[Scottish] Which distro

[Keith Sharp]

On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 19:13 +0000, Alistair J. Ross wrote:
> To answer all queries in one rather long rant-ish email:
> 
> * ion is indeed a fantastic wm. I prefer it's predecessor, pwm however, and 
> when I need a very fast lightweight desktop, that's what I still use. I have 
> a website-shrine dedicated to pwm: http://pwm.aliross.co.uk
> 
> * Enough of that twaddle - what you wanted to know was why do I think KDE is 
> better than Gnome?
> 
> I've used both Gnome and KDE since their very early incarnations (KDE 1, first 
> version of Gnome etc). I used KDE first of all, because that came first (if 
> memory serves). I thought it was pretty slow and it wasn't too usable in some 
> areas. I felt that things got worse in KDE2 on the slowness factor as well 
> (however I was using a PII or the likes at the time). I used multiple 
> desktops (including ion!) inbetween for a while, and then plonked for Gnome. 
> 
> Whilst on the whole, I have no severe disaffection for Gnome, and for the 
> people that use it, however, I find that I often end up asking myself two 
> questions when I use it:
> 
> 	1) That makes NO sense! Why the hell did the developers do that? It's not 
> logical to do this? (eg: WTF is Behavioural browsing? Why do I want it?)

I think you mean spatial vs browser.  Now that I am used to spatial I
don't think I could give it up.  Browser mode is still supported, you
can enable it in the preferences.

> 	2) Why is everything not integrated into easy to find/use menus, why is it 
> strewn between programs that have weird names. 

Not sure what you mean here, my Fedora Core 6 system has very nice
integrated menus.

> Oh - and why is it so ugly, despite all the things that Red Hat / Ubuntu etc 
> have tried to do to make it look nicer. GTK2 *is* nasty-looking.

I would say the same thing about KDE and QT :-)

> Let's take CD burning as example 1 of how KDE is better:
> 
> If I use KDE, and I want to burn a CD, I pop a blank in, it pops up with a cd 
> burner. Good. Last time I did that with Gnome, it had no bloody idea what to 
> do with it. I spent hours tweaking the program 'Graveman???' to get the cd 
> burning working. 

GNOME does the right thing for burning CDs, pop in a blank CD and it
asks if you want to burn files to it.  From Nautilus (the file manager)
I can right click on files or directories and burn them to CD, this also
works for ISO images.

> And for example 2, My Ipod:
> 
> plugging in the ipod in KDE remarks, "Open up ipod, or do nothing", click on 
> Open up Ipod and then you can see all your tunes in Amarok. simply drag the 
> music you want to the ipod from your collection and then click transfer.
> 
> In gnome - you use a selection of tools, gtkpod being the best I believe. The 
> last time I used that fugly piece of turdware I ended up installing kubuntu 
> in frustration, just to see what KDE was like in 3.5. Gtkpod never mounted my 
> ipod properly once and when i mounted via command line, it would unmount it 
> corrupt via the interface after transferring the tunes. Bad, broken software 
> that works on some pcs, but not others, is not welcome on my pc. KDE stuff 
> generally has more options, is more mature than Gnome apps, and works faster.

GNOME isn't perfect with iPods.  When I plug in my iPod it automatically
appears on my desktop as a USB storage device, and I can browse and
create files on it.  If I launch Rhythmbox (music library application
like iTunes) my iPod appears and I can browse and play all of the music.
Where I am let down, with Rhythmbox 0.9.5, is that I cannot drag and
drop music from my computer to my iPod.  I believe this is supported in
more recent versions.

> Don't take my word for it, listen to the words of Linus Torvalds himself, or 
> the recent critique on KDE vs Gnome in Linux Format.

I am not sure that being a low-level kernel hacker gives someones views
of desktop usability any more credibility :-)  I don't read Linux Format
so I cannot comment on their review.

> Gnome sucks. Plain and simple. It's ugly and its never worked quite right. KDE 
> is almost there, although I don't understand why they use such stupid names 
> for all their software!

It sounds like you haven't used a recent GNOME desktop, perhaps you
should give a recent Ubuntu or Fedora Core a try.

In fact if you take the above sentence and swap GNOME and KDE about and
you would have a reasonable statement of my opinion :-)

> The end :)

Never, from debating the merits of GNOME and KDE we can move onto Emacs
vs VI, Bourne Shell vs C Shell, C vs C++, Mono/C# vs Java. etc etc :-)

Keith.