Why is gnome better? RE: [Sussex] Promoting SLUG

[Geoff Teale]

OK,

I'll take this one up.  

First up - please everybody - this is not a flame fest, just my opinion 
on the matter - everyone should use what they like and enjoy it for what 
it is.

John - The reason you've probably had a more positive experience with 
KDE is because your favoured distro also favours KDE (this was also true 
of SuSE until recently, now they're part of the same company as Ximian 
that seems to be changing).  Red Hat / Fedora also give preference to 
GNOME.  Desktop Linux chose GNOME over KDE for their standard desktop, 
so did Sun Micrososystems for both Solaris 9 (and 10) and their linux 
based Sun Java Desktop.

Here are my reasons for prefering GNOME to KDE:

1. GNOME is IMHO generally prettier and more professional looking than 
KDE out of the box (both can be changed significantly with themes and 
layout work, but nothig will stop the KDE panel looking like it was 
built out of Duplo).  Generally speaking the default look of GNOME is 
much more business like and uncluttered than KDE.

2. More main stream application respect GNOME's look and feel than 
KDE's.   For example:
   - Evolution
   - Mozilla
   - Mozilla Firefox
   - Mozilla Thunderbird
   - Mozilla Sunbird
   - Gimp
   - Sodipodi / Inkscape
   - OpenOffice.org / Sun StarOffice
   - Eclipse
   - Emacs
   - Java Native GUI
   - mplayer
   - GNUCash
   - Mono / C# and MonoDevelop
... all of which will adopt your gtk theme (many of them are native gtk 
apps).  People like Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE  have been getting around 
this by defining themes that are common to both desktops (i.e. 
Bluecurve) which is nice, but breaks the moment the user changes 
themes.  In most cases there are equivalent KDE apps, but they are 
generally less well known.  See below for more on this point.

3. Over the last 18 months Sun, Red Hat and Ximian have been putting a 
massive amount of effort into usability testing for GNOME and making 
serious efforts to improve and innovate based on _real_ user experience.

4. Because the major apps (Mozilla, Evolution, OpenOffice.org) come from 
the GNOME side of things they play well with GNOME's inter-application 
communication mechanisms and GConf - they do less well with KDE.  KDE 
users generally fair better using KDE specific apps (KMail, Konqueror, 
KOffice) which use KDE's DCOP system.  IMHO the KDE native apps are good 
but generally inferior to the more mainstream apps.

5. KDE is more resource intensive than GNOME. 

6. DCOP is frankly flakey and KDE specific.   GNOME routes RPC through a 
nice, sensible CORBA ORB.

7. Qt is a great toolkit, very useful and professional.  However it's 
routed in C++ and doesn't play well with non-OO languages ( most 
importantly C ) .  Gtk is specifically designed to play equally well 
with OO and non OO languages and so can attract a wider range of 
developers - which means more applications.

8. Emacs is a native Gtk2 app and the world is so much better when your 
editor and desktop environment respect each others key bindings.

9. GNOME is more flexible than KDE - you can plug in any one of a numebr 
of different Window Managers in the GNOME environment.   The default is 
Metacity (it used to be Sawfish) but yo can use Enlightenment, Blackbox, 
OpenBox, Fluxbox, XFCE, FVWM, PekWM, TWM, WM2, WindowMaker, Afterstep, 
Oroborus, FLWM, and just about anything else you can think of, and still 
get all the benefits of GNOME.

... I'm sure I'll think of more..

-- 
Geoff ;-)
Please visit:   http://www.tellanamericantovote.com