OSNews

I didn't like the flame Linus started, but he was right, of course he was. GTK is less productive than Qt and less powerful for the programmer, and so GTK apps do less things. Period.

GTK apps tend to do fewer things as a design choice. Developers of GTK and Gnome apps tend to go with the Unix philosophy of small programs that do few things but do them very well, and providing a clean, simple interface to the user. Thus, for many people, the result is something that is far more productive than equivelent apps that have more features, because they don't waste time having to click around on a lot of things to get things done.

GTK and Gnome apps tend to be very easy and intuitive, and provide few choices and make functionality obvious.

By contrast, some QT and KDE apps tend to throw lots of features and options at the user, which can be overwhelming, or at least cause a lot of wasted time clicking on stuff before one comes across the functionality desired. With GTK and Gnoe apps, the functionality desired is usually obvious, and one gets it done quickly and easily.

Torvalds made a good point in that if certain features are not included that some people might want to use, it denies "usability" to those users. For those people, KDE is quite often the better choice. But what Torvalds, and others who joined in on the chorus of anti GTK/Gnome ranting, over looked was the fact that many people don't need all those features that Torvalds and others ranted about, and those features would only get in the way, and cause more clutter, and more annoying clicking on stuff to find desired functionality.

So it boils down to what individuals need or desire, and it's a choice between full featured (but sometimes cluttered and messy and non productive), and clean and simple (but sometimes lacking features desired by many).

Both approaches are great, and have their strenghts and weaknesses. I'm very glad there is the choice - I quite often switch between Gnome and KDE (with a very slight nod in favor of Gnome). And the good thing is that both Gnome and KDE are moving towards each other (their developers are actually quite friendly with one another - it's the fanboys in either camp that flame) with Gnome gradually adding key features it formerly lacked, and KDE cleaning up it's interface.

But what's bad is Torvalds' attitude (as much as I admire his work) and the attitude of many KDE users who've chimed in with thinking their way is the only way, and often saying that Gnome is bad and it's users are idiots. That kind of trolling is less than useless.