QOTD

[unixronin]

"Gnome is an engineering teaser.  It looks fairly good and almost works, but is otherwise a continuous BETA project."

-- Charles Shannon Hendrix

Comments

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I found just the opposite, that GNOME is much less obtrusive to my work. The number of buttons on KDE applications blows my mind and is visually incongruous. GNOME is well-integrated enough to do what I expect it to do.

Mostly, I got started on GNOME because I use the mega-apps (Evolution, Gnumeric) to full capacity, and I want the desktop to work with that.

Oh, GNUStep ...

[tww1fa]

Different tastes, I suppose. I don't like the fact that Gnome tries to force me into one way of doing things. KDE seems (to me) to have a "there's more than one way to do it" feel that I never got from Gnome. I don't have to break the train of what I'm doing to try to remember the one way to, let's say, change a configuration option. Instead the option is probably under the Settings menu for the app. Also, KDE is much more configurable than current versions of Gnome.

Also, KDE just seems to have been designed with firm principles from the start (some of which have changed), while Gnome is trying to pull a whole bunch of disparate stuff into a straightjacket. KDE's kioslaves are nothing less than genius, as is DCOP.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I don't care much for configurability -- a nice theme and sensible defaults are easier for me. If something really bothers me I can flip a switch in gconf. I also far prefer Python to Perl :D

I do appreciate the architectural cohesiveness of KDE, but I'm just a user. :P Occasionally, when I've tried my hand and debugging or tweaking some code, I've found the GNOME stack (C/glib/GTK/GNOME) to be easier to comprehend and less annoying to manage than C++/Qt/KDE (PyQt is quite nice, but so is gnome-python).

[tww1fa]

Ah... the question then becomes "defaults which are sensible for whom?" Personally, some of the Gnome decisions make me want to pull my hair out... and in current Gnome, I can't change them. Like middle mouse button on the maximize icon to maximize vertically. Gnome used to have it, I liked it and used it constantly - and then they took it away with no way to get it back. A little thing, but very useful for terminal windows.

And don't get me started on gconf. If I wanted a registry, I'd run Windows.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Oh, heh heh -- I'm a very basic GUI user. Just give me a space of panels and application windows; Mac screws it up with the modal task bar and no default virtual dekstop support.

A registry's not a bad idea; in my novice application development, I was happy there was a facility to manage the prefs I set but don't want to write dialogs for. It's just that Windows' implementation and policy are horribly broken.

[tww1fa]

Hehehehe - personally I think Gnome's implementation is just as broken. Give me plain text configuration files read by a library any day :) No need for daemons for something as simple as reading preferences.

Anyway, different strokes for different folks. If you're happy with Gnome, you're happy with Gnome. It's just not my cup of tea. I like my environment heavily customizable (perhaps not as much as unixronin does, however.) I just find it ironic that the desktop that started as a response to KDE's "corporate" image is now the more restrictive of the two :)

I do think that KDE should probably change their configuration dialogs to have "simple" and "advanced" settings, though. Apparently that's coming in KDE 4. I still don't think that configuration options for a GUI should ever need to be set at the command line though. If it's settable, add it to the GUI somewhere.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

See, this is another of the reasons I don't like ANY suite ... I like to be able to define behaviors myself. FVWM lets me do this, in exacting detail.

My windows have six titlebar buttons, three each side:



The first is the standard window-menu button. The second moves a window to a different page of my current desktop (my desktop is a grid of 4x4 pages). The third moves it to a different virtual desktop (I have four virtual desktops). The fourth is a windowshade button, fifth is minimize, sixth is maximize. If I click the maximize button, it does a vertical maximize. If I click it and drag a few pixels sideways, it does a full-screen maximize.

Try setting up either KDE or Gnome to work that way. You can't.

Frankly, another reason why I don't like either Gnome OR KDE is that both of them try too hard to look like Windows. If I wanted to be running Windows, I'd, well .... run Windows.