It’s been a few years since we ran such a poll. Let’s see what most people prefer these days.Note: The poll is now closed, thank you for voting.
Important note as a reply to some comments: Who ever claims that osnews is pro-gnome is a flat out idiot (no one at osnews.com uses gnome in the first place, not even myself anymore). The reason we closed the poll 7 hours after it opened was because we had to go to sleep and could not monitor it anymore, because this outsourced poll engine CAN be tampered with by script kiddies (we were hit 5 times in the past by script kiddies, so we HAVE to be EXTRA careful). The poll had to be open for as long we were around and I personally stayed awake for more than I should have just to give more time to this poll (I slept at 1 AM local time, long after my husband went to bed). But instead getting a “thank you”, I get crap from all these people over here and elsewhere that draw their OWN lame conclusions as to why we do the things we do and how, without even asking first. They think they know better. And besides, after 3,000 votes it’s a good indication of what people like and what not like. Serious scientific polls usually don’t even use more than 1000 subjects, we are happy having more than 3,000 in 7 hours for this fun poll. Other news web sites don’t even get more than 500 votes in weeks!
It’s old-fashioned, colors are dull, and it really doesn’t rock, sorry.
Use ClearLooks theme, it makes Gnome look pretty modern. Gnome looks good to me, it’s just needs some refinement in Nautilus and between the apps’ DnD and copy/paste. At this point, really, it’s just refinements I want to see.
I love XFCE, 4.2 rocks, but it runs HEAVIER than Gnome. Seriously. Gnome uses about 163mb while XFCE uses 172mb.. I’m sure I could hack around it someway and see what the problem is.. but I shouldn’t have too.
Also XFCE’s file manager sucks ass. Can’t wait for the new one, though.
It lacks seriously refinements. For instance, applications that use GTK+, their radio buttons look more like a jittered square than a round. This is gnome. KDE’s widgets are sleek.
I am sure there is something else that takes away your memory, not XFce. XFce uses about 20 MBs less than Gnome normally. Run “top” and see what’s been eating your memory.
The current xffm file manager of XFce is indeed _terrible_ though, agreed. I don’t have my hopes up for Thunar either, as it’s very alpha, and we all know that it takes years to get a GOOD and stable file manager.
I really like XFCE. Of course, I believe it could be added with more features (and I think it will be). In fact, I hope to see a distro that brings XFCE as default desktop environment, making KDE, Gnome, and others as “alternatives”.
heeheh… 🙂
> their radio buttons look more like a jittered square than a round.
This is not true. You are probably used Gnome with a terrible theme or something. I run ClearLooks and I am really happy with it for its usability.
I currently use several but not any on the list. Why don’t you include wm’s since some of use use them as a DE.
Because I wanted to learn more about KDE/Gnome ratio these days, the rest already have less than even the third option, XFce. Having 10 more options in there each with 1%, doesn’t bring much to my curiosity (I run polls just to satisfy my curiosity).
I use WindowLab with the Xplore file manager. Very minimalist, very fast.
http://www.nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/
This is not true. You are probably used Gnome with a terrible theme or something. I run ClearLooks and I am really happy with it for its usability.
Default install. Sony LCD monitor.
Two months ago I would have been voting for XFce, but I intalled gnome 2.10 and I use this DE 100% of my time.
I agree with Carlos, use Clearlooks.
ClearLooks is very pretty, I’ll try it here…
thanks.. 🙂
>Default install. Sony LCD monitor.
The default theme is really ugly, no one uses it, not even the Gnome developers. This is why it’s going to be replaced by Clearlooks. Screenshot:
http://clearlooks.sourceforge.net/screenshots/clearlooks-0.5_1.png
How are you going to learn anything about the KDE/GNOME ratio by posting the poll on a GNOME biased website? I don’t see any KDE applications listed in the sidebar on this site… only GTK+. Please say you want to learn something about your readers, don’t say it is something objective about KDE/GNOME users.
You call this “pretty” ?!
http://clearlooks.sourceforge.net/screenshots/clearlooks-0.5_1.png
I’m a GNOME guy myself, I used it since RH 7. I like the direction GNOME is going. What GNOME has that KDE doesn’t have is a lot of interest around it from corporations (which means more devs and money), at least publically. Personally, I see the multitude of controversies around it as something good. I see them as growing pains. Not to take away from KDE’s success and popularity at all, since it is a titan of X environments in its own right.
Tell me that Gnome desktop isn’t beautiful!
http://ubuntuforums.org/gallery/showimage.php?i=162&c=2
> How are you going to learn anything about the KDE/GNOME ratio by posting the poll on a GNOME biased website?
+1
Why not listing Qt apps ?
Lookt at this screenshot and tell me again that you think these radio buttons look square.
http://miffe.no-ip.org/~miffe/tmp/window.png
This may seem weird but I wish they would develope the XPDE Envir more. I think this would be a great tool for migrating non-technical people over to GNU/Linux who usually only use windows, it looks just like Windows XP most people are familiar with this and having a similar look would make it much easier to migrate them to GNU/Linux
There are no KDE apps posted on the sidebar because we don’t have a KDE application site, because kde-apps.org already existed. OSNews is not a biased gnome site, we run that sidebar simply because we also run gnomefiles.org (there was no gnome app listing site back then so we jumped into the business of it).
Personally, I don’t even run Gnome anymore (I run WindowMaker) and the onwer of OSNews does not run Linux at all (his main OS is Mac OS X). So, I fail to see the bias, except than trying to promote our sister site with that sidebar, not Gnome in particular!
>Please say you want to learn something about your readers
Of course and I want to learn about what my readers like! That’s the part about satisfying my curiosity! OSNews gets all kinds of users, not just gnome users and so it would be cool to see what they like!
They release their next-gen filemanager, Thunar. This and a few MIME-type refinements will make XFCE rock a lot more than it does now. Right now, I’d probably take Fluxbox over XFCE. Now I am a happy GNOME user, cause KDE looks like it was designed by an 8 year old with a box of crayons, and Konquerer is way too complicated to be a day-to-day filemanager.
Obviously this poll is about default install. If you start comparing Gnome theme X with KDE theme Y, we’re going nowhere.
>>You call this “pretty” ?!<<
I wouldn’t call it pretty if you are comparing it to plastik or Keramik or whatever, but for Gnome, I think it looks great.
For me, GNOME is about staying out of my way, and looking half-way decent at the same time. I find KDE with it’s garish themes and super-uber-ultra-over-the-top configurability to be annoying.
I used Red Hat for a longer time than any other distro I’ve tried. Gnome seemed to me to be the cleaner interface, although KDE the stabler one. I’ve been using Linspire for about two years now, I think, and really have no problems with KDE.
I’ve no problem with either.
>>Personally, I don’t even run Gnome anymore<<
Say it ain’t so. I thought you were the number 1 GNOME fangirl!
To be honest, I switched to Gnome because of you seeming endorsement of it over KDE. Time to load up GNUStep, I guess.
I definitely prefer Gnome over any other X11 environment. But I don’t want to use Gnome anymore for reasons I have explained in the past on osnews and on my blog recently. I just have lost my faith in it. Also, I agree with Cactus that it still requires some refinements in some places, especially in nautilus and gnome-panel, but such reports go unheard most of the time by the gnome devs, so who cares…
I prefer GNOME myself – I also like the direction of GNOME, GTK+, Mono. GNOME 2.10 is great, Clearlooks is ummm.. okay I guess, I prefer the Bluecurve them from RH.
KDE is good also and robust but for some reason, I don’t like it over GNOME. KDE 3.4.x is looks good from what I have seen (Kubuntu Live CD). Theres just something I don’t like about KDE and QT based apps. The only one I really use is K3B which is excellent.
I believe once GNOME gets more and more intergrated, It will be the choice of X11 based desktops. (Beagle, F-Spot, Evolution improvements, etc.)
Also.. go try out the Mono Live CD, its a great one based on Ubuntu. You will see what I mean ass far as mono based apps.
Wow, that looks sweet. I’m gonna try that
I’d have to say:
wm – fluxbox
file manager – aterm with bash and friends
web – konqueror
eye candy – torsmo, gkrellm, xdesktopwaves
It’s OSS! Why use some prepackaged solution when you can piece together the best of everything yourself?
I surely hope no one tries to derive any information from this poll because it would surely be pointless.
I think that there should more options in the poll, at least to include enlightenment, blackbox/fluxbox, and IceWM.
I personally like IceWM more than any other WM because it is very lightweight, easy to configure, has no bloat -> makes you more productive, and because you can assign shortcuts for anything.
IceWM + a good theme (the defaults are horribles) + gtk applications (qt are slow to start) + terminal (the one form XFCE) = best desktop experience.
Anyone should give it a try, and there’s a very good report here in OSNews about it: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7774&page=1
Anyway, I also like how clean and appealing the GNOME desktop looks, and I like the integration KDE has (Kontact, Kopete, Kparts, etc) , it also has the best file manager in the world (Konqueror).
The great about desktop environments is the fact that everyone could go and change them.
Sometimes the developers know that some areas must me improved, but they are focuded on some other areas. So, if you have the skills, why don’t go and make that change?
I see a lot of times that general developers don’t feel comfortable about the desktops out there (Gnome, Kde, etc), but don’t do anything to change that. They just say ‘that sucks, and that too’.
Even for users, thet could try to make a comment on list. Or maybe that communication channel should be improved. But that fact remains: the most you dislike, the most you can do.
I love its simplicity, versatility, and customizability.
And, yes, everything is so… square and grey.
Although, I have been using the CLI more and more often recently, so next time this poll rolls around, my answer may very well be ‘none’!
Obviously this poll is about default install. If you start comparing Gnome theme X with KDE theme Y, we’re going nowhere.
Since when did theme == DE?
I’m using XFCE right now myself, I came from Gnome, and from KDE before that, and am probably going to try out a few of the smaller ones.
Gnome, simple and efficient.
Just this.
I prefer GTK over QT apps in general, but for a DE I prefer Gnome. However, I Do like to run FVWM as my full blown windows manager. Everything can be configured to your liking.
Gnome seems to be leading at the moment but I bet that KDE wins in the end by large margin. I gave my vote to XFCE, which I use sometimes because it’s quite nice.
However, I much prefer to use Window Maker with perlpanel or fbpanel (and with gnome-panel in Frugalware because Frugalware doesn’t yet come with any another decent panel). Add there some select dockapps (mixer.app, mount.app, wmcdplay, wmshutdown), aterm, gkrellm, a file manager (xfe), firefox, sylpheed-gtk2, gftp, openoffice, leafpad, xpdf, gtklp, a GUI client to dictd, gimp, gthumb, gxine, zinf, grip, x-cd-roast, games, xlockmore, customized appicons, a cool wallpaper, etc. — and you’ve got a “desktop environment” that is slicker and faster than KDE or Gnome.
OK, it’s destop environments only.
I must say, I was surprised at Gnome’s lead over KDE, and even more at XFce’s very respectible third place.
I’m neutral, myself. I’m a Fluxbox user when I’m not on my Mac.
Hey! I like the GNOME default theme. It’s so much more high-contrast than Clearlooks, where you have to strain to see anything…
i like smokey blue theme and what is it… desert theme or something like that, very nice, glassy and pretty…
Of course, that is only when I want to look cool, otherwise something lite and ugly is just fine…..
Gnome does both really well
I haven’t tried the latest release from Gnome yet. Voted KDE anyway..
what do you mean themes dont count… either you have some kind of theme or you have nothing… so of course themes count… good grief charley brown
gnome is more basic out of the box but you canmake it look cooler then even KDE if you wish…
icewm should be included… dang it
runs on everything i have from 133mhz to my 2ghz machines and it is fast and smooth thru and thru….. but it is a bit far from a true DE but throw in your favorite toys and wheeeeee away you go…..
but i still voted for gnome 
cause I use to LOVE gnome and hope it will touch me again the way it did years ago… yes I love old gnome, with sawfish and gmc
I don’t use KDE because I don’t like being blinded by lens flare in my X environment. Also because I loathe the configuration applets. For advanced configuration give me a dotfile, I want the simple quick toggles that I’ll use often in my graphical configs.
I don’t use Gnome because it’s fat. I don’t think it looks bad, but it’s nothing special (Clearlooks is great, but the titlebar really needs some work). I do love the things Gnome offers, though. I use Gnome panel (though it can use some work), Evince, Abiword, Gnumeric, GMPC, mail-notification, Totem, and Grip regularly. I also finally got Nautilus working well without Gnome running, but I think I’ve used it twice (long live Eterm!) I’m really looking forward to Beagle and more use of hal/dbus, but I’m not sure I’m liking the heavy use of Mono that’s in the future.
I’ve gone back and forth between Fluxbox-devel, Enlightenment, Blackbox w/ Devil’s Pie, and FVWM2; but nothing has a better window memory than E16, and the window edge attraction is implemented perfectly. I’m using E16.8 from CVS right now, the new window handling code fixes a lot of glitches, but unfortunately shading is still a little slow.
There are a few great new features in E16.8 too. Like you can set windows to skip the window lists, and remember it. There’s a new fullscreen setting in addition to maximize, which finally makes terminals maximize cleanly. And x.org transparency and shadow options are everywhere, though I haven’t used them.
A lot of people seem to forget about E16 with all the talk about E17, but DR16 has matured greatly in the last few releases. And it runs well on my P3 800!
I personally find KDE far superior to Gnome (only my opinion), but one of the reasons I migrated from Windows to Linux was because I could not configure it the way I wanted it to be. Gnome seems to have no configurability, whereas with KDE, the sky is the limit, I can change anything to do anything I want the way I want…….. and fairly easily. There are certain things that I have become accustomed to in KDE that absolutely drive me nutts in Gnome because I cannot change it.
Since when does modern and clean equal toyish? Between “Luna” and the latest KDE themes (yes, including the beloved Plastik), what everything calls clean and pretty I see as overly bloated and toyish! OS X is an example of how it can be done well- its widgets are nice looking (perhaps to a bit over-the-top degree), but they don’t have 900px of wasted space per widget, and they don’t look like Tonka toys. Really, though, widgets looked nice in Windows 2000 (for some reason, the XP Classic versions just don’t look as nice), and they look nice in Gnome with a simple Bluecurve-esque theme. Qt looks bloated no matter how you style it!
[/end rant]
PS: Also, why did Eugenia make this topic? It’s obviously an invitation for a gentoo-forums-style multipage rant on the relative merits of gtk+ and qt, with the occassional reference to Aqua and Windows’ various UI APIs. Hopefully I’ve covered everything in this post.
PPS: Please don’t take anything seriously in any of the posts on this topic…
Of course I’m biased. But I think this looks as good as any
other desktop out there.
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/zborgerd/screenshots/2.10_1.png
I wouldn’t call it pretty if you are comparing it to plastik or Keramik or whatever, but for Gnome, I think it looks great.
I would call it pretty when compared to Keramik and Plastik. Those particular themes look childish to me. Clearlooks is understated and professional. Just the right touch of round and square. Complete, and well done. It’s my favorite theme out of any DE on any OS.
Then again, that’s just me. I also hate the Mac OSX theme, both the aqua and the brushed metal look (that usually drops a few jaws when I say that). I really dig something simplistic and understated. Basically, get out of my way and let me work, but still look damn good doing it
you can change everything and anything in gnome, and it is so modular you can turn off pieces you dont need or use them in a different window manager or whatever. the problem seems to be the gnome guys hiding more and more configuration and making it hardder to do so. KDE seems to have confusing configuration, you will think something should be under “display” and yet it is under “theme” or something…always have to search forever…. But often tweaking gnome is very simple but often not well documented or it is so simple that you arent accustomed to doing it that way….
and I agree Enlightenment is totally cool as well, I wish they could of turned right around and got everything right the first time on E17 since it seems to be so innovative but I am glad he is taking his time to get it right and nothing wrong with 16 at all…
I don’t use a DE – I see no reason to waste system resources on something like that. KDE is good as far as customizability goes, but Gnome is a little faster. I don’t really like either, though, because of their complexity – they tend to be more buggy, and I don’t need a fancy start menu or anything. I just need to have virtual desktops, keyboard shortcuts for window resizing/movement, and a shortcut to launch rxvt. I use Torsmo and root-tail for system monitoring in BadWM. Other than that, just give me rxvt and I’m happy.
As far as WMs go, on my desktop machine I’m currently using Ion2. Great tiling WM, fast, and “decent” keyboard input (a bit awkward at first). On my laptop I use BadWM.
However, I’m currently coding my own minimalistic WM, based off of TinyWM. It’ll be similar to BadWM, only more minimalistic (yes, you can get even more minimalistic
). Hoping to have a good beta in the next couple of weeks 
Nothing beats the ability to edit files remotely via ssh or ftp in any kde editor.
No other DE or even any OS can do that. (please correct me if I’m wrong)
I find Qt to be more responsive.
The last Gnome I tried was 2.0. vowed never again .. 15 X11 and kernel crashes in 30mins.
I did get to try out the Gnome on Ubuntu however. For what it is it’s decent. But I found it incredibly difficult to configure and well.. Use..
For the file manager you can’t go up a directory easily. I despise the open a directory new window opens.
and even more so hate the click an option and it’s applied immediately that’s infected every Gnome/GTK app around it.
that type of response is very undesirable because it doesn’t make it clear what exactly is happening or even what the Ok and Cancel buttons do. If it’s applied right away do I need to click Ok?
What happens if I wanted to click an option just to see what it could enable but I didn’t want to use it.. and it’s applied right away and something happens that causes something very undesirable to happen. What that could be I have no clue. but that reaction could result in that.
I will admit however there are certain areas in Gnome that I felt to be a bit more developed. that was from the 2.0 version tho. Since then KDE has caught up.
Let me edit the start menu without ripping my hair I will switch to Gnome that day.
I still like my own somewhat modified Gorilla theme the best.
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/paulbest/screenshots/20050426a.p…
(just an app screenshot of evince, but you get the idea.)
The bright themes with lots of blue and bright yellow just hurt my eyes too much after a lot of use. The old reliable Ximian color scheme is still my favorite.
I just love E16 (haven’t tried 17 yet). It’s lean, clean, fast, never gets in my way and looks absolutely gorgeous. Couldn’t ask for more.
Every once in a while, I also use Xfce. It’s quite nice too; just like Sun’s CDE, except that it doesn’t suck.
KDE is by far the best desktop environment I’ve ever used because I can customize it and there are tons of cool features.
I simply cannot use Gnome because I can’t get the windows to grab each other properly. The behavior is exactly the same as Microsoft Windows here. Will this ever be fixed?
XFCE is perfect if you have resource limitations. I installed Gentoo on an old computer at work to use as a second workstation. It’s a 700 MHz PIII with 128 MB RAM. I wouldn’t even dream of trying to run KDE plus other things on that box, but XFCE runs wonderfully and I can easily configure the window behavior to my preferences.
“I simply cannot use Gnome because I can’t get the windows to grab each other properly. The behavior is exactly the same as Microsoft Windows here. Will this ever be fixed?”
Unless I’m mistaken about what you’re asking about, it should be (alt+)shift+drag of a window.
Firstly – i’m very surprised that Gnome is in the lead. I think that the poll has been marked as being tampered with is a good explanation for that phenonomen. From talking to people, the vast majority seem to run KDE (i’d estimate 60% of Linux users that I know). Polls that i’ve seen conducted elsewhere over time seem to correlate with this figure that i’ve reached.
Gnome is what I consider very ‘dumbed’ down. I don’t like being told that I can’t (easily) configure something. For those bitching about KDE and it’s configurability – you *don’t* have to reconfigure it just because you have the option. So, what’s the problem?
For those bitching about UI – I haven’t used Gnome since v1.4 and it went downhill from there imho. KDE has just improved and improved and improved.
Windows/icons? KDE childish? Not in my eyes. It looks clean, crisp and professional.
QT vs GTK? GTK is just plain ugly. Plain ugly. Let me repeat it again for the dumb – plain ugly.
Speed? Gnome does indeed start up faster, and KDE have responded to this by improvements – compare KDE 3.1.4 to 3.4 and you’ll see what I mean. With the release of KDE 4 we should see an even larger speed increase. I don’t think it’ll match Gnome for speed even then though, but I think QT does more, and doing more simply takes more time.
Some choose Gnome because QT by Trolltech isn’t considered to be ‘free’ – fair enough.
I also like XFCE 4.* – very nice. Afterstep rocks as well. So please don’t call me a KDE fanboy 😉
Dave
KDE fan boys prefer WinXP or KDE?
I prefer GNOME to WinXP. And for the looks of Longhorn, I think I will prefer GNOME to Longhorn as well.
The problem is that when you want to configure one thing you get fifteen pages of options you don’t need. They spread everywhere. It’s annoying. Here’s a brilliant way to compare GNOME and KDE – look at Beagle, and look at Kat. Beagle is a search box with results under it. Kat is a search box, results, and fifteen thousand options on the main window…
lol funny, when i went to pick KDE it gave me a “the page contains no data” error, didnt do the same thing when i voted for “other” on my second try, nice
Whenever I see rounded corners on dialog boxes, it bothers the hell out of me. People don’t realize how much UI is a resource hog. Stupid little details like rounded corners, shadowing and bitmapped gradients bog down even a system such as Mac G4. You can literally feel the lag of the mouse movements and clicks as you move around the screen and open and close windows. This is partly why I’m not a particular fan of Gnome and KDE. They keep pushing the memory constraints and don’t try to balance the actually system resources.
KDE is the best by a long shot. Faster, better usability, and better technology. If I had to use GNOME apps, I’d use XFce over Nautilus. Nautilus sucks and spatial browsing too. The only reason to keep GNOME libs is because Mono guys use GTK# and the QT# aren’t going anywhere right now. >:|
BTW the new GNOME look Clearlook sucks, Industrial was much nicer. The tabs are fugly and look like OS/2 Warp 4 style.
This has been consistent for a while, so no matter what happens, this has been recorded; And the winner is: GNOME. 🙂
WindowLab looks cool, I’ll have to try it. Does it have an AmigaOS 2.x color theme for it?
My favorite window managers, which I haven’t used in a loonnng time, are AmiWM and mlvwm. Both very buggy, but nice. AmiWM especially was *fast*.
There are aspects of the AmigaOS 2+ UI and the MacOS 7-8 UI that are very nice and simple. I wish that I could meld them together into one.
What is with putting the close box next to the sizing boxes on the title bar? Didn’t MacOS X and Windows 95 (and after) get criticized for that? Too easy to hit the wrong button.
WindowMaker
enlightenment all the way
Reread the note, it’s not saying that the poll has been tampered with, it’s detailing what will be done if the poll is tampered with. That got me for a second too, the wording leads you the wrong direction at first.
Will, I totally agree. I use Ion2 myself, not a big fan of lua or whatever it’s called, but was able to customize my key bindings and haven’t looked back since. I can’t stand wasted real estate anymore! Ion2 is virtually invisible, it doesn’t get in the way, it just does it’s job. Which reminds me of the old unix philosophy, “… do one job and do it well.”
I spent about a month trying to switch from windows between Kubuntu and Ubuntu. After a couple of weeks I finally configured my modem and devices with Kubuntu, and spent some time surfing with Konquerer, using Kopete, Amarok… Nice DE, and some of the eye candy is great, but I seemed to experience a lot of application crashes (and I’d continually have to remove the ~/.kate to get it to run again).
Switched to Ubuntu, got rid of the brown and I haven’t booted back into windows in several weeks. Gnome seems just a bit more elegant to me; I like the Applications | Places | System on the bar and haven’t experienced many application crashes. Amarok is certainly superior to Rhythmbox but I actually prefer Rhythmbox’s simplicity, and hope that it will become just a bit more feature rich in the future.
I really thought the abundance of K’s in the K Menu was overdone, and a bit tacky (Kopete, amaroK, Kate, Koffice, etc. it’s hard on the eyes!)
Against GNOME, I have to say that Totem sucks at playing just about anything. Xine and VLC work well, however.
For ROX, combined with its session manager and native window manager it truly ROCKS!!! And with a Zero Install repository of applications it represents a truly innovative computing environment that solves the application distribution/dependency problem and provides a very elegant working environment.
How so?
Can it beat the apt-get/Synaptic way? In what way?
Here is the one big problem with KDE. QT. It is not because QT is bad actually I like it alot. Here is the problem. I talk to a client wanting to use a linux solution. The client likes what they see and uses linux, but the DE on the system is KDE. Then the client goes to develop a commercial application for the system. They then find out oops we need to spend ~1500 per developer to use QT for this project. They say you don’t have to do this on Windows or Mac OS … Why should we do it here. You could say use GTK but they don’t like that because it doesn’t intergrate into there chosen KDE desktop they love so much. Not good, not good at all. I say that is a huge advantage that Gnome/XFCE has over KDE.
I quite like ratpoison – it’s best described as GNU screen for X11. All windows are full screen, and you switch through them with Control+T and the corresponding number. Unfortunately, this makes running multi-window applications like the GIMP rather difficult.
Otherwise XFCE 4.0 is excellent – I have tried 4.2 and was unimpressed. Alot of the simplicity had vanished, and the new icon theme is absolutely ghastly. It’s a shame, really.
http://www.system-admins.net/e107_plugins/kig_menu/_imagefiles/kara…
WindowMaker all the way.
I wanted to mention that I have alway’s found KDE to be more responsive. But with Cairo I think this will change in Gnome. That is ofcourse if you have a 4dcard. oops I mean 3d
Against GNOME, I have to say that Totem sucks at playing just about anything. Xine and VLC work well, however.
People need to stop dogging Totem! It can use several different backends. The one installed by default is gstreamer (poor decision, IMO). If you want it to use xine for playing stuff, install the totem-xine package. It will then play everything xine can play, but with a decent GUI.
Anonymous, I have to disagree with you about it being a poor choice about using the gstreamer backend. Yes, I’ve had alot of problems with it myself I think for once this is an instance where it SHOULD be pushed more. gstreamer is really a revolutionary look at media decoding (and encoding for that matter). It should be pushed more to the forfront to get more bug posts, patches, and fixes.
Tho it is a pain in the ass to try and load a media file and having Totem crap itself. Maybe if Totem started with a dialogue box saying “Do you want to use the buggy but radically superior gstreamer system and help us improve it at the risk of instability or use X?
SlackWare Linux 10.1
FluxBox WM
Xfce4 Panel w/ some swanky plugins. 🙂
ROX Pinboard & ROX Filemanager.
Bashish (with my own custom theme)
Aterm sometimes.
On my other Box:
XFCE4
ROX Pinboard & File Manager
blackbox. hands down.
Ok, first you name a kile-equvalent great latex editor with gnome integration. Second, you name a kdevelop3-equivalent fully integrated rad environment for gtk/gnome. Third, you tell me how easy (/grin,big/) it is to customize every aspect of gnome at the level of kde. HIG is not everything you know.
I’ve been using kde since 1.x, and I’ve been trying to use gnome since 1.x, Still, after some years, my choice (though absolutely _not_ final) is kde. The most powerful linux de I’ve ever came in contact with. I have a such customized kde here, that is slick, fast, still is nice and fill every need I have. The only thing I like in gnome is the gtk2 file selector, which is still not better or more usable than the kde selector.
I also have xfce4 (great stuff !) and gnome installed all the time and upgraded when new version pop up, but neither has managed to forget kde. Yet.
Oh, and I read from time to time that some use gnome because kde looks like windows – and I call bullshit everytime. If this is your point of decision, use fluxbox, e16 or windowmaker, they are fast, and usable (if you know what you’re doing). I use kde because it’s flexible, I have the means to run it really fast, and has every native widget application that I need (which are a LOT).
GNOME > *
Bluecurve > Clearlooks
Your post sums up pretty well what most KDE users think about the available Desktop Environments, I think.
What I think the KDE users have wrong is how good the GTK+ apps look and feel in a good GNOME environment; or how bad the GTK+ apps look and feel in a KDE environment. Ubuntu is the only way to take a deep look on how a good GNOME environment generally looks and feels.
It disgusts me to see how non-QT and non-KDE apps look in a KDE environment. Firefox, for example, should be taken care of, because it’s the preferred browser to a lot of us. We prefer it to Konqueror, and it does not matter how good Konqueror may be. The theme should not make Firefox look ugly. The fonts should be ok by default as well. It totally sucks to use Firefox in some distros. Worse, some distros still bundle Mozilla.
Well like most of us I started out on KDE, with RedHat I came to Gnome after having made bad experiences with KDE 3.0. I have to say that nowadays I consider KDE too slow, it’s totally bloated, in the configuration menu I loose the overview… Gnome has gotten a lot more good apps the last few years and has evolved a lot. Also there is nice themes available and hell its a lot faster then KDE, but in my opinion also Gnome becomes more and more bloated nowadays. It needs some cleanup, the RAM usage begins to get too much. Therefor I got verry happy with enlightenment. I don’t need a fancy menu or anything anyway and e is very modern, fast and especially themeable, too
KDE is a joy for me to use. I love how well integrated things are. Things like KHotkeys (gestures and shortcuts, anywhere, extra keys on my keyboard), IRKick (for use with my remote control) and so on I have a built in method of accomplishing things for which I often see large tutorials written.
The code is easy to get into as well, which is a must for me. I don’t always muck about with my apps but when some little thing bugs me I have to be able to (why I used litestep as my shell on windows), and KDE makes it easy.
I like being able to make choices about my environment. I can switch the button order on dialogs. Gnome users can’t. I can have a top level menubar like on the Mac. I use many of the obscure options and some of the hidden, text file only ones. Not everyone needs to, but they are there if you want them.
Developing apps is pretty smooth too, and of course there is the possibility of using managed code. I recently ported a java app of mine from swt/swing over to qt just to see how, and it gives a good impression of a native app
Choice is a strong suit of linux, and KDE offers plenty. Others will choose Gnome, and it’s good to see the diversity. We’ve all got our reasons for preferring a DE, those were mine.
>I hope to see a distro that brings XFCE as default desktop environment, making KDE, Gnome, and others as “alternatives”.
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Xfld, a Knoppix based live cd use Xfce as the default DE.
It will be KDE for my DE of choice. The fact is that i like the overall design, the mechanics of the Qt libs, and the i18n support. It’s true, in my sense, that by default it is quietly bloated, but hey so are the Gnome and Mac defaults. It’s nothing.
Another thing, this time about the what i hate about Gnome : if you want to OOP, shouldn’t it be better to use an OOP language by default ? And not C ?? Well… Only my $0.02
Nice idea to open the polle while europe was sleeping! Sure no votes came from that! (and they’re kde lovers)
Against GNOME, I have to say that Totem sucks at playing just about anything. Xine and VLC work well, however.
sudo apt-get install totem-xine
This replaces the very immature gstreamer backend with a nice xine backend. Basically means you can play anything and everything.
People ussually sleeps at night in time-zones different from USA’s.
Anyway, it seems that not much people voted, so this poll is useless.
15 X11 and kernel crashes is just that, crash in X and the kernel. If X crashes it is the fault of X, not any app running under X. If the kernel crashes it is the fault of the kernel, not any app it is running, Gnome may have triggered the bugs, but the bugs are not due to Gnome.
we can do most amy task or beautification in the current desktops, from twm to kde3. For an underpowered and/or small pc I prefer icewm. Otherwise, I prefer KDE because wallpaer rotation is so easy to set up. I like xscreensaver and kde will run with that, after I make sure to turn off the native kde screensaver also.
BUT my favorite has not been invented yet. It is a cap like device comunicating with all my 5+ senses, responding to my comands. wireless and wired humanity.
On Solaris, I use Gnome, because I’m too lazy to get anything else up, and I can only stand CDE for so long. Before they did away with it, I used OpenLook sometimes.
On Linux/BSD, I use WindowMaker w/ GWorkspace for filemanager. I’d like to use GDesktop full-time, but it doesn’t necessarily play nicely with wmaker, and I’ve found it to be somewhat unstable still.
>People ussually sleep at night in time-zones different from USA’s.
Problem is that I need to go to sleep and I can’t monitor the poll anymore for script kiddies (which is important for this kind of poll, as we got hit in the past). The poll was open for many hours, including for Europe’s morning. Besides, I don’t think that it makes much of a difference if other continents are awake or not, users are users.
[…] there are also a couple of surveys running right now, one over at os news polling for people’s favourite x11 desktop environment […]
[Edit: the OS News poll is now closed. by my count it was up for around 6 hours? that’s got to be one of the fastest internet polls i’ve seen in a while. not to mention those 6 hours were during the night in Europe. interesting. and by “interesting” i mean “lame”. i wonder why it got pulled so quickly.]
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/06/these-are-days.html
I prefer the smaller/minimalist wm’s over things such as KDE and Gnome. I used to work with WMX a lot, but recently I’m more working with Blackbox, and at the moment it’s almost perfect: http://home.nedlinux.nl/~kryptos/screenshots/blackbox/27052005-blac…
KUBUNTU… that is all I have to say.
I’ve been WindowMaker fan for a looong time, then switched to fvwm2, and never looked back.I also occasionaly use gnome+metacity, when fvwm is unavailable on the box.