, Matthew Tolley <matthew at matthewtolley.com> wrote:

> 1)      Are all these GUIs equally 'open'? I read once that some people
> consider KDE to be less 'open'. How accurate is that?

Gnome is LGPL, KDE is GPL, XFCE uses BSD, LGPL and GPL [1], so they're
all open. KDE uses the QT widget set from Trolltech, which is where
the "less open" accusation comes from. As I understand it, QT was
originally licensed under a non-free licence, but is now available
under either the GPL (although you can also get it under a non-free
licence if you want to use it to create proprietary applications)

> 2)      Are they all equally stable?

Gnome & XFCE are both very stable in my experience. I haven't used KDE
for a long time.

> 3)      Is XFCE really the fastest of the three?

My laptop (400MHz CPU, 192MB RAM) has Gnome & XFCE installed. XFCE is
*much* faster on that machine - Gnome is only just usable, but XFCE is
fine.

> 4)      If I move to XFCE, does it restrict my software options in any way?
> Or can I still use Gnome- and K- based applications?

I have used Gnome-based applications on XFCE, and KDE-based
applications on Gnome, so I think you'll be OK.

> 5)      Can I move between GUIs without doing an OS reinstall?

In Ubuntu, yes, easily. To get XFCE, install the xubuntu-desktop
package. To get KDE, install the kubuntu-desktop package. Each will
have many dependencies ;-) Once they're installed, you can select
which desktop you want to use when you log on.

And to answer a question on another thread, upgrading to version 7.10
should be drop-dead simple. When 7.04 came out, I got a message box
asking me if I wanted to upgrade. Clicked yes, waited for all the
packages to download & install. That was it (I can't remember if I had
to reboot or not)

Russ

[1] http://www.xfce.org/documentation/4.2/userguide/xfce4-copyright