Attempting To Reframe "KDE Vs. GNOME" 455
jammag writes "Setting aside the now tired debate about whether KDE or GNOME is the 'better' Linux desktop, Bruce Byfield compares their disparate development approaches and asks, not which desktop is subjectively better, but which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years. 'In the short term, GNOME's gradualism seems sensible. But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems. It means being reduced to an imitator rather than innovator.' In contrast, 'you could say that KDE has done what's necessary and ripped the bandage off the scab. In the short term, the result has been a lot of screaming, but, in the long term, it has done what was necessary to thrive.'"
Re:Both will stay relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
From my personal experience I have always preferred KDE over Gnome but with my own laptop I have always allowed a choice for my wife and kids. For many years KDE was preferred although my youngest son liked Gnome.
When I installed Fedora 10 it came with KDE 4.0 and that was a shock. For my wife the change was too radical and I quickly switched her to Gnome. I knew KDE would improve over time however what forced me to change to Gnome was the fact that switching users was impossible at the time. For a while Gnome worked quite well but I wasn't that happy with it since it always felt "old school" but usuable, however KDE at the time was painful to use.
When KDE 4.2 came out to it was much more stable and had the features I was happy with so I quickly switched back and have been happy with it since. To me the new KDE 4,2 while different to KDE 3.5 is IMHO much more interesting and fun to work with than Gnome, however my wife is yet to make the switch back since she is much more conservative. My youngest son is still quite happy with Gnome.
From the article the following quote is very relevent.
You can see the differences in the current states of the two desktops from the reviews. Reviews about KDE are not always positive, but they are about large issues and shifts in the desktop paradigm. Reading them, you cannot help but come away with the impression that KDE developers are headed in a definite direction, even if you disagree with some or all of the details.
At least we have the choice.
Re:Both will stay relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
both projects feed off each other
Care to elaborate?
More likely they bounce off each other. A gnome developer who wants animated icons everywhere and per-component customisation of transparency can be told to piss off to KDE. Likewise a KDE developer who wants to enforce on one good way to do everything can be sent packing to gnome.
Re:being reduced to an imitator rather than innova (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, because we all know you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater every 5 years to "innovate". Uh huh.
Say what you want, but five years ago it wasn't reasonable to design the modern composite desktop. Five years is still a long time in computing and it shows. Think of it a little bit like construction work - you can remodel an existing building but if you really have to change the fundamentals you build new. That means you get all the fun of working out the kinks in the plumbing and wiring and whatnot all over again, and for a while that sucks. Then you realize it's actually quite great to live in a modern building.
Kinda seems like KDE is the imitator.. kinda seems like KDE has always been the imitator.
KDE is by default imitating a lot more, then has the configurability to decide where you want to be innovative. Desktops are very much "works for me" kind of stuff, when you like the "new way" that's great but Gnome has pulled a few on me where I just go "why couldn't you just leave this the #""#& alone and don't mess with it?!" and the way to revert it is usually in some obscure gconf option or no longer available because it's not "supposed to" function like that.
I've worked with Qt4 quite a bit and it's become a very complete and consistant toolkit. The changes were large, painful and it took quite a while to get everything working as well as in Qt3. I think the same will be true of KDE 4, once the dust settles it'll have the potential to rise much higher than KDE 3.5.10 and Gnome. As well it should, it's OS X setting the standard these days...
Losing interest (Score:5, Interesting)
I just tried out the Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 betas earlier today, and I think my interest in both GNOME and KDE is just about worn out.
Both are really quite bloated. I've been on Debian and KDE 3 for years, but I think I'll be switching to a stand-alone window manager like fluxbox, or maybe Xfce, the next time I have to upgrade.
GNOME on Ubuntu felt as sluggish and amateurish as ever. No amount of new themes and rehashed icons can improve GNOME. As a KDE user I was looking forward to KDE 4.2 but christ, it's so damn cluttered. I think they've actually added more clutter since 3.5, not taken it away. Every damn UI element flickers and flashes with a mouseover effect as you move around; some kind of indexing service is hitting the disk in the background; there's a plethora of desktop views or applets or whatever they're called, none of which I'm interested in; there's a new K menu that looks like it was a reject from Windows XP, and which takes several clicks to hunt around for what you're looking for; the default widget theme has super thick borders, even the pull down menus have thick borders around the menu items. The whole thing is just over-cooked. I couldn't make sense of it, frankly.
Sure, I could turn off or tweak most of that junk. But I think what I saw today is what happens when you try to copy Windows and Mac too closely. You end up copying the bad as well as the good. You inherit the same limitations and the same performance standards. It's a poor form of competition, and I despair at how much programmer effort must have gone into creating all this bloated mimicry.
Having said that, I only just scratched the surface. I know how good Qt 4 is, and I'm sure developing apps with the KDE4 framework is much nicer than KDE3. It's just that the result on the desktop (both of them) is a bit of a let down.
Unmentioned benefit of KDE 4 - Xorg+drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the major effects KDE 4 has had on the free desktop has been to light a fire under the metaphorical asses of Xorg and driver development. There has been tons of work going on in Xorg since the split, but until KDE 4 came along and proved that stuff like Composite could have a real effect on user experience (Compiz came first, yes, but that was more or less just bling until apps started using composite), there was not as much pressure and expectation from free desktop users.
Turn on desktop effects on any system using KDE 4 and if you have Xorg with good drivers, the difference in experience is startling.
The rate at which Xorg and some of the drivers are getting better is exciting, as is Qt and KDE itself, and this is in part due to the expectations that KDE 4 has set in the minds of free desktop users. Kudos to the Xorg and FOSS driver devs for stepping up. The next couple of years are going to be fun.
Re:KDE 4.2 (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to say, 4.1 wasn't -that- bad. 4.0 was horrid, though.
4.2 is indeed more stable and prettier, though. And finally firefox looks right again... A lot of the radio buttons and checkboxes wouldn't show up right on 4.1.
At 4.0, I seriously considered a switch to Gnome. I even installed it to try it for a while. But 4.2 has totally relieved that feeling.
Re:XFCE 4 and GNUStep (Score:5, Interesting)
We must have been using a different GNUStep.
Warning - Honest opinion below (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who has been using KDE 2001 (around KDE 2), I have to say that I think the latest version of KDE is fucking shit. It's a MAJOR step backward from KDE 3. I feel like the developers have taken everything that was good about KDE, thrown it in the bin, and made every effort to drive me to another DE altogether.
Things that have so far fucked me off:
I upgraded to KDE 4.2 a while back after everyone raved about it, but ended up reverting back down to KDE 3.5. I'm still not sure what the KDE team are attempting to achieve, but I would rather have seen a KDE 3.6 with all the fancy effects than what we have now.
I'm going to look very carefully at KDE 4.3 when that comes out, but I have little hope that it will reach the 3.5 standard, if I'm totally honest. Rant over. Sorry, had to get this off my chest. Am I the only one that feels this way? I'm sure when 4.2 came out Slashdot commentators were proclaiming it to be THE KDE 4 we'd been waiting for. Not me.
Decent defaults are the key (Score:3, Interesting)
That is not the point. Read his post - he said "I could turn off or tweak most of that junk".
If the OSS GUI people keep picking crappy defaults and require 90% of the people to customize/tweak stuff to achieve "decent usability", then that means their desktops are unsuitable for public use - it means they FAIL! Sure one may feel Windows requires lots of tweaking etc to be decent, but it has the market advantage of being "defacto/preinstalled".
A good GUI designer picks good defaults, so that 90% of the people will find it tolerable or even usable and won't need to customize it.
Think of GUI design as "user choice + huffman coding". The most popular options should be only one or two clicks/choices away, the advanced options should still be possible, just more steps.
GNOME fails the latter - they seem to have the development philosophy of totally removing/hiding features just because they might confuse the user.
KDE fails for having poor defaults. Look at their latest default menu, how many people want to keep clicking backwards and forwards to navigate their stupid new menu to look for the application to launch? BTW I tried Kubuntu recently and KDE was crashing way too often - so that's another fail.
1) The typical desktop user would not know how to customize his/her desktops OR want to know, so the desktop environment FAILS if it requires customization to achieve a good level of usability.
2) Even if there are "resident geeks" around to customize stuff for the desktop users, this results in zillions of different customizations because every geek will have their own favourite customization. This creates a big problem when users try to call 3rd party "Customer Support/Helpdesk" - the helpdesk agents and people writing the helpdesk scripts won't even know where the caller's taskbar will be.
At least with windows, the typical user's "start button" will be in the lower left hand (windows users who have moved it elsewhere don't normally call support to look for basic help- they call support to try to get to some higher level tech
How would the designer pick the defaults? They could test various designs with a large sample of users.
Just asking people what they want doesn't work that well, because often the users themselves don't know what they want or don't say it. After all, millions of people wanted chunky spaghetti sauce, but never said it in surveys till Howard Moscovitz did some taste tests with dozens (100?) variations of spaghetti sauce and found that a lot of people liked chunky sauces (at that time there were ZERO chunky sauces on the supermarket shelves!).
So a good designer will narrow down the variations (getting rid of the totally crappy ones - you don't bother testing varieties of spaghetti sauce that are totally awful) to a manageable number of varieties for testing.
Re:gnome better than kde (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you considered that it could be a conscious decision, because MDIs and dockable toolbars are ugly and annoying? OSX doesn't use either of those UI paradigms, and developers don't cry out for them. As a user, I find OSX's floating, contextual inspector palettes to be much nicer than the mess of toolbars and dockable crap in visual studio. I'm getting a Linux box this week, and if Gnome doesn't have MDIs, I think that's one more thing to push me in that direction. (I think I'm going to choose Fedora as my distro.)
Re:gnome better than kde (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, indeed I have considered that it is that decision. That is exactly the philosophy I don't like that I mentioned. That is the problem: the lacking features of GTK aren't due to lack of developers and time, but due to these decisions.
I'm not convinced of the advantage of these decisions. Also you say OSX doesn't use it, but OSX is conceptually a totally different type of dektop. In Linux, how something like Gimp looks, sucks.
Also, whether or not MDI is useful might differ from person to person, but I'm sure a lot of people, including me, like it, and there's no reason to leave it out from a proper GUI and desktop.
ripped the apps too (Score:3, Interesting)
Slackware moved KDE4 from testing into -current only a few weeks ago. So I was expecting that it is considered ready for general use. I was disappointed to find out, that the major applications such as KDevelop, Quanta and K3B are missing. And they will not come out soon either. KDE 4.2.2 will be released in a few days and still it will not contain KDevelop/Quanta/K3B. There are no dates given beyond KDE 4.2.2. KDE 4.0 was released in January 2008 (with alfa and beta releases published months before that). A year later the major apps are not ported. The change is too drastic if the major applications can't catch up in reasonable timeframe.
Re:Both will stay relevant (Score:2, Interesting)
The choice of Gnome vs KDE for our house is more about support from the distro than differences in the desktops. Kbuntu is simply less stable and polished than Ubuntu.
I think the article should have talked about the recent open-sourcing of QT, which I think is critical in the KDE vs Gnome debate. Last time around, I steered application development towards GTK, rather than QT, and I had all the developers work in Gnome. This time around, because of the decision to LGPL QT, I'm steering the app to QT 4, and developers will be encouraged to use KDE.
I believe the debate about desktops comes down to which apps win: Gnome or QT? Now that licensing issues for QT are fixed, and with QT's clear advantage in porting, I'd say QT apps will gain back lost ground.
Re:gnome better than kde (Score:3, Interesting)
The floating toolbars in osx have a load of problems, including constantly being hidden in the background somewhere when you need them because they do not stay on top. The reason osx never has used mdi simply was it is not really possible in osx in its metaphor of having the toolbar on top, every osx application sort of is mdi but the mdi is the desktop. I am not sure if this is the correct approach, my guess is either approach has its fair share of problems!
Re:Gnome alienating users (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, in my case, the reverse is true. I started as a KDE fan (back in 1997 or 8), and the more and more I have seen and --- later -- experienced with GNOME, the more I liked GNOME. Every GNOME release seems -- for me -- to bring me closer to my personal optimum. As it is now, it is for me already fantastically simple and friendly, and the moments when I need to focus at all on the Desktop environment are really rare.
Instead of annyoing me with whatever they change from release to release, the GNOME developers actually succeed to make my user experience better. So then again: the way the desktop system evolves (revolution vs evolution) is also a matter of taste.
Moreover -- since this opinion seems to be missing from the debate -- I want to stress that I actually prefer someone else doing usability decisions. Beyond a few very basic things, I have little or no interest in configuring the desktop look and behaviour. And default GNOME settings seem to be more and more suited to my taste (in contrast to KDE and Windows, and similar to MacOS).
All that I'm saying is: hello, I belong to the target group of GNOME developers, and I kinda like the way it evolves.
j.
Re:2nd Paragraph. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's too bad you had OS troubles on your T61. Maybe now you understand a little how some people felt when they upgraded to Vista and hardware support wasn't exactly 100%.
Crunch Bang (a Ubuntu derivative) was a lot easier to install on my Lenovo W500 than Vista, that's for sure.
Re:gnome better than kde (Score:3, Interesting)
x.org comes to mind, do away with the client/server paradigm,among many other things...
Because taking away one of X's greatest features is going to make it better how?
This misconception comes up all the time. Applications need to communicate somehow, you might as well use Unix Domain Sockets. Once you have a protocol that runs over unix sockets, you can just as easily send it over TCP sockets. Network transparency comes essentially for free as a side effect of designing the local IPC efficiently.
Do you have a situation where you can demonstrate that the network transparency of X is a bottleneck? People have been harping on this issue for years, and no one has ever demonstrated such a bottleneck. There's no reason to believe it is a bottleneck at all.
Re:gnome better than kde (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you have a situation where you can demonstrate that the network transparency of X is a bottleneck?
I'm trying to dig up a PDF I read on the subject a while back. Part of the problem is that since it was meant to run over a network the protocol is asynchronous by nature. This introduces all sorts of possible weirdness that is completely unnecessary. There are clearly issues with the driver model since Nvidia is the only vendor that managed to release a driver with full acceleration by bypassing x.org's own facilities.
If Linux is not Unix, why does it still carry around all this cruft? Desktop Linux starts with a new display manager.