I’m a big KDE fan, but I decided to install Gnome on my Sandbox PC (a 9-year old 32-bit athlon-1100 w/1GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce FX5200 graphic card). I already had openSUSE-11.2 w/KDE4 on that PC, so I put Gnome in its own partition (with its own /home). This was so I could compare the two and learn a bit about Gnome.
Of course my views are HEAVILY bias’d with my being an KDE4 fan,… but still, I was both surprised and impressed by openSUSE-11.2’s Gnome implementation. I had last installed Gnome on openSUSE many years ago, although I did install Gnome from Fedora-10 a year ago (also on this same sandbox PC).
IMHO in terms of basic “look”, the openSUSE-11.2’s gnome implementation is WAY BETTER than what I recall from that Fedora gnome implementation. The openSUSE-11.2 gnome desktop is really nice. I concede my first impression was that gnome was barren and rather bland, but after using it for about 30 minutes, my view completely changed and I instead considered (and still consider) Gnome to be a very nice clear simplicity. Its really VERY nice.
On the negative side, the integration of sound on Gnome, with my PC’s hardware, and from my simple user’s initial impression, is really really BAD in comparison to KDE4 on the same PC. Its just plain bad. When I first started Gnome, the speaker was muted. When I unmuted it I got a horribly loud squeak.
I then installed smplayer, xine and vlc. They all played with HORRIBLE static. In each case I had to go into their properties and for smplayer change from “alsa” to "alsa(0.0-VIA-8233A), for xine change from “alsa” to “oss”, and for vlc change also to “oss”. I still don’t have Totem playing without this ugly static.
In KDE4, this “just works”. None of this changing output audio mode to get rid of static.
There is a ‘sound preferences’ speaker in the lower right corner of the Gnome desktop but no mixer like Kmix that I have in KDE4. I don’t like this Gnome limitation. Again, not so good in comparison.
Also, I found the Software Management under Gnome, in comparison to KDE4, missing many features in comparison to KDE4. I was surprised to see so many differences. Frankly, I don’t like the limitation(s) in Gnome’s YaST software management implementation and I miss the KDE4 YaST software management features.
Another negative aspect I encountered with Gnome was in configuring the proprietary nVidia graphic driver. After installing the nVidia .run file “the hardway”, I ran “nvidia-xconfig” to create the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. After a reboot Gnome just hung at a black screen and mouse arrow, for over a minute. In the end I just pressed < ctrl > < alt > < f2 >, logged on to a terminal and typed (with root permissions) “shutdown -r now” to reboot from there. Back at run level 3, I deleted the xorg.conf, and ran “sax2 -r -m 0=vesa”, which worked. While puzzling if the sax2 would work, I also noted that the gnome desktop gives less feedback (than KDE) when booting, which I do not like in Gnome. I prefer the warm fuzzing feeling I get with the KDE boot indications.
I note special desktop effects work well, although I am still puzzling how to activate the various effects, as the same key sequences that I use in KDE4 don’t work in Gnome (clearly Gnome’s are different).
Possibly the biggest irritation with Gnome for me, is the Gnome desktop requires I double click on icons. I can’t over state how much that irritates me. I don’t think I’ll get used to it, and if I can’t figure out how to reconfigure this to 1 click, then it does not bode well for my continued testing of this Gnome install.
Still, despite the negative aspects that I posted, the FONTS in Gnome are great. The style of the windows is very good. I significantly prefer this default Gnome setup over my current KDE setup in terms of a basic look, although KDE4 has a degree of configurability that I can not (yet) find in Gnome. I may just try to configure my KDE4 desktop’s to look like Gnome.
… Its been interesting.
I’ve been told others did NOT experience what I did wrt the Sound in Gnome, and I suspect others do not have my aversion to the need to double click. Hence given that, I would not hesitate to recommend Gnome.
As noted, the default clean/simple to its desktop is something that I really like.
