Morning…
I am presently running Gnome 10.3, however I am noticing that a lot of posters tag lines mention KDE. I am wondering as I go through and play with my system trying to setup various things if I should be on KDE instead of Gnome - no particular reason other than curiosity - more features, ease of configuration, appearance?
Thanks for reading…
I’ve stayed with KDE3 thus far because of familiarity. I’ve invested too much time in KDE3 to want to change desktops. It does what I want.
I suspect if i were a Gnome user, I would have the same perspective when it comes to sticking with Gnome.
With KDE4 becoming more mature (and support for KDE3 dropping), I am now being forced to choose between either KDE4 or Gnome (I tried for some months xfce and I did not like it). I’ll likely choose KDE4 'cause its newer, and I’m curious.
This sort of discussion can easily fan the flames of prejudice. You will find we are either one or the other, there is them and us.:sarcastic:
Personally, I could live with either, I just prefer KDE. I think you will find both kde and gnome to be full featured. Kde4 is probably a little lacking at the moment or perhaps I mean problematic.
Of course you can quite happily have both installed on your system and experience twice the joy.
This has been discussed & there are current topics to be found in General Chit Chat & Soapbox. I will move this one there as well
Andy
> Morning…
> I am presently running Gnome 10.3, however I am noticing that a lot of
> posters tag lines mention KDE. I am wondering as I go through and play
> with my system trying to setup various things if I should be on KDE
> instead of Gnome - no particular reason other than curiosity - more
> features, ease of configuration, appearance?
Well in KDE 3.X I found that all of the little clicky bits that I needed
were there by default, GNOME not so much so due to ‘usability’ concerns.
Only time will tell if KDE4 has the right stuff…but it looks nice. 
i prefer individual KDE apps.
i believe KDE has a more forward looking development future.
I apologize for posting in the wrong forum…
Sorry I didn’t realize that it would fan the flames - not my intention.
Is the discussion about KDE vs Gnome similar to the MAC interface to Windows interface (I am talking interface not function)discussion (arguments)? Or is this more of 2 programming methods to get to the same point - it comes down to which one you as a user like the appearance of, or intuitive function (is there such a thing) better?
I’m not interested in flames… its more of an understanding of why the differences.
Thank you…
I discovered kind of by accident that I was just more comfortable in the GNOME environment. I had been using KDE in my early experimentation with Linux, mostly because I liked the default look in most distros better than what I’d seen of GNOME – and nothing I had read had provided any concrete reasons to pick one over the other.
Then I was fooling around with a Fedora 8 box at work, and also had my first (recent) exposure to Ubuntu, both around the same time – GNOME felt more intuitive, and that’s what I’ve been using since.
I like the idea of KDE4, but I had lots of random crashes of apps and was having a hard time figuring out the difference between not knowing how things were supposed to work and things actually not working when I tried it recently under openSUSE 11.
I also couldn’t figure out how to get a few basic things functioning, like the hardware media buttons on my laptop, which “just work” in GNOME. I spent a bit of time trying to config that particular item, but had spotty success.
I’m guessing those things could have been worked out, but I didn’t feel like KDE4 was “giving” me anything compelling enough to make it worth my time. Even on the eyecandy front, having gotten the hang of configuring gnome, and adding cairo-dock and screenlets has gotten me to the point where I’m not even sure what eyecandy KDE brings to the table that amounts to a compelling reason to change. (I admit to being somewhat of a ***** for eyecandy.)
As I said, however, I don’t necessarily “blame” KDE for my experiences – my lack of experience could certainly be a contributing factor.
When KDE4 gets to the point where “Is KDE4 usable” type threads stop occurring – because it’s no longer a needed question – I’ll probably install it in parallel with GNOME and give it a go again.
thanks converted - this type of responce is what I was hoping to get, keep them coming…
I also am a bit of an eye candy person though I use XP all day at work I have always liked the appearance of the MAC interface - but I don’t have a MAC and it won’t run the software that I run (windows based engineering stuff) - yes I could dual boot etc, etc. Some will run on Linux - but the remainder wont.
I like the vibrant colour and clarity that I see on a MAC and I have yet to find a theme for Gnome that gives me this ‘look’ I do look at the gnome theme sites but not on a regular basis. But I digress, this thread wasn’t intended about shiny stuff.
KDE4 is starting to look good. I was discussing this earlier today with ‘else where’ who was commenting on 4.2 in the factory unstable. Actually it pretty darn good for unstable. I have it in a VM just to see how things are progressing and WOW I’m liking it.
I prefer KDE.
Every version of KDE has evolved into a more resource hungry enviroment than the previous versions. This is something which I don’t like about KDE, but I still like it and I’m actually able to use the KDE enviroment on my old Powerbook laptop “Lombard” which has 320MB of RAM in it, which historically is more memory than what a KDE enviroment needs.
I don’t know anything about the new KDE 4.0 other from what I’ve seen on screen dumps. I guess it’s even more heavy on the resources than KDE 3.5. Am I correct?
I guess it’s even more heavy on the resources than KDE 3.5.
Not true I affraid. it actually uses less than kde3 or gnome.
I found the stats:
Default Desktop Memory Footprint:
kde4: 391MB
Gnome 2.21.5: 480MB
kde3.5.8: 497MB
Only thing is no reference to version of kde4, but time of writing April 2008, would suggest 4.0.4
Page 44 Linux Format April 2008
Sounds hopeful!
I have heard reports that the KDE 4 isn’t as matured as the previous version, though. Some distributions has chosen not to go for KDE 4 yet.
Stability has been an issue with kde4, but now it’s pretty much ok. I use it now everyday. But it still seems to throw a curve ball at new users.
Give it a try on a grey Sunday and I do suggest an install above the live CD… although the live CD is a nice way to see if it even looks remotely of interest to you. I’ve tried both and like both as well… using KDE atm because I prefer most of the KDE programs above their gnome counterparts.
kTorrent has more of the features I like/need/want than Mongoose has.
(Although I like Vuze even more… but it’s such a resource hog and atm am trying out Torrentflux on my server).
I very much prefer Amarok above Banshee, although I think my opinion changes if I give banshee another try…
As the Banshee search seems to have gotten a lot faster last time I checked (was just checking if the gnome network manager did a better job than the kde one… so the install didn’t last very long)
And Amarok 2 seems to be only getting features I’m not interested in while the search dissapeared?
I don’t like Pidgin or Kopete, but like kMess (QT based) more than emesene.
I don’t like Kaffeine or Totem, in my opinion nothing comes close to SMPlayer(QT again) (Hell I consider it equal to my beloved windows media player classic).
Yast seems to make a lot more sense to me in terms of layout in kde than it does in gnome.
In term of eyecandy… I don’t know, gnome is VERY customisable compared to KDE in my opinion, just can’t tweak a few little things the way I want them. But by default KDE4 does sport a much more modern looking interface.
Don’t think there is a way to find out if KDE has features you want/need enough (and gnome lacks) to leave gnome besides giving it ago.
I personally don’t think one is really inferior or superior in terms of features and the ‘feel’ of the native apps or the looks are all personal preferences.
I love kde4 but i use gnome 2.14, because it’s more stable on my pc.Maybe some day i will give kde another try,but for now on i stay with gnome.
I originally got into KDE because it was most like the windows set up I was familiar with at that time(2004). I then tried Gnome for a bit. Best I can say is that by the time I tried Gnome(2006), Kde was a habit.
Now with KDE4 I look at the whole concept, & I think its the future. As I work with KDE it leads me to the conclusion that in time Gnome will have something like KDE4. When that happens I & others that hacked through all the crap that was Kde4.0.4-4.1.2 smiles, tears & clenched teeth. We can say," We was plasmoid before a plasmoid was cool!"
Db9 I use KDE most of the time. One caveat would be weather and CPU temp sensors. You can put as many weather applets on a panel or desktop in Gnome as you want to. You can only use one weather applet in KDE at a time. The Gnome CPU temp sensor seems to work with more motherboards then the CPU temp sensor in KDE.
KDE was meant to give the end user many more tools and control over the OS and software.
KDE Pros: Gives the end user more tools with GUI’s to change system settings. Has more applets. Has a more professional polished look. Has Krusader for changing permissions. Has k3b for multisession CD/DVD’s.
KDE Cons: KDE 4 adoption by too many major Linux distros before KDE 4 is finished.
Gnome was meant to make everything simple for the end user. It achieves this by hiding most of the system from the end user. Examples of this are the CD/DVD burner software. They have no provision to change the placement of the temp dir, hence they can only use the root partition. There are fewer tools with GUI’s to make changes to the system easy hence one needs to use the CLI more often.
The man who invented Gnome went to work for M$.
Gnome Pros: More desktop themes then KDE.
Gnome Cons: It’s not KDE. Requires more frequent use of the CLI.
All of this is just my opinion of course and mileage will very accordingly, according to the needs and alibis of the individual end user. The funny thing is I like the look of Gnome better, but I use KDE most of the time.
On 11/26/2008 khelben1979 wrote:
> I have heard reports that the KDE 4 isn’t as matured as the previous
> version, though.
Well, of course it isn’t as mature as KDE3 or Gnome, because it is brand new
I still think it was a terrible mistake to include KDE4 in Opensuse 11, but I have been using 11.1 Beta with KDE4 on my laptop for quite a while now, exclusively, and I can only encourage everybody (including Gnome users) to try KDE4 once Opensuse 11.1 is being released. It is rock solid and fast.
Uwe