My story [LWN.net]

My story

Posted Dec 13, 2005 19:47 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

I used KDE with SUSE for about 6 years, and liked it a lot. Then I switched to Ubuntu, and noticed that, after about 3-6 months (or even larger time frame, gradually), I actually don't give a damn about all the configuration options that eg. KDE is offering. Especially Ubuntu's GNOME desktop is much, cleaner than any KDE desktop I've seen (or been able to even configure easily, actually), and cleaner than eg. Debian's or Fedora Core's default GNOME desktops / menus.

I _was_ the kind of user that wants to fiddle with all the settings to the max. Nowadays I do all my daily tasks with the nice & clean GNOME programs, and have realized that, as a power-user as I am, I prefer doing the more complicated stuff on the command line or with nice little scripts than having Konqueror-like amount of GUI settings / menus to configure. And that "more complicated stuff" isn't a lot, since nowadays GNOME programs have actually quite a lot of features already. There could be more, that's true, but that's also why waiting for a new GNOME&Ubuntu is also so anticipated by me :)

But definitely when I was a SUSE & KDE user, I'd have first thought that I wouldn't switch to GNOME... but now I'm happy, and still also think that KDE is nice. With the cleanup operation for KDE 4, it might again offer so much more, too - KDE has a lot of nice applications, and I use some of them even despite the UI clutter which depends a bit on the application. And yes, some Gnome applications (Rhythmbox comes to my mind) are currently even a bit too "empty".

Adding features in a reasonable way is easier than cleaning up already-added features - that's one of the main points that I've noticed, even though the clean-up process was long in GNOME. I happily missed most of it, because I started with GNOME 2.8. I'd probably be pissed off with Gnome if I had tried to endure Gnome from 1.4 through 2.4 or so :) It just took so long to realize the benefits, and the process is of course still on-going. But I don't know if it could have been done in any other way.

And all in all, the Gnome & KDE & others co-operation (fd.o etc.) is a benefit for all - even for the more Gnome-oriented distros, with the nicer and nicer KDE/Qt integration we're seeing (and vice versa), KDE/Gnome can offer nice applications to complement each other. I hope that the interoperability will continue to increase, even though currently it seems I'm going to stay with Gnome (and some others are seemingly going to stay with KDE).

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