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

[John D.]

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 16:44, Geoff Teale wrote:
<snip>
> 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.

In truth, when I first started playing with linux, I didn't have a choice.
I had so much IT knowledge, I had to make to with the default's :P
Which of course, was kde (but in any case, I prefered Lego - the duplo
brick's always seemed too large and clumsy).

> 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.

Ah, "professional looking". Now that's one thing I don't alway's follow,
because obviously "professional looking" is relative (also I'd say very
hard to quantify - a bit like the way that Robert Prisig tries to define
"quality" in Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance). As for
uncluttered, well in the past it's often amazed me how some professional
people seem to be able to work amongst great mountain's of paperwork and
other office debris.                                              

> 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.

A sort of visual interoperability perhap's, as opposed to "branding"?
Not sure, but if it's about how the app's work together, then that's
something that definitely makes sense (even to a nugget like me) :)

> 5. KDE is more resource intensive than GNOME. 

Hum! I suppose that would have previously been a quite important factor,
though given that people's system resources (these day's) are often more
than adequate I'd presume that unless someone run's mission critical
app's/system hog app's (big graphic's stuff et al), then it's something
that has reduced as a possible problem (in general of course).

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

Don't know. That's something, of which I have little or no
understanding.

> 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.

OO = object oriented, presumably. Heard of it, but don't have the
knowledge to appreciate the pro's and con's - but I understand that this
is a good thing.

> 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.

Perhap's it's time I learned something about Emacs then. I can bearly
manage vi (my huge depth of knowledge about vi extend's all the way to
:q and :wq - impressive huh! :P ). Thus far, I've tended to use either
kwrite or nano which mean's I'll have to do more bloody reading :(

> 9. GNOME is more flexible than KDE - you can plug in any one of a number 
> of different Window Managers in the GNOME environment.   The default is 
> Metacity (it used to be Sawfish) but you 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.

Now this highlight's (well for me anyway) that linux lack's a nice,
easily understandable glossary type app (unless someone know's
differently).

The description of KDE or Gnome as "environment's" and the rest as
window manager's is something that I find confusing. Is there a
difference? I don't know. I've seen various "pretty" examples of stuff
at kde-look that seem to be using Fluxbox (apparently). But the
differences, like most "thing's linux" is over my head.

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 17:55, Steve Dobson wrote: 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 04:44:36PM +0100, Geoff Teale wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I don't agree that KDE is "less business like" than Gnome - it is different.
> 
> I don't like the Window's GUI because it is based on a different set of 
> assumptions that X (so is the MAC).  There is always a resistance to change.
>  
> > 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.
> 
> This is the biggy.  Key bindings are so important to someone who would rather
> not take his hand off the keyboard and move it to the mouse.
> 
> A few years back I was developing device drivers for Solaris -- this required
> that I spend a lot of time in the Open Boot Prompt (OBP - Sun's version of the
> BIOS).  Surprise, surprise it had a command line interface.  [You can get CLI
> interfaces for BIOSs too - the Serial BIOS on the SOEKRIS boards work this
> way.] Sun had encoded some of the emacs commands into the OBP to allow editing
> of the commands in the history buffer.
> 
> I learnt the OBP edit commands - it made sense.  Because I had learnt the
> OBP commands learning Emacs made sense too, so I did.  As a result I am now
> happy using both [X]Emacs & vi.  (I still prefer vi to vim; it's that change
> thing again.)
> 
> This is my long winded way of making my point.  You probably prefer KDE
> because you are more use to it.  And that's the only reason.  I prefer 
> Gnome, as Geoff says, because it is closer to the other tools I use on a 
> daily basis.

Some of the point's that Steve mentioned made sense as well. The
re-affirmation of the pro's of Emacs for example, and the familiarity
with KDE definitely "rings true". But that was part of the reason for
asking the question in the first place. Obviously, it's pretty unlikely
that I'll ever have the knowledge (or the courage) to have a go at
anything like playing with solaris/BSD etc etc - but taking the "I'll be
the first truck driver to walk on the moon" approach, you never know
(now where's that bloody lottery win got to?).

Taking the view that if it's Ok for "you lot" (you know what I mean, IT
professional's - 3 head's, green skin and TV antennae protruding from
the top's of you're head's :)) then it's good enough for me :D 

More to the point, it'll give me more reason to post innane and
pointless questions - Yippee (not that I need much of an excuse).

Thanks for the replies though, they make the differences considerably
clearer.

regards

John D.

p.s. Bugger. that mean's that I'll have to think about re-installing
gentoo (again) - I'm too impatient to wait for Mandrake to "mandrakise"
the latest versions!