Rony Klein explains a few of the reasons why he prefers Gnome over KDE, an article accompanied by screenshots illustrating his case.
Some Reasons Why I Prefer Gnome over KDE
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I use KDE on my workstation because it works fine for me. However, I do feel that Gnome is more likely to be successful on the corporate workstation than KDE, because there are less option to fiddle around with and it seems simplier to get things done, sure stock Gnome isn’t as polished as KDE, but Ximian Gnome is. Gnome 2.6 looks like it might just Gnome that extra bit of polish that it needs as well.
“Sorry, pal. But single-click has been shown in repeated studies to be the preferred way of doing things among noobs. Most beginners take a long time to learn how to double click. I know this having taught several hundred people the basics of computing. Some infrequent users actually never really get the manual motions down very well at all.”
Well, we have lots of videotapes of actual KDE users showing the opposite.
What’s best really depends on the context and what internal model the users applies to the system they use.
Generally, single click is to be preferred in navigational settings. E.g. single click seam to work well in a web browsing context, but that is not the same thing as saying that it is the right thing in a desktop environment for general use.
By the way do you have any references to the studies you mention?
“That is why KDE uses single-click. The only reason that the other DE’s don’t is because existing users are too set in their ways. New users “untainted” by the Windows/Mac defaults take to single-click like a duck to water.”
The problem is that users “untainted” by the Windows/Mac
is very hard to come by. My guess is that 99% of all potential users of KDE have been exposed to a double click system at one time or another.
Many of the projects my company do includes usability work, and we have often wanted test persons with no previous windows experience. I can tell you, they are extremely difficult to get. Often the subjects tend to become 60+ years old. Not that people in that age shouldn’t be able to use a computer, but they are soon to be retired (if not already) and are probably not the first concern if you develop business solutions.
And even if we could find such noobs, how much of KDE would they be able to use? I think that you could make very convincing studies showing that GUIs with a blanc screen and four buttons is much easier to use than systems with a start menu like KDE, Gnome and windows. So why is this not the standard in KDE, Gnome,…?
I think one of the problem with KDE is the developers seam to have a hard time deciding who the intended user of the system is. Is it their current user base of fairly advanced users, or do they want to target a new user base consisting of noobs. It will be very hard to please both groups.
And how many GNOME users run RedHat or Fedora ? Guess what, not everyone speaks English and lives in the US. A DE has to let you change configurations easily, as KDE does.
I don’t really understand what your point has to do with mine, but now that you mention it…
1) I don’t live in the US, something easy to notice with the partial DNS name in my messages;
2) English isn’t my mother tongue, something easy to notice with my craptastic English.
Personally, I had a bit more success with GNOME’s internalization efforts as I only had to set an environment variable (LANG) to set my GNOME environment in the language I want. I have to fiddle with settings as KED seems to automatically set my system to either: a) use the Imperial system if I choose Canada in the English version (and we don’t use it since 1976 if my memory is good); or b) use the Euro sign if I choose the French version. Note that it’s been quite a while since I tried the French version (I think it’s in the 2.x era) so things might have changed.
Yes it does matter. We today place the stones for the road tomorrow.
I won’t bother to quote the rest of the message as I stopped reading there. The user does not place any stone. It’s not his job. He just wants to walk on the road. I still stand my position: no, it doesn’t matter for him. Do I believe that KDE is architecturally superior to GNOME? Yes (except for aRts, which is a big pile of dog puke). Do I care as a future developer? Yes. Do I care as a current user? No. I understand your concerns on the future of GNOME… but the user don’t. Some of them can’t even spell their name correctly so why should they care of the internals? And honestly, if you think GNOME is so hopeless, why do you bother to post? You don’t see me bitching on the fugliness of QT in KDE threads, after all.
OK, for one, he is displaying the Fedora implementation of KDE and GNOME… Bluecurve used with KDE just looks aweful, anyone will admit that. Red Hat/Fedora is one of the pioneers of GNOME, KDE is pretty much an after thought in that camp.
He mentions the menu’s for each desktop. KDE’s menu can be made to be more simple. In his example however, he seemed to have added stuff to the Multimedia menu, maybe KDE just picked up more of his apps? (I have known GNOME to miss some applications that I have installed).
Also, I notice he doesn’t look at Konqueror vs Epiphany etc as a web browser. I don’t use file managers enough to care what the functionality of them are. I can honestly say that enless I consciously go into Nautilus just to check it out, I have never used it. Likewise I never use Konqueror as a filemanager. He also states that the options for Konqueror are “overkill”, except I use every single option in there at least once during my tweaking. Its not overkill if its actually used.
I personally have a lot of issues finding things in GNOME’s control center, at least with KDE there is a search feature, and I don’t have to keep closing and opening different tools to find what I want. kcm’s are one of the best things about KDE, but this guy appears to not like them, thats fine. He can use the Preferences sub menu (after enabling it), and have just as tedious a time finding something as I have with GNOME. Kcontrol is one big kpart, its not cluttered, its just an easy way to find the configuration option you want.
Also, I must admit, his screenshot of Kontact looks horrible, but then it also looks very different to what I see. It almost appears he made an effort to make it look bad to me.
These are all the points he made… there are some valid reasons to use GNOME over KDE, but he didn’t state any of them. Next time, if someone is going to do this, please at least use the mainstream versions of each. A customized implementation of each can not be a basis for comparison.
I am almost disappointed that this even made it onto osnews.com… I was expecting something which displayed some thought
You are sooo wrong comparing mac with KDE, mac osx could be everything but never could be KDE, OSX its polished great HIG, less options do more, you dont see a zillions of configurable things.
I don’t say KDE is bad, just needs the direction for HIG.
And here is the problem. GNOME these days aims for the unexperienced users. Quite a contradictorily to the aims of GNOME don’t you think. Most important settings are simply hidden behind GConf (and not Gconfig better you get off and learn some basics before teaching knowledged people what the differences are).
I like hiden things, I give suport to customer by phone, you know, somethig like “go to the start menu then to configuration then to control panel after that click..”
Computer users usually don’t know much about computers, I can’t imagine a customer trying to find and specific option here:
http://www.ronny-klein.de/linux/archives/themes_kde.html
So many options, not useless, but a normal user find hard to do what he want and get lose.
Gconf have hiden configurations that are not really needed for normal operations, Kpanel have then all, needed and not needed that’s the problem with it, of course it is paradise for a tweaker with many time on his hands but not for a normal user.
> I do feel that Gnome is more likely to be successful on
> the corporate workstation than KDE
I don’t believe so. Even corporate people have eyes in their head and a brain they can use. When they spent some time into Linux and know more about the technical stuff and probably the two desktops they then will decide wisely. I recently had a conversation with someone who wanted to change his entire company (1200 Desktops) to GNOME but then they decided to use KDE after they figured out how messy GNOME really is.
> because there are less option to fiddle around with and it
> seems simplier to get things done
What things do you think they get done that simple ? I would know a couple of examples of the things you can do simplier on GNOME than e.g. KDE ? But ok be it like that, this still doesn’t change the broken Framework issue which is basicly the all and everything for a Desktop. No matter how less options you have, no matter how clean you assume the desktop to be, no matter how polished or nice you find it yourself. It still won’t change the broken junk inside it. As many people already explained (since they elaborated correctly) GNOME will take years (IF EVER) to reach quality of KDE.
Forget the ugly icons, forget the bazillion of Menu entries and forget all the tons of Options. These are all things you can change easily and quickly. Unfortunately you can’t easily change the broken stuff in GNOME that quickly. I wish it would be possible but as sad and realistic it sounds, it won’t happen.
> sure stock Gnome isn’t as polished as KDE, but Ximian
> Gnome is. Gnome 2.6 looks like it might just Gnome that
> extra bit of polish that it needs as well.
Yeah but thre rest remains GNOME, the same incomplete and unfinished Framework. Ximian GNOME may be a name in the public, but new apps need to be developed as well and that’s still the same problematic issue than using stock GNOME. You still deal with the problems I have described above.
We need a stable desktop, a desktop with good framework, nice applications and where we can be sure that rapid application development is possible. A Ximian GNOME won’t change anything here.
i use gnome xfce stylexp nextstep sawfish metacity x fluxbox/blackbox and enlightenment.
i like them because it gives users the freedom to customize their GUI, workflow and workspace fast and on the fly. they are lite and very customizable. they are also asthetically pleasing and most of the forementioned DE has panther, aqua os theme look, likewise they have Luna looking shells to bet yet only one has longhorn shell in effect but i guess thats not hard to make anyways.
What’s best really depends on the context and what internal model the users applies to the system they use.
Generally, single click is to be preferred in navigational settings. E.g. single click seam to work well in a web browsing context, but that is not the same thing as saying that it is the right thing in a desktop environment for general use.
Most long-time computer users prefer using double-click because it is what they are used to. However, if you had any experience teaching new computer users, you would know that double-click is a hard concept to grasp. Many take some time to understand where to double-click and where not to.
In addition to that, older new users find it hard to click two times quickly. Sure, after awhile they would get used to it, but still, they learn faster with single clicks.
As for getting used to single clicks after a life-time using using double-clicks, it is pretty fast actually. Took me somewhat a week to get used to single clicking, took my much older father a little more than that. The problem with KDE’s implementation of single click (which actually helps the learning process) is when you accidently double-click, it would execute the icon twice.
I never said Gnome had more users than Kde, I never even implied it, read the words d*mmit. And of the recent polls I’ve seen Kde has had roughly 2x the number of users Gnome has. But how many in total use Gnome? That’s not a few thousand. My point is that if Gnome is as bad as you Kde fanatics claim, why do so many people still choose Gnome?
And what I said about direction IS true. I follow the development of Gnome in a casual manner, and now stuff like integration and the underlying systems is being very much developed. How people will adapt to the spatial nautilus remains to be seen. I myself am mostly a CLI type of person, and I know my filesystem like my own pockets, so I’m not sure I like this move. I won’t know until I try, though.
You are btw exactly the kind of person who pisses me off. I use Gnome, because _I_ like it better. I am allowed to do this, and to me it _is_ better. I have used Kde, it’s not just some bogus opinion from thin air. But this does not mean I dislike Kde, I think Kde is great, I just happen to like Gnome better.
And you are not doing your favourite DE any favours by racking down on Gnome. If anything, there is even less a chance that I’ll ever shift to Kde because of you. I have no problems accepting the fact that some people like Kde better, I can even see why. Heck, I can even see why some people would prefer windows. And last time I checked, there were like 100x more windows users than Kde. Must be astonishingly much better then…
I shouldn’t waste my time posting in these pointless discussions, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I need to go do something useful now, like working on my exam…
> Computer users usually don’t know much about computers, I
> can’t imagine a customer trying to find and specific option
> here.
Excuse me, but why do these people want to use Linux then ? If they have no clue what they are doing they better head off using Windows. Every farmer can give help with Windows, every neighbour can and even every WalMart store can help these people in Windows related questions. Why do they want to bother with Linux then ?
New people unfamilar to computers make their first touch with Windows. They learn to use it, they using it fine and they strangely get their stuff done the way they like and Windows is overblown with configuration options.
Even my sister is far better in Microsoft Word than I ever was or ever will be (not to mention that I am not interested either). But you see that people as unexperienced they are are usually willing to learn and do it. They learn by mistakes and don’t make them again the next time.
Every now and then my sister comes up to me and tells me that her printer doesn’t work. Hell it’s even easier for me as Administrator and even as long years of Linux user to fix her 1 second problem with the printer on Windows rather than on Linux. Windows is dead simple but yet full of configuration stuff. People not interested in config stuff won’t fiddle with the things either.
Even cars, videorecorders, cellphones, pda’s, dvd burners, mp3 players are getting more features and things. And when I see people talking about technical stuff they usually go for the things with many options because they think it’s correct with their price.
Anyways you should clearly read my comments. All the options, icons and much menu entries you can IGNORE since these are things you can easily CHANGE. Changing all the stuff in KDE is far easier than fixing the broken Framework in GNOME.
> My point is that if Gnome is as bad as you Kde fanatics
> claim, why do so many people still choose Gnome?
If you spent time reading what I write then you may have figured out that I come from the GNOME architecture.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6348&offset=75&rows=90#21…
Here the reference in case you skipped it.
> And what I said about direction IS true. I follow the
> development of Gnome in a casual manner, and now stuff
> like integration and the underlying systems is being very
> much developed.
I am following the development for the past 5 years now. not just in a casual manner – I do it every day.
Excuse me, but why do these people want to use Linux then ? If they have no clue what they are doing they better head off using Windows. Every farmer can give help with Windows, every neighbour can and even every WalMart store can help these people in Windows related questions. Why do they want to bother with Linux then ?
For the same reason they use Windows?, are you telling me that they need to lear how to work with all those options if they want to use Linux? Of course not, they just GNOME and ready, they wont have to worry about it.
Even my sister is far better in Microsoft Word than I ever was or ever will be (not to mention that I am not interested either). But you see that people as unexperienced they are are usually willing to learn and do it. They learn by mistakes and don’t make them again the next time.
Yes people are willing to learn, but they are more worried aboyt getting their work done as fast as posible, less clicks, less options, just do what they need. Do you sister depends of a computer to have her work done? I dont know, but many customers I have does, they always complain about all the things they have to do for get something to work, so, GNOME feets really nice there.
Even cars, videorecorders, cellphones, pda’s, dvd burners, mp3 players are getting more features and things. And when I see people talking about technical stuff they usually go for the things with many options because they think it’s correct with their price
Wrong again, have n quantity of options its soo 90’s. take a look the iPod and count the buttons and options, And you and me know that the iPod kick ass despite the lack of options its has.
Anyways you should clearly read my comments. All the options, icons and much menu entries you can IGNORE since these are things you can easily CHANGE. Changing all the stuff in KDE is far easier than fixing the broken Framework in GNOME.
Options cannot be ignored if they are in your way, they are distracting, don’t talk w/o a bse please.
@crom
By oGALAXYo (IP: —.dip.t-dialin.net) – Posted on 2004-03-15 02:28:34
Here are a few polls that I found on the net that clearly demonstrates the domination of KDE in user acceptance.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&…..
http://www.dslreports.com/poll/vote?qid=1416629&aid=2
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/140330
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/poll.php?s=cdc36b681f2b32675cb605593b…..
http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=189515
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38449
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=179…..
http://www.fltk.org/poll.php?r13
my post was deleted i mean this really reminds me some presidents aproval poll some years ago.
> Yes people are willing to learn, but they are more worried
> aboyt getting their work done as fast as posible, less
> clicks, less options, just do what they need.
Ok and what WORK do these people get done with GNOME they can not get done with KDE ?
For my knowledge they can get the same work done with KDE as they would get done with GNOME. So far we hopefully agree.
Now let’s get a look beyond the tunnel (having a tunnelview is kinda pointless here).
Say that person wants to get REAL work done. Say he or she want’s to do some astrological stuff. Where will he get the software to get the work done ? GNOME doesn’t offer such a software so he or she can’t even start to work.
Say people come in #gnome every day complaining there is no CD burning application like K3b now how can they get their work done if the application is missing ?
Say people want to do presentation stuff like PowerPoint, where is the application on GNOME so these people can get the work done ?.
Say people want to do 3D stuff for their mechanical course, where do they get the application for GNOME ?
Say people want to do UML for their university course, where do they get that program for GNOME ? DIA ? Hell I am a practical example here that DIA is unusable to do a shite.
Now where is the software on GNOME to get exactly that work done ?. Looking over to KDE the software is existing already.
Ok I am not blaming GNOME for not having all this. NO. But I wanted to make you understand that a good Framework is required to guarantee rapid application development. Rapid application development means that the users do not need to wait 2 years until they get the work done, since they already have the software today to get the work done. And this software is in a way to be improved. They have no problems changing huge parts of their Code to fit the fixed Framework since the Framework on KDE is already in a very good condition. The developers concentrate on the fun stuff improving and echancing their applications rather than fixing stuff or get their app understanding the new changed API.
You know, a good Framework means that you can quickly develop programs. Programs that people can use to get serious work done.
I always wished GNOME would have such a great development Framework like KDE has but it sadly hasn’t and this is what I like people to understand. There is no point blaming one desktop and favoriting another one just for the Icons of for the Themes (as this editorial shows) it matters more that we have a good framework for the future and guarantee that apps are being written in masses.
This is all I wanted to say, nothing more, nothing less. If you are not willing to understand this (or not able to understand either due to limited knowledge) then this is your problem not mine. I took quite a lot of time to explain these things to you. By now everyone else reading this should have understood the points.
this is start of a flame war people cannot accept that they have their own preference in terms of programming usage and what not
who cares about the framework?
finall users don’t know what it is anyway, yes, you can get your wotk done with KDE too, that’s not my point, Im talking about HIG, read again, HIG, and you are talking about 3d and who knows what else, I stopped reading there, Im telling you some things of normal daily work are easier with GNOME, nothing else, im not even bashing KDE as you do with GNOME.
why would you rely heavily on gnome for all your needs?
i am not trying to flame you or anything about kthis and kthat that youre using.
what framework are you talking about are you talking about?
the kapps like k3b and other kstuff outthere are most of the time just front ends if yo install linux u can do cdrecord with a terminal anyways.
***Say people want to do presentation stuff like PowerPoint, where is the application on GNOME so these people can get the work done ?.
dude there is openoffice http://www.ooo.org for that!
***Say people want to do 3D stuff for their mechanical course, where do they get the application for GNOME ?
can you name an original kapp that does that or better kapp that performs much better than the ones out there?
***Say people want to do UML for their university course, where do they get that program for GNOME ? DIA ? Hell I am a practical example here that DIA is unusable to do a shite.
for uml try ximian gnome combo and please specify besides its opensource and lots of cool programmers outthere would fix it faster.
and seriously dude what framework are you talking about
tis not troll for tech so pls dont hate
All this really makes no sense. you have two great free DE’s both of which are better than windows, so waht’s the point in arguing which is better. i am an average user and use kde because of quanta and kdevelop(these take a lot of time to load in gnome) and if these were gnome apps, i would be using gnome!but i got say the new spatial mode in 2.6 will be the coolest feature!
I understand your point. However, the superior framework doesn’t justify some problems I’ve got here. The last time I used KDE, icons weren’t aligned in the file selector box! Fonts are also looking much better with Pango than QT. I know it’s trivial stuff. Then again, it’s that trivial stuff that affecting my experience directly. If it’s that easy to fix, why aren’t they bothering to do it? Why aren’t they bothering to develop a better interface (if it was better, most people wouldn’t bother to modify it to their likings)? Get a more sane HIG and force developers to comply with it? Why, as an user, should I trust them with their framework if they can’t fix stuff like that? Like I said previously, the framework don’t mean shit to user. Only the end result does. If the result in KDE was always superior, I don’t think we would have this argument right now. But is that the case…?
I completely agree with you that KDE is light-years ahead GNOME for RAD. Then again, I believe that most applications developed for GNOME are of an higher quality than their KDE counterparts. For example, I personally find Epiphany/Firefox superior to Konqueror (I know that Firefox isn’t a GNOME app. but it’s using GTK2). Same thing with Ximian Evolution and OpenOffice, XChat, GAIM… Many users and developers must think the same way or developers wouldn’t bother to develop GTK wrappers for QT. To be fair, there’s no K3B on GNOME. Then again,there’s no GIMP for KDE either. And I believe that the GIMP is more used than astrological or mechanical software… Most users are only using basic applications like I do and I don’t think this will change soon.
KDE has the potential to be far better than GNOME, to be the Ferrari like you proudly claimed in a previous post. However, *I* believe it’s more a Dodge Aries with only the Ferrari engine right now. Of course, this will change… but so GNOME will also change.
lol why would you be a ferrari when you can be a starship enterprise
ok for your own safety pls dont disregard this.
> For example, I personally find Epiphany/Firefox superior to
> Konqueror (I know that Firefox isn’t a GNOME app. but it’s
> using GTK2). Same thing with Ximian Evolution and
> OpenOffice, XChat, GAIM… Many
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6348&offset=75&rows=90#21…
First paragraph. Nothing more I can add.
“Most long-time computer users prefer using double-click because it is what they are used to. However, if you had any experience teaching new computer users, you would know that double-click is a hard concept to grasp. Many take some time to understand where to double-click and where not to.
In addition to that, older new users find it hard to click two times quickly. Sure, after awhile they would get used to it, but still, they learn faster with single clicks.
As for getting used to single clicks after a life-time using using double-clicks, it is pretty fast actually. Took me somewhat a week to get used to single clicking, took my much older father a little more than that. The problem with KDE’s implementation of single click (which actually helps the learning process) is when you accidently double-click, it would execute the icon twice.
”
Once in a while, people design keyboards that are supposed to improve typing speed. Most of them would not be harder to learn. New users would benefit a lot since they wouldn’t have to relearn. Still we don’t change our keyboards. Why? because all the relearning needed to be done by existing users would be too expensive. We just accept that a keyboard the way it is. In this case one week or two is far to long. Facing that, most companies will say lets upgrade to the next version of windows instead.
The same could be said about double click and the general apperance of the computer desktop. Xerox, Apple and Microsoft have already defined it for us. It’s sort of sad, but I guess Linux and other free software developers have themselves to blame. When Xerox et al did of their job, most open source gurus would tell you that if it couldn’t be done in “vi” it was not worth doing. This macho attitude have costed us a lot of valuable time and perhaps even the freedom of create the desktops we dream of and have them widely used.
So actually it doesn’t really matter if double click is better or not. It has been decided for us. Red Hat and many other Linux distros knows this and designs custom KDE themes where double click is the default.
This doesn’t alter the fact that our tests shows that the kind of user that is most likely to use the computer in a business setting will be better off with double click. I admit that these user studies of mine could be biased by the fact that it is so hard to find people in the age between 7 and 60 that never have used double click. Even
if you try very hard you end up with perhaps one user out of hundred. But then again, that might tell you something.
And yes, I do have teaching experience, and I do agree with you, old people may have harder to learn double click. But, look at your office environment how many people do you see that is 60+, that are completely new to computers?
I could also tell you that single click probably reduces risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. But as I said the choice is allready made for us.
Anyway, it is no point in developing for the user we want to have if he doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I did read that… And that somewhat prove my point that a framework doesn’t mean much to the user if applications aren’t using it properly. It’s the end result that matters.
However, I’m giving a chance to KDE… and that’s why I’m giving a chance to GNOME too. I don’t follow the development as deeply as you do but I don’t believe their cause is hopeless as you *seem* to believe.
“……., GNU awesome, and that they have to jihad everybody else into submission. Therefore there’s little focus in the Gnome community on just making a good desktop, damn it, with decent technologies and well integrated….”
As a Os X user I wont comment on this quotes remarks about the Gnome community. However, as an arabic speaker I have point out the blatant misuse of the word “Jihad”. it is used in the context of to “beat” here. The correct meaning is a combination of struggling and striving.
It seems incredible that OSNEWS staff bothered to mention this obviously irrelevant and useless «article»(?)
No reason occurs to me, except, perhaps, a degenerate and perverse instinct of self-promotion by instigating yet one more gratuitous war amidst uncritical fanatics.
This site’s interest lies 99,999% on the readers comments; it is a great community with very, very poor «news» editing behind.
OK. It was a Sunday, and you had better things to do than write about OS stuff. No problem, just spare us the bullshit!
I really can’t pin point what is actually broken about the GNOME framework or application programming interface. In fact, I don’t see anything broken about it. Many of the GNOME framework and application programming interfaces were rewritten following the move to the 2.X series. Many GNOME/GTK+ applications where created before this grandiose move. And many are in the process of upgrading their applications to make full use of the GNOME APIs.
Developers that wrote applications for GNOME-1.X series had to rewrite their applications for the GNOME-2.X series. The GNOME-2.X APIs were still new to them as such many of the developers weren’t able to harness completely the new APIs. For example, I often here of people exclaiming that there isn’t a K3B for GNOME. Many GNOME-1.X users would readily remember gnome toaster, gcombust or even X-CD-Roast which fit nicely into the GNOMe-1.X destop environment. Unfortunately, none of their developers where motivated to update their applications to harness the new APIs necessary to integrate well with the GNOMe-2.X desktop. The same holds true for many other applications.
The problem isn’t a broken framework. The problem might be that the developers aren’t aware of the new APIs, or aren’t attracted to the new APIs, or see no compelling reason to port their applications to exploit the new APIs. Also, the GNOME/GTK APIs are different from the KDE/QT ones. Almost every KDE developer is forced to use many of the KDE/QT APIs and framework, like dcop, kpart, kioslaves etc. The same does not hold true for GNOME/GTK+ developers. In fact, many GNOME/GTK+ developers just use the widget tool kit, GTK+ to develop their applications ignoring the other APIs, like bonobo, libgnome, libart, ORBit etc.
In order words, GNOME/GTK+ developers aren’t forced to use particular APIs that enforce interoperability and integration of services at a lower level. This was intentional by design. Whether it is right or wrong is open for debate. Nevertheless, this still doesn’t mean that GNOME technological framework is broken or poorly designed. It only means that KDE developers better harness and exploit their technological framework than GNOME/GTK+ developers do. The goal of the GNOME foundation should first and foremost be to encourage developers to make extensive use of the GNOME APIs. Perhaps they are not attractive to use. Perhaps they are not properly advertised. Perhaps they are not well documented. Perhaps they are just plain ugly. Perhaps they are still new. Whatever the reasons are, evidently, the GNOME APIs are not used by majority of GNOME/GTK+ developers.
Now several projects are working towards this. Only recently the Abiword, Gnumeric developers where discussing better integration of their apps into GNOME. Ximian are proceeding to gnomify Openoffice.org. They are also working towards introducing a newer, better language, C#, and an attractive more sophisticated RAD framework to GNOME, Mono. Many of the GNOME developers are actively working towards utilizing the projects on fd.o, dbus, cario, utopia, gstreamer, libsvg to mention but a few. All these projects although still at their infancy, represent the future and the direction GNOME is heading and GNOME is adopting. I’d even wager that many of the projects on fd.o that clamor for inteoperability, integration are the voices of GNOME/GTK+ developers.
These and many more is where GNOME is/might be heading. And hopefully new developers will find these new technologies enjoyable and fun to work with. And also, hopefully, new and old developers will introduce these technologies into their applications. The new GNOME framework is not broken. Unfortunately it changes too quickly and developers are often caught napping during these changes. It will take a few years before the APIs, especially the new ones stabilize. These are the sacrifices that need to be made to bring the future of desktop computing to Linux and the world.
None of my posts were ment as a reply to any of yours, so why are you bashing me? It was aimed at an anonymous post which came as a reply to a previous post of mine, in which there was no mention of him using gnome. In fact the contrary seemed obvious.
I think it is you who must read what is written, not me
And I do follow the development pretty closely, I don’t follow every gnome mailing list to do so, though.
Well, I’ve to admit that my previous article could be improved in several ways. I agree that to choose the default Fedora RPMs wasn’t a good idea although I really doubt that compiling everything from scratch would have made it better. But, now one can say it’s all the fault of Fedora.
I also should have worked on the article a little more because it seems quite unfinished and not very convincing. The main point here is that I really like the method of presenting two similar screenshots from the different DEs. To talk about the functionality and features is one thing. But, hey, we are talking about GUIs which should convince me not to use the shell after all.
So, if somebody wants to submit me links or even whole articles which compare KDE (or any other DE) with Gnome in a similar manner (two screenshots, a short description) I would be glad to post them here. I try to be unprejudiced. And, actually, I would love to see an article which is more in favor for KDE – just to understand. Here is my mail address: ronny_klein AT yahoo DOT de
P.S.: I appreciate choice. I appreciate the hard work of the KDE community. Don’t get me wrong: nobody is forced to agree with me.
“Once in a while, people design keyboards that are supposed to improve typing speed. Most of them would not be harder to learn. New users would benefit a lot since they wouldn’t have to relearn. Still we don’t change our keyboards. Why? because all the relearning needed to be done by existing users would be too expensive. We just accept that a keyboard the way it is. In this case one week or two is far to long. Facing that, most companies will say lets upgrade to the next version of windows instead.”
Learning a new keyboard is hardly the same as learning to single-click. Oh, and btw, this has happened more than you think in the non-English world.
“The same could be said about double click and the general apperance of the computer desktop. Xerox, Apple and Microsoft have already defined it for us. It’s sort of sad, but I guess Linux and other free software developers have themselves to blame. When Xerox et al did of their job, most open source gurus would tell you that if it couldn’t be done in “vi” it was not worth doing. This macho attitude have costed us a lot of valuable time and perhaps even the freedom of create the desktops we dream of and have them widely used. ”
IIRC, the PARC environments didn’t use double-click. They used a one select and other activate scheme.
“So actually it doesn’t really matter if double click is better or not. It has been decided for us. Red Hat and many other Linux distros knows this and designs custom KDE themes where double click is the default.”
This contradicts the GNOME argument of sane defaults. If it’s best to have only a few preferences and then that ought to be done, then isn’t it true that if it’s best to use single-click (which it is) then that ought to be done as well?
“This doesn’t alter the fact that our tests shows that the kind of user that is most likely to use the computer in a business setting will be better off with double click. I admit that these user studies of mine could be biased by the fact that it is so hard to find people in the age between 7 and 60 that never have used double click. Even
if you try very hard you end up with perhaps one user out of hundred. But then again, that might tell you something.
And yes, I do have teaching experience, and I do agree with you, old people may have harder to learn double click. But, look at your office environment how many people do you see that is 60+, that are completely new to computers?”
Actually, based on my experience teaching hundreds of adults and young adults, that number is far greater. There are many people who sort of know how to do it but they are confused in that they will double-click on links in a Web page or click too rapidly or manually stop holding the mouse and then push the button twice. So, these people “understand” how to double-click but they really don’t know how to do it properly. There’s no need to confuse them. If I were making KDE’s welcome wizard, I’d add an option to switch it to double-click at the first startup. The noobs wouldn’t know what it meant and would ignore it. The “corrupted” would change it or decide to walk on the wild side.
“I could also tell you that single click probably reduces risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. But as I said the choice is allready made for us.”
You are right. Carpal tunnel syndrome is very aggravated by needless clicking. If any of my users who report wrist or lower arm pain, I immediately switch them over to single-click. Many have thanked me for helping alleviate their pain.
on my fedora machine, every time i open an menu in KDE it hangs and I have top press alt or esc to reset it and try again to open the wanted programm.
Is there any solution`?
How to remove the hide buttons complete from the gnome panels`? See a comment in the “review”
thx
one thing i dont like about gnome is their icons! they have to be resized using streched!!!
I think E17 is going to be serious competition with KDE and Gnome as it will not be a minimalist WM any longer, but a full desktop environment. In the meantime no one ever mentions XFCE4 which is very lightweight, but will do anything a DE requires. The file manager rocks. The LAN browser in it is flawless.
I think the KDE framework is actually causing many (casual) developers to be lazy. I mean, want to make a new PIM app. Jst make a container for Kmail, Korganizer, Kaddressbook and Kwhatever and you have an app. But this stagnates development as far as I can see. there is no substitute for real programming, i.e., something involving writing totally new code.
I think the most overrated thing about KDE is how everything ‘interoperates’. It al interoperates with itself. It is not of much use to be able to embed a Kspread document in Kword, when you want people to actually access the document from Abiword. They will not have Kspread to actually display the spreadsheet for them. I know my example may not be accurate, but the idea is what is important. KDE apps are useless standing alone. I know they are not supposed to be used alone by design, but it really makes it not worthwhile. Many GTK/GNOME apps are ported to other operating systems. Right now, there is work on porting Gnumeric to windows. This is possible because you do not need the whole of GNOME to use Gnumeric. They are slowly dropping unnecessary dependencies to be able to achieve this.
As I said in another posting, in many ways GNOME/GTK makes more sense than KDE/Qt. Look at it this way. If you want to use the nice KDE file selectors, you need to install kdebase. There are at least 2 other file selectors available. If you do not want to make kdebase a dependency, you are unable to use the nicer file selector. The GNOME people rightfully resisted creating their own file selector, but now, once implemented in GTK, GNOME gets a very good fileselector. anyone making GTK apps gets the new file selector without having to add to the dependencies.
Let me give you a view examples of what I think of being a broken framework:
a) When I implment new features but do it just half. Adding GStreamer to GNOME for example which is indeed a nice thing but adding it only to half of the apps and skipping the others is a bug.
b) Fixing half of the stuff in apps. Say you committ a patch that fixes 2 dialogs in Nautilus but leaves the others as they were 2 years before is imo a bug. Makes using the app become, well ugly.
c) Offering multiple ways to open a Window in GNOME is a bug. GTK+, GnomeUI, BonoboUI. This leads to inconsistency and total clutter.
d) Writing a new Fileselector but have the default apps use a mixture of old and New Fileselectors is imo a bug. By the way why should a developer waste time fixing all old and new Filedialogs ? If the stuff is properly written then you simply inherit the new Fileselector without noticing it. It’s simply there. Here is a proof that not everything in GNOME 2.0 is re-written. Much of the stuff is simply ported from 1.x.
e) When copying files via Nautilus (say http://ftp.gnome.org) and you copy a subdir which includes MORE directories and files from that FTP to your Desktop and you get stuff like
(copying file 98 of 23)
Or get 0byte files copied from that FTP to your Desktop then this is a bug.
f) Gnomifying OpenOffice is an even bigger bug. The entire OpenOffice framework is based on the Staroffice Foundation Class (Their own Widgetset). Gnomifying all this is simply an idiotic task and leads to fragmentation in the code. Again they will do this work only hal. Only what you see will be changed not the rest. So the result is a mixture of old code and new changed User Experience.
g) Hardcoded UI is a bug (at least under GNOME), it leads no space for UI designers to fix all the stuff without code skills. Where should they start ? In the Hardcoded stuff ? In the *.glade stuff ? In the .xml stuff ?
h) Having all apps do their own bookmarks system is a bug, There is no central bookmarks solution. Same for Addressbooks etc.
i) When I call out for a bounty and have people called up to ‘tweak and fiddle’ Evolution support into the Panel Callendar then this is a bug and not a feature. A feature would be if I changed the Callendar Object so when I inherit it into other applications that all these apps will benefit from the Evolution support and not just one.
—-
And yes what you write is indeed also a big problem (at least your text is partially right). A lot of undocumented API changes. A lot of undocumented changes itself.
E.g. I wrote a little Application which uses a GtkCombo I was in the assumption to use a good API from GTK and then one day they changed the Widget and marked this one DEPRECATED and this in a new App that I wrote.
The changes are quite huge and I feel quite frustrated having this one changed to adopt the new Widgets. It’s not just trivial changes these changes I have to do are quite huge and will take me a couple of days. The days I usually have to stay motivated to do the work. Now instead of improving my application I need to fiddle around to remove the old stuff, go through 10 source files and remove the stuff. Not to mention that I also need to re-write huge chunks of code only to fix the stuff.
While the old GtkCombo allowed me to simply attach a GList to it (my ‘History’ function is based on a GList which contains 5 Listentries which have Data applied) I now need to create an entire TreeModell again and populate that Tree with these values.
What I do here is changing a well thought interface (which I spent hours to figure out before) into a new interface and what I do is tweak and fiddle the stuff in a way to make it fit there. Which then leaves other parts of my code get slightly unoptimal as I used to have in mind before.
Your first example is rubbish:
a) When I implment new features but do it just half. Adding GStreamer to GNOME for example which is indeed a nice thing but adding it only to half of the apps and skipping the others is a bug.
What are you actually trying to say. Does every application need to add GStreamer? Why don’t you specify precisely what features are not implemented and state where GNOME has stated officially or unofficially not to implement it. Rather than just throwing around unfounded accusations and fud, you may want to try some facts every once in a while. It is good for your health.
Your second example doesn’t cut it either:
b) Fixing half of the stuff in apps. Say you committ a patch that fixes 2 dialogs in Nautilus but leaves the others as they were 2 years before is imo a bug. Makes using the app become, well ugly.
Still short on specifics. If you are such a great software developer and you claim to have been working for GNOME but yet you have not been able to solve even one of the problems you whine about years on end. Where are all the bug reports you have filed? Where are all the patches you are submitted that the GNOME ‘people’ have refused to commit. Please give us more facts, and soon.
Your third example is not any better:
c) Offering multiple ways to open a Window in GNOME is a bug. GTK+, GnomeUI, BonoboUI. This leads to inconsistency and total clutter.
How about you give an example of the clutter that this causes. Are you complaining that GTK+ has only one way to open a window, or that GnomeUI has only one way to open a window or that GTK, GnomeUI and BonoboUI altogether have three ways to open a window? By the same logic I can complain that QT,GTK, Motif, FLTK, FOX have 5 ways to open a window which is a bug! So again you are just throwing words without any meaning.
Your next example
d) Writing a new Fileselector but have the default apps use a mixture of old and New Fileselectors is imo a bug. By the way why should a developer waste time fixing all old and new Filedialogs ? If the stuff is properly written then you simply inherit the new Fileselector without noticing it. It’s simply there. Here is a proof that not everything in GNOME 2.0 is re-written. Much of the stuff is simply ported from 1.x.
just tells me that you don’t know or understand sh*t about things in GNOME as you claim all the time. It also brings doubt your claimed knowledge about software development because I don’t need to remind you of what happens during API changes such as the one going on in the FileSelector. Are you claiming that you have invented a way to change the API that is backward compatible and the ‘GNOME people’ have rejected your idea? Or are you saying that they could have done better? But I thought you were working for GNOME? How come things went so bad when genius oGALAXYo was around? Oh I forgot, the ‘GNOME people’ did not want your help, is that it? In any case, provide specifics not blanket statements and you’ll make yourself more understandable and less trollish in the future.
Well, you never cease to amuse me:
e) When copying files via Nautilus (say http://ftp.gnome.org) and you copy a subdir which includes MORE directories and files from that FTP to your Desktop and you get stuff like
(copying file 98 of 23)
Or get 0byte files copied from that FTP to your Desktop then this is a bug.
This one and all the rest of your ‘examples’ are just too funny. You have just gone to ‘bugzilla’ and copied things over. Unless you can show an official or unofficial policy from GNOME not to fix these issues, they are moot. Just because they are not fixed when you want does not make the framework broken. I can go to any project and collect the buglist off bugzilla to make the project look bad and that seems to be your intention with respect to GNOME. What puzzles me is your motivation to do so which you have never mentioned but I suspect it has to do with some closed-source browser issue.
I’m sure I’m not the only one tired of seeing all these verbose spillage of fud from you every time a GNOME article shows up.
I have to disagree with you on a number of counts.
Firstly, it is common knowledge that the old file selector API was basically useless. There was no way to add functionality without breaking stuff, so they added a new API to use instead of the old, and developers can transition to the new at their own pace.
Deprecated stuff means it works. I am sure that only means at the next major upgrade of GTK, deprecated stuff may/will not be included. That would probably be at GTK3. Its like OSS sound system is deprecated in the 2.6 range of kernels, but it still works. The problem is that you have two choices when you find you have features that cannot be upgraded easily. You either add a new separate API and keep the old, which makes for inconsistency, or you depracate it, and remain consistent in the future when everyone transitions to the new.
Evolution is being split in the way it is so that other apps can use its components. All you need is to have the data-server installed, and you can use the address book and so on. Of course, it is obvious apps have to be changed to communicate with the address book because previously, they didn’t have to communicate with it.
The bookmarks problem actually transcends the desktop thing. There is a need for a unified bookmarks system. I am sure there is a freedesktop.org effort to do this. This is probably mostly a GNOME effort thus far. Truth be told, the interoperability between KDE apps alone is not something that is all that if it means you have to use KDE to be able to use a unified bookmarks system. Its like Microsoft all over again, except KDE is not a monopoly right now.
every desktop has its problems if we decide to nitpick. I haven’t used KDE in a long time, so I am not qualified to nitpick on it, lest I be very innaccurate.
Why so frustrated and why attacking my person ? Do you fear that I could be right and you not ? Your reply is far to ridiculous and only a try to publicly destroy my creditibility rather than a sign of willing to accept the critics as I write them (since they are right) and start discussion with the community and have these problems solved. People like you are more up to attack those who bring up constructive criticism and feedback rather than true willing to change the true things.
> What are you actually trying to say. Does every
> application need to add GStreamer? Why don’t you specify
> precisely what features are not implemented and state
> where GNOME has stated officially or unofficially not to
> implement it.
Not every application needs to embedd GStreamer that’s pure rubbish. But the audio stuff should and should do that correctly. Right now in GNOME we deal with direct Xine calls and GStreamer calls. Developer have been chosing Xine in many tools (Totem and Rhythmbox) due to stability reasons because GStreamer still is unfinished, no stable API and no general stability. They do still offer the posibility to include the GStreamer stuff but what benefits does it give when it locks up during playback or simply doesn’t play back at all. Go and get a look in the code yourself id you don’t trust my words. Let’s continue with the new GMixer, it was hyped that it now supports the GStreamer stuff but yet it doesn’t. When I select ‘alsasink’ in GConf-Editor then I would like to be able to Mix the alsa stuff and not get a dialog that the sound devices an not be found. The reason why it can not be found is it still expects the OSS emulation in Alsa to be active so it just mixes the OSS part of alsa but not the native part. I thought it uses GStreamer here, so I do assume it to use the right sinks and right devices to Mix. Just one example.
> Still short on specifics. If you are such a great software
> developer and you claim to have been working for GNOME but
> yet you have not been able to solve even one of the
> problems you whine about years on end.
The problem here is you can’t simply sent in bugfixes or patches when your innerst tells you that this is plain wrong and needs to be re-done correctly. See it like a house where you continue glueing stuff into it. A bit here, a bit there a bit in another place and you see how the stuff you are doing makes no sense but yet you continue because you can’t convince the other owners that it would be better to trash the entire house and start from scratch.
> Where are all the bug reports you have filed? Where are
> all the patches you are submitted that the GNOME ‘people’
> have refused to commit. Please give us more facts, and
> soon.
They are either on bugzilla.gnome.org or made their way in the Applications in case they got accepted. I know you are trying to pick here but you won’t be successful. For further information you can look into ChangeLogs. But this isn’t your point at all, you will reply and tell me that you wasn’t able to find a shit (many others have tried this before). I think you should get out of your tunnelview and your evangelism here and start looking into the real problems. Guess why there aren’t any changes in GNOME because people and developers fear to do these changes or raise constructive criticism because it ends in things like this. Ignorance, Elitism, Tunnelview and even worse Namecalling.
> How about you give an example of the clutter that this
> causes. Are you complaining that GTK+ has only one way to
> open a window, or that GnomeUI has only one way to open a
> window or that GTK, GnomeUI and BonoboUI altogether have
> three ways to open a window?
The problem here is interoperability with the rest of GNOME. Try opening a couple of applications on your GNOME desktop. Say one program written using GnomeUI, one written in GTK+ one written in BonoboUI. Now go to:
Desktop-Preferences -> Menus&Toolbars
And fiddle around with the values there. You will see that some programs imidiately change the Toolbar and Menu behaviour, some not, some change their appearance after they got opened and closed and some even do not react on these settings at all. Just one example only to satisfy your questions here.
Technically they are a pain to maintain too. Specially for UI people, those who go from app to app fixing all the paddings, Layout of buttons and widgets etc. There is a big difference if you use one GUI designer or one system to change all this or need to learn 3-4 different but common used ways to change all this.
It is problematic having hardcoded UI in the code (which requires that an UI expert needs to learn to programm to solve these things) or if you use GLADE (which can create *.glade files or simply embeddable code) or if you use BonoboUI with it’s *.xml files. They are all totally differently, different attributes, different behaviour etc. And yet I do see people using all these things in their own apps over and over again. Sure core developers may use the correct way for their upcoming products but not the new developers who start working on their apps. They use GLADE to build the interface but forget or don’t know that GLADE isn’t aware of all the new DEPRECATED widgets or new widgets that have been introduced lately. Go and look yourself.
> just tells me that you don’t know or understand sh*t about
> things in GNOME as you claim all the time. It also brings
> doubt your claimed knowledge about software development
> because I don’t need to remind you of what happens during
> API changes such as the one going on in the FileSelector.
No I was more demonstrating how good the KDE framework for these kind of things are. They change the Object Fileselector one time (regardless what changes they do) and it’s automatically inherit into other apps. While in GNOME they now offer 2 Fileselectors the old and the new one. Different API is a problem here but this is a sign that the stuff is simply an artifact from GTK 1 and GNOME 1 times. If it was a total rewrite as you want to make me believe then this would have been introduced far earlier.
What I also speak about is the consistent look of these Fileselectors. The new Fileselector now offers this stupid ‘expander’ widget where you first get a locationbar (at least some apps show this) and then need to press the expander to get the rest of the files shown. To much magic and to much ‘usability experts’ have made a huge mess once again for a simply shitty fileselector. Jesus we use Fileselectors of 20 years and longer they do what the name says showing files and directories where we can simply dive in and do the task. No magic techno stuff that yet requires 3 mouseclicks to actually do what I want.
> This one and all the rest of your ‘examples’ are just too
> funny. You have just gone to ‘bugzilla’ and copied things
> over.
No I didn’t copied them but it’s ok for me that you confirm these problems to exist. Now we have GNOME 2.6 in a couple of days and these problems are still there since GNOME 2.0 or even earlier who actually knows. You seriously want to go enterprise with these problems ? And when will they get fixed ? Is it even possible to fix these issues ?
> Unless you can show an official or unofficial policy
> from GNOME not to fix these issues, they are moot. Just
> because they are not fixed when you want does not make the
> framework broken.
As long these things are not fixed and even unknown whether they can be fixed at all – yes I do have the tendency to say that these things are broken. People who write a FTP client for GNOME use an alternative library to do these things since they can not reliably use the ones offered in the GNOME framework due to these errors. People writing a Webbrowser for example can’t use the HTTP backend of gnome-vfs due it not to work reliable not doing redirections for URL’s etc. Sure there are always bugs in such projects. I am the last person admitting that there aren’t bugs. Every bigger project has a lot of them and this is natural and just the way it is.
But here are the fundamental problems I do see in GNOME. They spent to much time rewriting stuff over and over again and want to do everything the right way (excuse me, there isn’t something as the right way, there is just one way and another way but the right way doesn’t exist). You need to finish a project and then head over to the other one and make sure that with increasing version of GNOME that the stuff you offer to the people is less painful and usable.
Nautilus used to show signals of becoming a well not as crappy Filemanager as it used to be and now it has been changed into a Spatial Filemanager. This is a drastical change for the Users. While they have done such drastical changes in the behavior of Nautilus they forget to fix the other things due to lack of resources. Imo it would have been better fixing gnome-vfs and all the other tiny bits and bytes rather than re-writing stuff that has been written before and has shown signal that they work. This is going over and over in GNOME and still no sign or signal where we as users can see (look here the evolution of the software is finished, we can have it stay that way and lets continue working on other bits). No they are busy throwing over concepts and re-write them over and over again. And all the developers outside who work on their own software need to play catchup to have their app following the new changes. Instead doing the funstuff to continue improving their app they stick into all these messy changes.
And hey, this is just my very own opinion. That’s why I do fullheartly welcome the Quality and Assurance team in KDE. They will clearly signal the developers ‘hey what are you doing now ?’.
> I’m sure I’m not the only one tired of seeing all these
> verbose spillage of fud from you every time a GNOME
> article shows up.
Whatever you think. There are people outside who agree with me there are people outside who agree with you. That’s life but I do see a reason here to make people understand these things before writing editorials like these. A good solid framework and nice applications are important.
If people come over and over again with their counted Applications they like to use and others come over with the same old junk over and over. The same way I come over with the same stuff to make people understand the problems here.
GNOME has copied a lot of stuff from MacOSX and Windows in the past months and years. Sadly the wrong bits were copied.
A last thing to add from my side that people do not think about. KDE already offers all these things already. Two years ago when I used KDE 3.x I already noticed a lot of stuff in KDE that were missing and still are missing in GNOME.
I do know that one day someone will fix the broken gnome-vfs. But when ? As long as these things are not working properly people use other libraries to solve the solutions they need to solve. GNOME may (or may not) get all these things one day. Say in 2 years by now. But KDE had exactly all these things 2 years ago already. There is a development difference of 4 years between both Desktop solutions. While GNOME is catching up to what KDE offered 2 years ago KDE continues to quickly expand in all areas and the applications it offers are growing as well and new applications can easily be developed in a short timeframe.
These things you should take into account to when doing such editorials. Not just looking at fancy icons and compare two screenshots. I would say the same things about GNOME if GNOME were in the position to be much enchanced over KDE. Although even KDE is lacking a bunch of things that I would see more improved.
– Split out applications in own Modules like in GNOME rather than having all put into kdelibs, kdebase, kdeutils etc.
– More clean layout of includes in the includes directory like GNOME does (by default and not per distro excuse during install).
– Make sure the .po files come with the module rather than a separate huge translated tarball.
I here again do like the way GNOME does it. As you see neither of both are perfect.
Don’t you think that instead of complaining, a good way of improving things would be to start coding instead of losing time in endless discussions?
Just my 2 cents,
I think GNOME developers are going about it the right way, and once again I don’t see anything broken in their APIs or methodologies. Gstreamer is slowly being introduced into GNOME. It is not as stable and as mature as Xine is, so Xine is primarily used as the media API of choice. When Gstreamer matures up to the point that it is better, more robust and more mature than Xine is, then many gnome/gtk+ applications will slowly replace Xine with Gstreamer. What is so irrational or broken about that? Do you suggest GNOME get rids of Xine/esd for a media framework that is yet untested and less mature than either of them?
The file selector has changed for the better. Lets accept it. Nautilus is now spacial, except we are willing to fork Nautilus, lets deal with it. Gnome-vfs is not perfect yet and it still changing. Should we throw it away because it doesn’t working perfectly? What do you suggest we do? Openoffice.org is being gnomified. You don’t like that. Do you want to start an office suit project from the scratch? Gnome is adopting most of the technologies over at fd.o in name of interoperability between desktops. You seem to think this is backward and that instead GNOME should focus on GNOME-only, gnome-centric technologies, like the KDE folks are doing. I think you are being shortsighted, no offense.
When a building becomes old and weak because it’s foundation was poorly designed, patching the building won’t make a difference. It is bound to collapse sooner or later. You need to demolish it an start all over again this focusing on long term design goals and solid building principles. The GNOME folks have admitted they made mistakes earlier in GNOME’s conception. They have no choice but to rewrite many of the underlying framework from scratch, for how long do you want them to patch APIs in the name of backward compatibility?
Unfortunately, adopting new technologies and changes do come with their burdens. Many developers need to update their applications which can be a pain. Some of these changes might affect users too. But in my opinion, the benefits justify the pain. In body building, the mantra is “No Pain, No Gain.” Contrary to your opinion, almost all the changes going on in GNOME are for the better. The GNOME framework and underlying framework is being slowly remodeled to create a more robust platform for the future. I don’t see the mess. What I see is a lack of awareness, perhaps lack of education and a bitter gnomer who is resisting the waves of change.
I don’t claim GNOME is perfect. Or that KDE isn’t better than GNOME is many respects. However, what don’t accept is that GNOME is unusable, broken and/or light years behind KDE. It’s like a chess game. Because you have capture all my pawns doesn’t make you a winner. What gone is doing right now is pulling back the the string of the bow, waiting at the right moment to release the arrow. It might seem like a step backward, but is merely a spring board into the future.
No offense, but I can’t help but observe your shortsightedness, especially since you are a gnome developer. I mean, you and I both know that new technologies don’t get mature overnight. You and I both know the amount of work needed to create cross desktop interoperability in Unix. You and I both know that APIs needed to be broken to get rid of unwanted baggage and to evolve. After all, isn’t that what differentiates Windows development from open source development? To claim the GNOME framework is mess, with all due respect, is an exaggeration. Clearly GNOME has issues, but they all fall under bug reports at bugzilla to be fixed as time permits. You make it sound like GNOME is facing a catastrophic crisis, and apocalypse that will eventually end its annihilation. It is not.
The challenge for GNOME is to find an avenue to expose, advertise, improve upon those APIs, hammer on the benefits of using them and make them attractive and fun for developers use. As much as I question the existence and usage of Mono, it seems to be doing just that. But hey, if that will attract and force developers to make use of the essential gnome APIs and make coding fun for them, there is very little I can do about that. Technologies should speak for themselves, I believe.
“Don’t you think that instead of complaining, a good way of improving things would be to start coding instead of losing time in endless discussions? ”
No, that just reaks of being useful. Heaven forbid somebody backup their complaints and fix things.
This is a comparison of two DE’s on one distro; HIGHLY CUSTOMIZED DE’s that were made to look like a Red Hat desktop. Doesn’t Red Hat focus on Gnome? Doesn’t Gnome look sooo much better on Red Hat and Fedora when Red Hat spends twice as much time making it look that way?
Well I like Gnome more too… it’s just that when you compare Gnome and KDE, you might try comparing them in their natural state. Compile the sources and compare the results then.
How about Fluxbox? Enlightenment? Any takers?
gosh are that many comments, haven’t read any of them, nor do I intend to do it anytime soon again (so replies to my post will likely stay unanswered…)
I just want to say a very simple thing, neither kde/gnome nor ‘the other’ is really useable for a wide mass of people, they both have their flaws and could learn much from each other, kde is hard at beginners it really gives the user the feeling to be overwhelmed and not to have the control over the computer, gnome on the other hand is nice to beginners but I (as example for a long-time computer user) can’t even find how to split nautilus into two views.
Perhaps the best approach for kde would be to hide more advanced options (find out which one’s are used by beginners) by default, or best ask at the first-time how the user would like it (with some screenshots perhaps) so everyone could choose their level of complexity.
I think I will post something on kdedevelopers.org (very nice site to see what’s going on in the future) were usuabilty and such is already much discussed, hope it will work somehow…
-mjb
Tell me how to do this in gnome and maybe I would consider using it:
1. When I log on in KDE, all the apps I’ve been using are restored properly in the virtual desktop that I was using them.
2. I have an option in KDE that allows me to keep my windows settings (it also work with no KDE apps); in gnome the apps (specially gnome-terminal) don’t open with the settings I choose in a previous session.
3. In KDE I use the Panel on the right of the screen, autohide. When I try to do the same in gnome I get an awful set of big ugly icons.
I have more complaints (lots of
), but I think these are enough to stay me away from gnome.
This review only talks about usability, which seems to be all the fad in the Gnome circles. Nothing about performance or features. KDE has moved the more advanced options under an “Advanced” button or tab, instead of just removing everything. I don’t like anybody else imposing their ideas of usability on me.
KDE also has previews for most file types, audio, video, txt, pdf and other documents. KDE has had a full-featured file open/save dialog for ages. Gnome will have a decent one in 2.6. I could keep going but my “personal” opinion (as yours was) is that KDE is and always was ahead of Gnome in both features and flexibility. I think it’s time for the Gnome people to stop considering themselves so “superior” because their desktop is so much cleaner and “usable”. A lot of features have been hidden in a Windows-like registry and you have to use gconf-editor to change them, same as regedit in Windows. That’s usability at its best.
Plus, what you Gnome people don’t get is that KDE is a framework of apps, not just a DE, which interoperate very nicely together. Text editor, video and audio players, and other apps, can integrate into a file manager or browser window very easily in KDE, because of the modular design. Gnome is using bits and pieces from other projects (Mozilla, OpenOffice) and is slower. Plus it doesn’t have any consistency since a lot of apps are still using the gtk1 libraries, and they look and behave totally different.
Most of these issues are probably caused by the fact that Gnome is developed in C instead of C++, and they re-used code or components from other projects like Mozilla and OpenOffice (which are using totally different toolkits and languages) just to cut corners and try to catch up with KDE. Sorry, but Gnome is still lagging behind. See, you started another flame war.
Gnome has previews for alot of filetypes too, text files (though this is theme dependant iirc), audio and video files, etc. I do consider gnome superior, superior for my needs.
GConf is not a window’s like registry, it’s a notification system. Just change an option, applications will immediatly adapt. But indeed it is also used for somewhat more advanced options. That still doesn’t mean it’s suddenly terribly cluttered though. (Some parts of it are, I have to admit. An advanced option for some gnome preferences dialogs would be nice)
Gnome also has a framework for it’s applications, bonobo, gnome-vfs. Applications can integrate with nautilus by implementing nautilus views. Gnome uses Mozilla to render pages in Epiphany and Galeon which really isn’t as bad as you make it sound. Evolution uses gtkhtml, Konquerer uses KHTML, epiphany uses Gecko… There’s really not much difference, they’re all just libraries linked against.
Most of the apps are being ported to gtk2, consistency is one of priorities in gnome because it’s essential in reaching their usability goals. Even apps still using gtk1 can look consistent by using themes supporting both versions, like Industrial. Though these apps should still be ported. But I really didn’t encountered any gtk1 app in while.
Your last paragraph is really just false statements. Whether a project uses C or C++ or any other language doesn’t matter. The linux kernel itself is coded in C, does that make it inferior? On the contrary, most of us seem to love it. As said before, gnome hardly uses code from mozilla, it just links against it. OpenOffice isn’t reused, it’s patched and I would actually call it a fork because of the large amount of patches going into it.
This sure is heading towards a flamewar but I’m trying to treat it as a discussion by not throwing any possibly insulting remarks at anyone. Even then posting here seems rather useless. I know I’m not going to convert you away from KDE or anything and I don’t intend to.
What I would like to see, however, is for people to respect both DEs and other WMs. I’m a Gnome zealot and I’m just saying I prefer using Gnome over KDE. KDE is a very nice DE in itself, no need to lart it at all.
its simple: KDE is the beast! and Gnome is the shit
It is unfair to unwise to compare any version of KDE since Red Hat 8.0 (and therefore Fedora) to Gnome. The problem is that Red Hat came up with a “brillant” idea of making a mutt of KDE by making it look like Gnome and subsituted KDE programs with Gnome replacements. It was enough to drive me to build my own Linux From Scratch installation because I wanted a pure KDE.
I recognize that there are speed advantages with Gnome. But there are just too many instances, on multiple insallations/computers, in which I had severe promblems of Gnome crashing so often and without any intuitive/centralized means of restarting the crashed process(es) that I couldn’t stand to use it any more. That was after switching from KDE 1.x; a version of KDE that often could not launch programs from its menu. So, by the time I switched from Gnome KDE was at 2.x. It was a hugh improvement over both Gnome and its previous incarnation.
I have yet to look back. I run KDE on Gentoo now. 3.2 is sweet and I only expect KDE to get better and better.