GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:05 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Well, my apologies for stepping over the line a bit with that last post.
The airport kiosk remark is just the best describing remark I've come up
with after tinkering with GNOME a few times in between spans on KDE over
the years. (IIRC, my earliest time spent running around on an actual
Linux *desktop* was Red Hat 5 or 6).

My biggest criticism (is this constructive?) of GNOME is that every app
and dialog feels like it was deliberately reduced from what it could have
been. In some cases, this is genius and the dialog is simple / elegant /
pretty. But way too often does it simply get in the way (Your file picker
is a *big* example - why won't it let me sort by file type and why isn't
it immediately evident that I can type a location?)

If GNOME stood alone on the desktop market, I think it would be a great
desktop. The fact is that it stands next to KDE, and even though I admire
your looks and in *some* places the simplicity, any time I spend any
length of time at all in GNOME I come away frustrated after X number of
important things appear to have been intentionally excluded. (X is
porportional to the amount of time I spend on GNOME)

Posted Dec 13, 2005 23:16 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

One of the big things I have to do for customers is to turn off the spatial perspective in nautilus. People hate having to close 15 windows as they went searching for something in their directory tree structure.. but every time I and others mention it.. its that we arent understanding what we should do.. Here is a sample of what multiple customers have complained about:

Well I am just wanting to open up a document that I filed away in the way that I wanted, but I when I have finished opening up
Desktop
Work Documents
Project XYZ
2005
Work Orders

I now have 4 windows I dont want to stay open and 2 that I do.. so I end up spending a lot of time closing stuff.

[And switching to 'classic' mode makes everything look like it is GNOME-0.8 and not as featured as the KDE desktop.]

I currently use GNOME, but I am coming this close to switching over to KDE even if it means being a third class citizen on Fedora.

Posted Dec 14, 2005 8:25 UTC (Wed) by heini (subscriber, #33614) [Link]

One simple thing: You mentioned this doctor w/o computer knowledge.
Imagine it was a german doctor, who simply would like to see his desktop
in german language. I am a KDE user and when I start KDE the first time, a
configuration wizard pops up where the very first thing I can choose is
the language.

Now on to Gnome (or XFCE). Whenever a new version is released, I try it
out. I am not asked to choose my language. I spend 15 to 30 minutes to
find out how to change it to german (other than setting some ENV vars, I
know how to do that). I finally give up and stay with KDE, and so will the
german doctor, he doesn't know how to set ENV vars.