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GNOME GUI

CDE vs Gnome 137

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-quite-the-same dept.
EmilEifrem wrote in to tell us that 32BitsOnline review where CDE vs Gnome duke it out. Not sure why exactly KDE isn't in the shuffle, but I'll spoil it for you: GNOME wins.
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CDE vs Gnome More

CDE vs Gnome

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  • Re:Let's spare the GNOME vs. KDE flames (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ease of setup - KDE, hands down. The Gnome guys could take a cue from KDE's install process. A very large cue.

    This is more a RPM problem and not a Gnome problem. With Debian, I just point apt to the gnome-staging-area and select panel and co. Et voila. Btw, I don't use enlightment, I hate it I use icewm-gnome.

    In the end, I'd call it a draw. Use whichever you like, but keep the libs from the other one on your hard drive also. Until we have a clear winner you're going to want both.

    Agree

  • 32 Bits (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Very few comments on the article itself - about CDE and Gnome. Lots of comments about Kde and Gnome.

    32 Bits is a commercial site, and many commercial unixes use CDE and are reluctant to use either Gnome or Kde because they are non-commercial. But Gnome is more commercial so it was reviewed.

    It was a terrible review. The author kept finding problems with Gnome and saying "of course, these things will be fixed" too many times. How biased can you get? Why should one assume that these things will be fixed - Gnome releases seem to have gotten progressively more unstable and buggy since version 0.30.

    CDE, using motif, is plain ugly. But, it's stable. A fair comparison would be with KDE which also is stable and has more mature apps than Gnome.

    32 Bits is proof positive of how ezines are influenced by advertisers. Yes, Gnome is GNU, bult it is heavily associated with RedHat which is a big advertiser at 32 Bits. Kde, which has falsely been identified as "commercial" because of its Qt connection, is actually not commerical at all. Kde doesn't have paid ads like Gnome/RedHat, so, it is reviewd less. Even a review comparing WindowMaker (without Gnome support) would have been more honest becasue WindowMaker can be a desktop system that goes beyond what a window manager normally does. So much for the truth.

    Money talks, Truth Walks



  • Who cares? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IMO there is no point to using desktop environments yet since not many applications exist that actually make use of a "desktop's" features (drag and drop, object sharing, etc.).

    I believe all current (with exception of GNUstep.. I don't know much about it currently.. and its based completely on an existing and functional desktop) desktop environments are doomed. GNOME is doomed because, IMHO, there was no design plan going on. It was just random hacking (take a look at the window manager compliance and other things). KDE is doomed because of political issues (how many more could they get? first it was C++ issue, and Qt, then the Win95 looks). They aren't doomed because their code won't be stable/fast/etc., but because they will not be integrated and have a common GUI (the whole purpose of creating a desktop). Desktop users currently are, and will be, divided into KDE users, GNOME users, and those who plain 'ol don't give a damn. Development is being reinvented, duplicated, etc. for both environments. Every Kprogram has an equivilent Gprogram.

    One final ramble..
    GNOME (KDE too?) is trying to be a portable desktop environment. This is good, but to an extent. If developers make it to where it doesn't use Unix features (after all, it IS being created for Linux, I assume) I believe it will be limiting it greatly. If you want to completely wrap every C function and every possible feature to make sure you guarantee a portable program, why not just make a whole new OS? It would be much faster and less bloated than abstracting an entire OS. If you live in a Unix, you should do things the Unix way. Most of the Unix design is very good. It just needs an updated way of doing things.

  • Let's spare the GNOME vs. KDE flames (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, people, let's spare the usual GNOME vs. KDE flame wars. Now KDE is more usable and functional. GNOME has some catch up to do. GNOME is in active development and will be a good desktop as well.

    So that sums everything up.
  • On some systems, the thing seems armor plated, working like a top and nothing seems to crash it. So far, this is with three of the machines I've been working with. Today, however, I installed it on another machine up at my work and the fscking thing's unstable as all get-out. It hangs. Apps die for no good reason, etc. It's not memory- the machines it's running reliably on size in at 32, 40 (Notebook- go figure), and 64Mb. The machine that it's unstable on has 64Mb... It's not X (at least I don't see how...) as the same X server is in use (S3) on the working 32Mb machine and the unstable one.

  • Biases (Score:1)

    by Pug ( 21 )
    I think this was just another example of someone trying to make GNOME look like this big great thing by making something else look bad.

    When I read it, I got the distinct impression that the man really liked CDE, and accepted GNOME a bit grudingly, so I don't think that this is the case.
  • Speaking as a member of 32BO, you'd be surprised how un-commercial it really is. Although I didn't write that particular article, I know that Red Hat does not have any association with 32 Bits Online at the moment. Red Hat doesn't advertise on our site, and our efforts to become a content provider for redhat.com have not been conclusive.

    Another fact, by the way--I use Window Maker. By itself.

  • CDE (Score:1)

    by John Kozan ( 157 )
    I actually like CDE. Not that I would pay for it, but I do use it at home on my Solaris machine... GNOME on my linux boxes. Both are good.. but CDE truly is the "standard" unix desktop, at least on commercial unix. GNOME has a very strong base with alot of potential, and is already has some very good showings. Now please dont flame me on how KDE is better, I dont care
  • I think you need to start kpanel with a special option, something like
    kpanel --no-kde-compliant-window-manager
    -----------
  • Slashdotted already? Ugh... Any mirrors?

    Alex Bischoff

    ---

  • I use the Blackdown jvm daily. It's not as fast as c code, but it's not bad at all. I use a java text editor quite a bit, performance is fine.

    The requirements for text editor performance are very low, and you probably have something very fast, however my main gripe is about reliability. It's not normal when programs crash because of buggy language implementation.

  • The problem is, there is no usable Java VM, and no one seems to be capable of producing one. Quality of Sun's own implementation is low, and others don't seem to have anything much better.
  • Run it in xterm with larger font and enabled mouse for "graphical capabilities".
  • Okay, lemme preface by saying I'm not seeking to start any kind of flame war here...

    Can anyone give me info on how well Gnome is running now? Last time I looked was Gnome 1.0, and it still seemed really beta to me. I'm not a developer, so I'm not interested in using anything that won't just plain work; if I wanted to fight with my OS, I'd use Windows.

    ----

  • Well, as someone who is using GNOME right now, I'd have to say it's more stable than you think.

    Something is funky about those RH 5.9 packages. All in all, Starbuck is unreliable, and the GNOME portions of it just plain suck. (Whaddya expect, it's a pre-release...) I think the most annoying thing was the fact that the default E theme for Starbuck had tiny unusuable menus... And GNOME was REALLY glitchy.

    I'm now using the latest GNOME RPMs and I'm back to RH 5.2. Much, much better. I'm VERY impressed.

    Now I would LOVE to make the GNOME launcher applet lirc (remote-control) aware... :)
  • I disagree about the OOP/language part.

    First, OOP can be done in most languages, although it is more convenient in languages that support it directly. Gtk is a good OO toolkit.

    Secondly, it seems to me that Gtk-- 1.0 actually offers _better_ C++ support than Qt 1.x, probably because it was designed later than Qt, and thus could assume more C++ support in the compilers.

    Really, neither an OO C binding to a C++ toolkit, nor a C++ binding to OO C toolkit, are particularily difficult. |You lose convenience when going from C++ to C, and gains it when going from C to C++, if done right.
  • 1) I didn't wrote that Gtk 1.0 had better support for C++ than Qt 1.x. I wrote that Gtk-- 1.0 (which is build on top of Gtk 1.2) had better support for C++ than Qt 1.x. Gtk-- is actually better viewed as a separate toolkit that just happens to be implemented on top og Gtk, rather than as a "wrapper" for Gtk.

    Also, I didn't write Gtk-- 1.0 was better than Qt 1.x. The other sider of being older, is that Qt 1.x is a lot more mature and stable than Gtk--.

    2) OO is much more about design than about programming, and implementing an OO design in C is not tricky. Certainly, I would not advice against using a OO design, just because the implementation language was C. I would prefer using C++, but access to STL (and templates in general) is a more signaficant factor for that, than any of the OO features.

  • You don't need big macro collections for doing OOP in C, and C is not an inappropiate language for implementing an OO design. The essential features that allows clean implementation of OO designs in C are pointers to incomplete structs (for data hiding) and function pointers (for virtual member functions).

    The big advantage of C++ over C is tempaltes, which has nothing to do with OOP.

    The "wrapper" business is a red herring, Qt is just a much a C++ wrapper for a C library at Gtk-- is. The library Qt wraps just happens at a lower level, namely to Xlib rather than Gtk.
  • This is something that has been bugging me for a long time. It's this:
    If the Gnome RedHat packages are screwed up and hard to install, that's not Gnome's fault. It's RedHat's.
    The *only* installation system that most software packages need (or should) provide is "make install". Anything else results in a huge mess of bloated distribution files, incompatible installations, and broken installers. See The Other OS.
    This is not to say that 'make install' should be the only way to install software. We need higher-level approaches too such as package management and integration into existing systems, but this is not something that the Gnome people should worry about, other than making sure the software is flexible enough to be installed in a variety of situations, and it's not something that the mob should be coming to their gate with torches and pitchforks over. This is an issue of distribution. Distributors should be compiling the programs, tweaking them to suit local policy, integrating the documentation with the local help system, and so on.
    The "Gnome menu" already bothers me, but I don't mind too much because it's possible to override it with your own local menu generator (and in fact the Debian packages do just that). Even an installer wouldn't be too much of a problem--it might be a pain to use, but you'd probably only need to use it once or bypass it by compiling from source. *BUT* no-one should *demand* that Gnome have its own private install system. (and before I get leapt on by people saying I'm restricting their right to speak: I said 'should'. Not 'must'. It's an expression of the way the world ought to be rather than of how I'm going to force the world to be.)

    Now, a program that was run the first time Gnome started for a user and did a little 'hand-holding', let them set up some defaults: that would be excellent.

    Daniel
  • Oops. I missed the 'graphical interface' bit. I can tell you *not* to use any of the ones I mentioned earlier. :-)

    (what do you have against text? :-) )

    Daniel
  • What's fake about fetchmail's POP? It's the Right Way[tm]. IMO, all mail clients should drop POP support right now and use the time they save writing a decent configuration tool for fetchmail that doesn't use Tk. ;-)

    Daniel
  • I have procmail set up to drop mail into several files and Mutt checks all of them when it starts up for new mail. If I want I can get a list of the mailboxes that have new mail, and it has a few other nice features (eg, when you change mailboxes, the default one is the next one with new mail). There's an Emacs-based email reader that might be good too; I haven't used it but I've used the news interface and it's quite impressive (always IMO of course :-) )

    Daniel
  • I wish I could easily install the latest Gnumeric
    (a Gnome application) with a click or two; but, hey, it's Unix.

    Uh, ... no. That's not a given. If you have a spare partition sitting around, try out Debian--they've got proper Gnome packages, too. :-)

    ("apt-get install gnumeric" or "apt-get upgrade" aren't exactly mouse-clicks but they're close!)

    Daniel
  • Uh? What's weird about that? It's what it is, assuming he's running a RedHat system.

    Now, if he's actually running BSD or Debian or Suse or something then I agree, that would be weird. :-)

    Daniel
  • mutt. Do you want a long list of all the ways in which this program is wonderful or is that enough? :-) [ I started using it because it's the only mailer I could find that handled attachments sanely..I tried tkrat, positilion, tkmail, and a couple other X ones beforehand.. ]

    Daniel
  • Are you talking about windows here or X11?

    "In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
  • Having used all three, I'd have to say the optimum location for these three DE's are

    KDE - At the Office, on the desktop.
    GNOME - At home so you can play with themes.
    CDE - in the bin.

    Remember, it's "KDE at the office & Gnome at home"

    Regards
  • What I need from a mail client:

    Graphical interface. (No Pine!)

    whoa there! what have you got against pine?

    I used netscape for email ever since it started shipping with an email client. (ns3 i think), so for about 3 years. Then last year i got sick of NS4's bloatedness and switched to pine.#

    pine is really cool. even better, it's very easy and intuitive to use. there's context help on available commands for every different screen, with extended online. and it's powerful so managing mail is dead easy.

    configuration is done via a menu (again with context and online help), no messing with rc files if you don't want it.

    if you run in it in an xterm it's graphical - you can click on commands, no typing!

    and you can telnet into your machine and run the same email programme as in your Xsessions!

    and it's a hell of a lot faster than any X programme ever could be!! and it doesn't crash!!

    so what's wrong with pine???
  • Althought its not included in the base distribution, the author seemed to overlook Balsa as Gnome's mailer (which I belive is its official mailer)
  • How about if the reviewer just didn't have the time or the will to try it? In fact, he gives his personal reasons for not using KDE himself. But from the depth of his analysis into the two desktops he did research it would have been alot more work to also review KDE. And then, of course, people would be shouting "where's GNUStep?"

    In other words, you can't win.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • I downloaded Gnome 1.0.3 and I think it sucks. Shows alot of promise but still seems unstable and reeeeeeal slow.
  • I think CDE looks pretty cool myself. I suppose that it is based on motif which is a shame, because gtk is easier to code/understand. Although motif does Xresources and gtk does not so motif is better in that respect. Why do they have to make all the GUI stuff (motif, CDE) non-free, don't they know that is what is going to kill Unix?
    I wonder if we could convice them to relicence CDE under the GPL or a BSD style licence. Or maybe we ought to go the lesstif route.
    Gnome is slow, it uses to much memory, and it does nothing. X was not designed to have stuff stuck to the edges like the KDE and Gnome panels, thinks were meant to float like the CDE dasboard thing. It is the right way.
    A GUI could have been designed to be so much more not just a copy of windows. It needed to be more like Emacs.
    Maybe I will write my own Graphical Enviroment how I think it should be down.

  • CDE (Score:1)

    by enterix ( 5252 )

    Yes, CDE is nice if you know how to customize it. I went really deep into TriTeal version and made CDE very, very useable.
    Right now, people are coming to me and couldn t believe that's 'ol good CDE... Just put some actions, nice backgrounds (via wmsetbg - Window Maker feature!), put some icons on desktop,
    customize front panel... boy!

    GNOME is my second favorite, I will wait for Red Hat 6.0...

    BTW: yes, CDE is standard. I work with several Unix system, and if you move display form one Unix to another, CDE is useful... especially, when you have a Motif application...

  • 100% agree with above statement by N3MCB

  • Before you say something bad about CDE, just look at my CDE screenshot. I m running Red Hat 5.2 + TriTeal TED 4.2+ + personal enhancements...

    CDE Screenshot [outlook.net]

  • what's immoral about CDE? Do they support the killing of children in Rwanda or something?
  • I am continously getting:
    error: cannot select database 'adminex_32bits': Unknown database 'adminex_32bits'
    at 32bitsonline... Any clues?
  • You're right. That is odd. I always thought the people who insist on calling the OS "GNU/Linux" all run Debian, save for the ten or so still running Slackware.

    And while we're on that, why is KDE with its problematic (free beer) community licensing morally worse than the Motif-based and commercial-only CDE (free nuthin')?

    Don't answer that. Please. Just noticing.
  • I've been playing with Gnome 1.0 and KDE 1.1, as packaged in Red Hat Starbuck (v5.9, aka beta-6.0). Gnome is sexier but parts of it crash. It really feels like a development release--I'm not even sure I'd call it a respectable beta. KDE is solid and stable, but still has major missing features and "things that make you go hmmm." Neither is remotely close to the usability of Windows, let alone MacOS.

    The Halloween document was correct on at least one point: Usability isn't something that can be easily 'grafted on' to an otherwise finished system, any more than security or stability. It's one of those things that requires fundamental support from the whole package.

    To co-opt an old saying: Security, stability, usability; pick any two.

    -Graham
  • KDE is free (as in no cost) for commercial use.

    The applications are GPL'd. The libs are LGPL'd with the exception of QT which is QPL'd.

    You could even distribute proprietary apps for KDE (though you would have to pay Troll Tech a grand).

    I wouldn't say the KDE is free (as in freedom), but that isn't saying much as I wouldn't say that the GPL gives you freedom either. (As it attempts to restrict proprietary derivative distributions, privacy loophole excepted)

    BTW QT 2.0 (which KDE 2.0 is based on) is fully themeable. KDE 1.1 can be made to look pretty as the kde easter egg [kde.org]
    shows.
  • You can use procmail if you are getting the mail over a dialup line. This way, it works in much the same manner that filtering on your other clients works , ie the messages are dropped into folders on your linux machine and not the server. If you have a shell account, sometimes it's nice to use procmail on that because that way, you don't have to download mail you kill, and you can choose to keep certain email on the server, but download other messages.

    cheers,

  • A fellow was kind enough to follow up with a pertinent, helpful and correct answer to my question. Thanks ! Unfortunately, the moderators killed ( "score -1'd" ) his reply, which was certainly no more off topic than the rest of this little thread.

    Moderators reading this ? Poor form, guys ...

  • I have a linux box hooked to the campus network and don't want to run sendmail services on it. Can mutt use an external SMTP server ? it doesn't seem to be the case, and this has prevented me from using it.
  • The best mail clients I've seen are TkRat and XFmail. Tkrat doesn't do filtering. The best way to do filtering is to use procmail ( a seperate filtering program ) then you can use any reader to read your mail and its filtered. You might want to check out the mailers that come with KDE and GNOME ( balsa and kmail )
  • I know OOP is a matter of philosophy, if not ideology, and not only among UNIX developers.

    Sure you can use OO concepts in all languages. I had an Amiga Macro Assembler that supported it.
    But basically it is about using the right tools for the right job, and therefore a language should support OO concepts if you want to use them seriously.
    It's like opening an beer bottle with a chainsaw: It'possible, it may be even cool, but it is not particularly practical.

    We can argue whether or not C++ has very useful OO features, but we should agree that C is entirely inappropriate for OO programming. Sure, you can simulate it with nonstandard means like big macro collections and such, like the Netscape guys did it, but the code becomes extremely messy and the compiler has no possibility to optimize well.

    But that's what a language should offer for OOD:
    compiler optimization of OO features, inheritance mechanisms, polymorphism and the like.

    It is very hard (if not impossible) to achieve this with bindings like gtk--, which are based on code written in a procedural language like C.

    Anyway, I don't think this is so important in the KDE-GNOME comparison. If you don't agree with these philosophical issues, just forget about it, and read just the rest.
    My intention was to make clear that there are still important differences between a native toolkit and a wrapper. A point that hasn't been mentioned yet is the difficulty of keeping a wrapper up to date. While this has more or less worked in the case of gtk, the GNOME wrappers are AFAIK pretty outdated in most cases. The same will be true for QT bindings when Qt 2.0 comes out.
  • As Millenium is obviously a GNOME user who has used KDE only occasionally, I will try to reply to his points.
    For some more comprehensive - and maybe objective - comparisons, you mau consider looking at Ars Technica about KDE [ars-technica.com], Mininco about GNOME [slashdot.org] (sorry, has vanished), and Predawnia for a comparison [predawnia.org].
    Another GNOME article is on Linuxworld [linuxworld.com].
    Interestingly, only the entirely positive articles about GNOME are posted on Slashdot.

    Now for the points mentioned above:
    Stability
    I've never had either Gnome or KDE crash my machine.
    So So you're either very lucky or very lazy. Look at the newsgroups, mailing lists and reviews and you'll see people are *very* annoyed about GNOME's instability. Look at the Predawnia article for more.

    functionality
    In terms of functionality KDE excels in areas Gnome does not, but Gnome too is way ahead of KDE in some areas. I'd call it a flat-out draw in that area.
    Sorry, but that's an illusion. KDE offers undoubtedly more functionality, if you look at productivity features.
    You may argue that for technology (CORBA) and eyecandy (widget themes), but there you should compare GNOME -at least until it is really stable- to the most recent KDE, and KOffice technology, which is far ahead of GNOME (CORBA object model technology working for many months, while Baboon isn't even finished).

    Looks
    In terms of looks I doubt anyone can argue against the assertion that Gnome wins, so I won't go into that one here.
    You are using geeks' standards here: GNOME looks screamingly flashy (what I'd call kitsch; maybe cool for you). KDE looks cleaner and more elegant. All that is a matter of taste. Look at kde.t.o [themes.org] for WM themes or these brand new icons! [kde.org]

    Speed and Resources
    Now, we come to speed. [...] KWM is a BIG problem for KDE; it makes E look stunningly fast and stable.[...]
    Now there's the matter of resources. I'm afraid Gnome wins it here. It appears to use far less in the way of resources than KDE does.
    This was probably true for KDE 1.0, it's certainly wrong for KDE 1.1. This is *much* faster and leaner than KDE 1.0.
    As for resources: Surely you're joking Mr Mil! GNOME needs 3 times as much diskspace than KDE (for about the same functionality), and GNOME panel applets eat memory like crazy! (But that's partly a general problem of CORBA, not so much GNOME's fault)
    Besides that, many WM are already KDE aware, so you can use Window Maker, Afterstep, or the lean blackbox or flwm if you find KWM too bulky.
    As much as I love the eyecandy of Enlightenment, saying that E is faster/more stable than KWM is IMHO fiction instead of fact...

    Toolkits
    Raw toolkits: Strip out the desktop environments, and GTK wins out over Qt. This is simply a matter of functionality: GTK offers more than a few things which you can't get with Qt alone.
    I don't know where you get this information from. Even gtk advocate concede that QT is way ahead in terms of productive features, simply because they started earlier. Take e.g. printing, a pretty basic thing: gtk doesn't offer the respective widgets yet, while it is very easy to implement with QT. (And with all due respect, having pinnable or themable toolbar is not such a top priority).
    More importantly, we're talking about QT 1.4x here. QT 2 is currently in late beta, and it offers many major improvements.
    Don't get me wrong, gtk is a nice toolkit, and I'd love to see KDE support for it (like for fltk and tcl/tk), but we should stay realistic.

    Programming Language
    The language issue is irrelevant; several C++ bindings exist for GTK and a set of C bindings is being worked on for Qt
    You are not an OO programmer, I presume. There is a big difference whether you have OO bindings or a entirely OO structure. Many Object Oriented features (overloading, inheritance etc.) are restricted if you have just bindings.
    Making a OO lib like QT "flat" by offering a procedural interface (like C) is easier, but many C advocates will still say it's not the ideal solution (less efficient that plain C etc.)
    Thus, Gtk is still the best choice for C, and QT for OOP and C++ programming. As OOP is more appropriate for GUIs, things look maybe a bit better for QT, but with the large C coder base on Linux, this may still be a draw.

    Conclusion: Due to the longer development period, KDE is undoubtedly ahead of GNOME in terms of stability, maturity and productivity. It's much better than its reputation among geeks.
    GNOME does a good job in offering a more individual and artistic look, so it is well suited for experiments at home.
  • Procmail... there's that word again. :) I'm on a dial-up account getting mail with POP3, sending with SMTP... can procmail help me?
  • This is hopelessly OT but here goes.

    Are there any decent non-beta e-mail clients for Linux? The only reason I still run Windows NT is because Eudora is my best friend. I spend about 60% of my computer-time writing mails and I need a quality e-mail client to be able to cope with the amount of mails I get.

    What I need from a mail client:

    • Graphical interface. (No Pine!)
    • Powerful filtering capabilities
    • Stability
    • (Optional)Capability of importing Eudora mailbox-setup and filters
    I'm currently reviewing xfmail. It's good, but not quite up to Eudora's standards -- and, doh, it just locked up on me. :(

    What's everyone using?

  • Checking out the TkRat homepage right now... As for XFmail, it was kinda neat and seemed to have a lot of nice features. But it locked up on me thrice (during roughly an hours worth of testing) and I had some problems with the overall L&F. As for kmail, I read in a review somewhere (think it was Ars Technica's review of KDE) that it had some problems with leaving/deleting mails on the server and that is the one issue that it *can't* have a problem with -- I need to be able to read my mail from home/linux, home/windows, from work and from school.

    Procmail... if I've understood it correctly, it's running on the server that receives the mail? I'm using a dial-up connection, getting mail via POP3 and sending with SMTP... can procmail help me here?
  • > (what do you have against text? :-) )

    Overview. I may be scared by Pine, but I just can't see a console mail reader where I can get as good an overview of my mailboxes and incoming mail as I can in Eudora. Or am I wrong here?
  • Lots of seg-faults on my system occur (or used to occur) because applications were still linked to old libraries that weren't compatible with new libraries.

    So, yes, wiping clean all the old libraries and recompiling everything against new libraries could dramatically increase stability.

    So have both posts suggesting this been moderated down to -1?
  • Nope..he meant DELETE the OLD libraries before
    you compile the NEW libraries.

    Note that he said that we should delete the libraries BEFORE we install. Installing usually consists of putting the new libraries in their places.
  • It's OK for POP, though it's a bit cumbersome. For IMAP though, it just sucks. The whole point of IMAP is that you keep your mail stays on the servers, accessible from everywhere. Fetchmail can't support that kind of environment.
  • try using lynx. The thing isn't slashdotted so much as the pictures take a lot of bandwith. Lynx got through like the pages were on my local web server.
  • What is the full menu path to that tool? I can't find it off of the footprint menu for some reason. Thanks.
  • The first few problems are with E. Try using e-conf to change it around, which I ran to change it to include the features you talk about. I run with icewm, and I can move windows to other desktops, see whats happening in other desktops with the gnome-pager, yada yada.

    Make links by dragging files or directories with the middle mouse button (or use the left+right button which I have to do). Ohh yea, the balsa on the balsa web site is old, get the version from the gnome sources directory on the gnome ftp mirrors.
  • What does it matter what slashdot puts on. Even the gnome sight linked to that mingco article, the most scaving of the ones you pointed out (the predawnia says its biased, so forget that).

    GNOME really can be stable, and I would bet it is stable on most peoples machines. I have heard just as many stories about KDE being worse that windows 95 as far as crashing. Try it out, it must have worked well on some peoples machines (like mine).

    The only reall thing you gave said gave KDE an edge in functionality was KOffice and the object model that KDE plans to use in it. KOffice is probably not usable (or it would be released, right?). Some would think the actuall desktop envirement of gnome is more functional (minus the web browser featured in KFM). Becuase of the multiple panels for example.

    Please don't laugh, but I think that GNOME apps look more elegent and clean looking that KDE apps. Really, they don't have a lot of clutter, and the icons a very consistent (reused, whatever). GTK and E have some nice looking (though many times very ugly) themes, but they aren't gnome.

    On the speed issue, you might be right, just maybe as I don't use KDE 1.1 alot. Though as for memory, typing free in gnome, and then in kde reveals the truth. I leave it up to you to test yourself.

    Toolkit features, most apps that I use have printing support, so it doesn't matter to me as a user. I guess you mean that any QT window can be made into postscript, without having to use something like the gnome canvas. And I haven't tried programming in QT or KDE, so wouldn't know. (useless paragraph, just so I hit every point). Ask again for what gnome apps I use if you care.
  • I rather run kde until gnome gets more stable...but I do think gnome looks way cooler. As to CDE...never really tried it.
    NaTaS
  • It's not as if he was out to evaluate all the options and found out "Heh, wow! GNOME is the best." It's really a promotion piece for GNOME. It's a "free software is petter than propriatary" article. KDE dosn't fit into the author's idea of free.
  • A:Politics. The first clue was on the first page where the author talks about his Red Hat 5.2 GNU/Linux system. He actually does mention KDE on the next to last page and says he avoided it because of the original licensing scheme.
  • The author kept finding problems with Gnome and saying "of course, these things will be fixed" too many times. How biased can you get? Why should one assume that these things will be fixed - Gnome releases seem to have gotten progressively more unstable and buggy since version 0.30.

    Everyone knows that the GNOME team rushed the 1.0 release because they wanted to have it ready for the big expo. If Miguel would issue some sort of public apology admitting that they made a mistake and saying that they've learned their lesson, perhaps it would go some way towards clearing the air. The guys working on GNOME are good coders. They are very capable of working out the problems. They just need to spend more time testing and debugging. There have been times, for example, when the Linux development kernel or an important part of the Debian distribution have been just as ugly - but their development model and shipping policy, along with the GNOME 1.0 fiasco, ought to serve as examples the GNOME team will never forget.
    (like that old ad, something like "Serve no wine before its time," ship no dot-o till it's ready to go.)

  • A few ideas that are missing in this article are 'component framework', 'Java', and their corollary, interoperability.

    Java has the coolest architecture and programming interface by far, IMHO. For example, it allows you to change the look-and-feel of your widgets on the fly among the JLAF (Java Look and Feel), Motif, and, on Windows machines, that crappy one too. What's more, you can customize your own! Yes, if you want to, you can make a GNOME and/or KDE look-and feel. They call this feature PLAF: Pluggable Look and Feel.

    Another bonus is that it's extremely easy to use threads in Java. Also, its component framework, JavaBeans, and the JNI (Java Native Interface) play extremely well together with other frameworks and with legacy code. There is no good reason whatsoever why people can't write Java apps to be integrated into GNOME and KDE.

    There is also no good reason why someone couldn't or shouldn't start yet another open source desktop project based on Java. When the KDE folks said they picked the best available toolkit, well, maybe they did, but IMO that's no longer true. Java is comprehensive and cutting-edge (and it's still growing). Sun has poured a lot of money into it, using extremely talented programmers who have had the luxury of synthesizing the best ideas in software engineering that have come along in the last decade or so.

    A final benefit of Java is that you can actually get a job programming in it; how many ads in the paper have you seen for companies looking for Qt or GTK skills? I saw one in my local paper that was looking for Motif last Sunday. Aside from that, everyone wants you to use Microsoft Visual C++, with the wonderful Microsoft Foundation Classes, for the wonderful world of Windows. If you're lucky, they'll let you do some cross-platform stuff between NT and AIX, HPUX, etc.

    People can brag about the apps they have with GTK, Qt, and even Motif. Furthermore, both the KOM/OpenParts framework, as well as GNOME's architecture are quite impressive, but under the hood and in the job market, they fall a bit short of Java IMO.

    Ok, I've got my flame-retardant jacket on now.
  • yea.. in theory you can
  • I meant as in visual layout. WAY too many panels.
    Once you switch into x-server mode, you don't see the debuggging messages :-)
  • Gnome -- 100% free.
    KDE -- kinda sorta free (not available for commercial use)
    CDE -- NOT FREE AT ALL

    Ah well, Even though I like CDE best, I have to disqualify it for moral reasons.

    I don't care for KDE's window styles and the fact that portions resemble Windows too much. Plus it just seems too noisy in general.

    Gnome -- ARGH! You have to install 60 million other packages first, and even then the big foot wouldn't show up on the panel for me!

    What's left? GNUSTEP? Two words -- NO APPLICATIONS! Plus it's not really a Desktop Environment yet...
  • The thing took several minutes (ie: about 5 to 10) per page on my system here at work -- with bandwidth coming out the ying-yang.

    Go figure...
    --
    - Sean
  • Thanks for the tip. If I get time I'll try it this weekend. Otherwise, I'll just wait and zap / to do a clean install next time my distro comes out with a new release.
  • I tried the latest GNOME last week, but ended up dropping it due to instability. Sometimes it outright crashes. Sometimes I would log in and half the panel applets would be gone, with only a tiny white dot to show where they should be. Sometimes I would log on and it would ask me if I really wanted to start a second panel (no, of course not -- I never asked for such a thing).

    Also, some of the apps either don't start or else don't function reliably when they do. There's a really nice CD player that automatically downloads the CDDB entry for whatever you're playing, but it wouldn't even start for me unless I started the panel CD applet first. (And even then, I had to kill it again to get the drawer to open and shut.)

    The linuxconf that came with it temporarily grabs 40Mb of memory every time I simply click to bring up the control to activate/deactivate ppp. Something in GNOME intermittently reduces my mouse to an unacceptibly low level of acceleration, even though I have the controls set to the maximum (but I could still fix it, temporarily, by using xset m).

    The list goes on and on, so I'd have to agree with those that say it's still in beta or even alpha.

    All that said, I was really sorry to have to remove it, and I'm looking forward to a more robust release.
  • I haven't tried it myself, (I use a PPC) but a friend of mine with a P-166 running RH5.2 with a 2.2.5 kernel runs Eudora Lite via Wine with no real problems. Drag and drop doesn't quite work but hey. Might be worth a try.

  • I recently switched to gnome. I like the looks a lot, especially the metal java look and feel, very slick. But it's missing some core functionality. Like the article said, the desktops don't work very well. Namely, you can't do like in kde and send a window to another desktop. And, you can't see what apps are running on other desktops. Plus, and maybe I just haven't figured it out yet, but I have been unable to get a window to gain focus unless I click on the title bar of frame. Sometimes all that is visible is a piece of the inside, and I can't click to get focus. While I'm at it, the only way to make shortcut desktops appears to be making a symbolic link and dragging it onto the desktop. Also no trash can like KDE has, it's delete or nothing. And balsa looks great, but I don't really believe anyone has got it to compile yet.

    Don't get me wrong, I like gnome, but I have to agree that this should not have been the 1.0 release. I think they felt a bit of pressure by the kde folks and pushed it a bit before it's time.
  • That may be tought though. Doing a window manager in java would be insane, if it's even possible. You might be able to do it with swing, hell it even has desktop classes built in. But with AWT you need native window managers to draw gui's. I think swing has some reliance on native components as well, with top level containers (frames, panels, etc). Plus I think a Java WM would be a bit slow at the present time.

    But it is an awesome graphical development platform. The OO setup of swing is great, makes it easy to simply extend the classes to create your own look, or even functionality. It's almost fun! Definately up there with NeXTStep for a development environment:) Now if they could just get the performance up there...
  • anyone else notice that in one of the CDE screenshots,he is looking at slashdot!
  • Currently, I'm using TkRat v1.2. It's not as pretty as balsa or hte kde mail program, but it's been incredibly stable for me so far, and it's imap support is the best i've seen yet. I'd imagine that it supports pop3 equally well ubt I haven't tried that out.

    http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~maf/ratatosk/
    (TkRat stuff)
  • yep, I don't care how great the GTK is or anything. I kinda like the GIMP and read about GTK--, the language support is fine, etc. but the GNOME looks like windoze, and worse KDE does too... aren't these people creative at all?
  • I've been looking for this for a long time. I'd like to here more. Especially about Gnome 1.04. Is it significantly more stable? Which version does Red Hat 5.9 use? And any word from KDE user who has used Gnome? I like objective viewpoints.

    As for me, I'm gonna wait on Red Hat six and watch Windows get blown away.

    --

  • He detailed how to _remove_ all the libraries associated with gnome. r00t was being sarcastic. Obvious flame bait.

    I am not a moderator.

    --

  • r00t never said to reinstall anything. He simply said to remove.

    End result: yes, Gnome is stable

    OTOH: I just checked r00t's other comment in this article and it does agree with your statement. Maybe you're right.

    Is it just me, or was r00t's score -1 before. Someone must have agreed with you.


    --

  • The whole site is down now. 32BitsOnline.com Out Of Service

    We are experiencing a slight technical problem with our database system. The system administrator has already been notified and the system will be back to normal soon.

    Sorry for the inconvenience.

    webmaster@32bitsonline.com [mailto] hehehe

  • Its not irrelevant when you have a department with systems from DEC, HP, & Sun on all the user desktops. These users are comfortable with the CDE and it gives them a very similar interface between systems and allows me as an admin to support fewer configurations. We don't prevent anyone from running something else but only a select few who do and they are cabable of getting along without too much help from us. I try to make the network as invisible as possible so as our linux machines begin to roll out I don't want to force the users to relearn the window manager - that would make it all the harder to get linux on more desktops.

  • http://www.ishmail.com

    You might try this one. It's downloadable
    with a 30-day evaluation license.
  • I agree with many points. The thing that has always set apart Mac from Windows is it desktop-db and file meta data. (I've always thought windows was too keyboard oriented and the Mac was too mouse oriented or should I say doesn't have enough keyboard support)

    Gnome needs a lot of work. I'd like to see it suceed but it'll need much better
    keyboard support and a cleaner and more complete environment to ever have a chance of winning
    over the average desktop user.

    Standard and simple keyboard short-cuts need
    to be defined now if not built into the api. F3 to open a file? Huh?

    When a program opens a file dialog it should always remember where it last or at least default to a users 'home/desktop dir'.

    So... I'd like to sum up my suggestions about gnome.

    1. Better keyboard support.
    2. Better tracking of state.
    3. Cleaner / More Defined environment

    Either way both KDE and GNOME knock the socks off any other gui I've seen for unix.
    I can't believe how band Motif was/is, how clunky
    and difficult it is to use. It's a bad sign when MS can do better. I sure hope someone or group focuses on the environment and not just widgets or the themes or api. UI basics, eg style guide
    or some other document no one reads.

    Then again I'd wouldn't mind just being able to paste text from my gnome terminal into gedit.

  • Wow... I guess anything that's not in the
    windows mindset sucks for you. Well stick
    with windows then or maybe try KDE. KDE
    does a nice job of building on the Win95 UI.
  • I told the author about the misinformation about the printing tool, there is a printing tool under the administration submenu in gnome.
  • Gnome! Much cooler looking, easier to work with, and has Wanda.

    Both work just about equally well, but Gnome is just plain fun, and that's important to me.


    "Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
  • Check the gnome.org homepage and you should find a link to some precompiled .debs made by one of the Debian guys, they work, and are an admirable effort - but until Gnome really put their heads together with more of the distro's (not just RH!) we will have to wait for the official Debian Packages.

    P.S. (FYI) I have a friend who is a *dedicated* Gnome user - he saw kde 1.1 the other day and his words were, and I quote, "Sometimes I don't know what the F@#$ am I doing struggling with Gnome when I could be using kde without the hassles?"

  • Here's my opinion of the state of GNOME:

    The core of GNOME is three modules:
    gnome-libs - very stable, powerful, fast and good;
    gnome-core - pretty stable, powerful, fast and good, a few wrinkles to iron out;
    gmc - pretty stable, powerful, fast and good, a few wrinkles to iron out.

    The other modules are more or less ready, ranging from excellent and stable to barely functional; but the GNOME 1.0 release wasn't the release of these modules. These modules are in many respects independant but related development efforts with their own release cycles.

    If you want a high quality, functional GNOME system spoon fed to you, RedHat 5.9 Starbuck offers it, right now. Download it from RedHat or buy it from CheapBytes.
  • You should investigate the combination of fetchmail / procmail / Emacs / VM. It's what I use, and I especially recommend it for programmers and wannabe programmers.

    Fetchmail retrieves your mail as the name implies. It is very powerful. It can handle a wide variety of servers and multiple mail accounts with ease.

    Procmail processes your mail in virtually any way you can imagine. At the most simple level, this is sorting it into different folders. You can have it run scrips or play sounds or virtually anything else on specific conditions.

    Emacs / XEmacs is the programmer's editor. If you already know Emacs, you will find composing and editing mail with Emacs a godsend.

    VM is XEmacs' major mode for reading mail. It is quite powerful. I only use XEmacs so I don't even know if it is availible for regular Emacs, but that apparently doesn't matter to you. VM in Xemacs is fully graphical. You can even view image attachements inline. There is a toolbar and everything.

    Reviewing your requirments: Graphical interface. (No Pine!)

    Like I said, Xemacs is graphical and quite functional and reasonably attractive. VM is also fairly nice to look at. Everything can be keyboard driven if you like, but there are also menus and such.

    Powerful filtering capabilities

    Procmail is about as powerful as you can get. It uses regular expressions and can perform just about any action based on your regex's.

    Stability

    All of these programs are well-known for their stability. Certainly I've never had a problem with fetchmail or procmail. Xemacs has crashed on me once or twice, but never in VM, and it was always because I was messing around with stuff that I didn't know about. And obviously, if one component crashes, your Linux box will be quite unaffected!

    (Optional)Capability of importing Eudora mailbox-setup and filters

    Can't really help you here. VM uses the standard Unix mailbox format. If you can export your Eudora messages to this standard format, you're set.

    Don't get me wrong... there is a relatively steep learning curve with all of this. Fetchmail isn't hard to set up. Procmail isn't hard at all to do some very basic things if you follow the examples given. If you want to do more powerful things, you will have to learn about Procmail. Xemacs / VM is well, Emacs. If you don't know basic Emacs editing commands you will have some learning ahead of you. I think you will find that it was well worth it. I can't think of a more powerful mail agent than these programs. Emacs is the kitchen-sink editor. If you are going to do any programming on Unix, you really need to learn Emacs.

    It took me about a day of dedicated fiddling (and FAQ reading) to get fetchmail / procmail / VM configured just like I like, and I am a relatively experienced Unix user. Like I said, the learning curve is fairly steep compared to Eudora, but you are investing in learning a really first-class system.

    Good luck!

  • As if CDE has a much freer license than KDE

  • CDE is the standard desktop environment for commercial Unix workstations. It's based around Motif.

    You can find more information and screenshots at this page [plig.org].

    KDE has little to do with CDE.

  • The Halloween document was correct on at least one point: Usability isn't something that can be easily 'grafted on' to an otherwise finished system, any more than security or stability.

    This is a very valid point - unfortunately, the whole KDE vs Gnome thing often gets boiled down to a pretty widget issue (see any comments on themes or icon sizes.)

    For those of you who might not have touched a Macintosh in ten years, here are several technical features which are key to it's usablity. I'd like to see the KDE or Gnome projects rip some of these ideas off.

    * You can drag an application or alias anywhere and it will still work. This works because the Finder automatically updates a "desktop database", so the system can go back and find that app. This eliminates many common problems newbie Windows users have until they figure not to touch anything. (Obviously a Unix implementation will need to accomote security and path settings, but it could be done.)

    * Drivers load directly out of the "Extensions" and "Control Panels" directories, not some initilization file. If you are having problems with a driver, just drag it out of the folder, or drag an updated one in. (This is a "designed in" feature which is possibly impossible to do with unix. However, it would be nice to see a good virutalization.)

    * Every file stores a "Type" and "Creator" value, which means you can have some JPEGs which open in a viewer, and others which open in Photoshop. Makes a double-click interface much easier for the user, because the right application always opens. (There should be no reason one couldn't do this in Unix, if a standard could be developed.)

    * All applicaitions store their icons, windows, dialog boxes, text strings, etc. in a standard resource format. (Which is why Macs have the wierd two fork files that no other OS has.) Anyone can launch the ResEdit applicaiton and customize the GuI for their apps. I would assume that QT/Gnome has something similar, it's just not exposed to the user.

    * Drag-n-Drop just works. For example, decompressng a file involves just dragging it to the Stuffit Expander icon. Compare this to WinZip or the KDE equivalent.

    The MacOS is lacking in many places, but these little bits and pieces make it nicer to work with from a mouse-wielding user level. I haven't tried Gnome, but using KDE, CDE, LinuxConf, or even MS Windows, you always feel as if you are working with a similcrum of somehthing else which may or may not be decieving you, whereas the Mac is super predictiable enough from the mouse pointer level that you can actually feel comfortable there.




    --

  • While CDE is the old standby, I would guess that very soon now both the KDE and Gnome user base is going to be larger than CDE's. There just isn't that many Unix workstations out there relative to people playing with and using Linux. In fact, FWVM may already have a larger user base than CDE just to it being in RedHat.
    --

  • Being able to cut-n-paste is hardly a laughing matter (that's part of OLE). Obvously he was talking about X.

    And it's a good point. The unix community will never rally around any desktop enviornment, not while CDE costs money, that is. So they should focus on defining base-line standards, not all encompassing projects that are destined to be incompatible forever.
    --
  • I use the Blackdown jvm daily. It's not as fast as c code, but it's not bad at all. I use a java text editor quite a bit, performance is fine.

  • Applications with Java? Sure. A desktop environment with Java? No. Java could be
    used for commercial applications on Linux,
    but a desktop would be a bad idea. This would
    be controversial due to licensing like Qt is.
    We wouldn't want to be totally dependant on
    Sun for what could be eventually condsidered
    a core component for a Linux system to function.

  • Re:Let's spare the GNOME vs. KDE flames (Score:3)

    by KingBob ( 33381 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @04:10PM (#1948358)
    Spot on AC!

    Having recently installed and experimented with both Gnome and KDE, my honest and impartial assessment is pretty much summed up by you.

    I like Gnome, I think it is "tres cool", but at the moment it does not seem to be as functional as KDE, which conversely does not have the cool look of Gnome, but does have the edge in usability and ease of installation and configuration (just!).

    And as you so succinctly put it - the operative word is *NOW* - they are indeed both in development and destined to improve with time.

    P.S. I do love the little Gnome foot symbol - very chic!

  • Re:Let's spare the GNOME vs. KDE flames (Score:4)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @04:31PM (#1948359)
    I, too, have experimented with both...

    I like Gnome, I think it is "tres cool", but at the moment it does not seem to be as functional as KDE, which conversely does not have the cool look of Gnome, but does have the edge in usability and ease of installation and configuration (just!).

    On the area of functionality I'm afraid I must disagree. WindowMaker crashes far more than either; I've never had either Gnome or KDE crash my machine. In terms of functionality KDE excels in areas Gnome does not, but Gnome too is way ahead of KDE in some areas. I'd call it a flat-out draw in that area.

    In terms of looks I doubt anyone can argue against the assertion that Gnome wins, so I won't go into that one here. The Gnome team obviously thought out their aesthetics much more than the KDE people did (though the KDE team was also aesthetically hobbled by Qt, and still is to a large degree; this will probably be fixed with Qt 2.0, though it remains to be seen whether or not KDE will get some better looks out of the deal).

    Now, we come to speed. With stock installations, Gnome wins hands down. Put both DE's on the same windowmanager, however, (I use WindowMaker since it seems to be the only one which currently have good support for both), and the speed again comes to roughly even; KWM is a BIG problem for KDE; it makes E look stunningly fast and stable. I'll call it a draw here too, then.

    Now there's the matter of resources. I'm afraid Gnome wins it here. It appears to use far less in the way of resources than KDE does. The one exception I found was GnomeICU, which does occasionally start draining CPU cycles at an unbelieveable rate.

    Filemanagers? KDE takes it. GMC has the potential, but it needs to first get stable, then get the FTP link of the "plain" MC working right. I don't care for Konqueror (KWM's Web browser) myself; give me Netscape/Mozilla any day. Konqueror reminds me far too much of a certain OS from Washington, if you know what I mean...

    Ease of setup - KDE, hands down. The Gnome guys could take a cue from KDE's install process. A very large cue.

    Raw toolkits: Strip out the desktop environments, and GTK wins out over Qt. This is simply a matter of functionality: GTK offers more than a few things which you can't get with Qt alone (look to the many things you can do with toolbars for just one example). This isn't the fault of the KDE team, however, and hopefully their widgets will be incorporated into Qt at some point in time. The language issue is irrelevant; several C++ bindings exist for GTK and a set of C bindings is being worked on for Qt; it should be noted however that many more language bindings are available for GTK.

    In the end, I'd call it a draw. Use whichever you like, but keep the libs from the other one on your hard drive also. Until we have a clear winner you're going to want both.

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