On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 19:13 +0000, Alistair J. Ross wrote: > To answer all queries in one rather long rant-ish email: > > * ion is indeed a fantastic wm. I prefer it's predecessor, pwm however, and > when I need a very fast lightweight desktop, that's what I still use. I have > a website-shrine dedicated to pwm: http://pwm.aliross.co.uk > > * Enough of that twaddle - what you wanted to know was why do I think KDE is > better than Gnome? > > I've used both Gnome and KDE since their very early incarnations (KDE 1, > first > version of Gnome etc). I used KDE first of all, because that came first (if > memory serves). I thought it was pretty slow and it wasn't too usable in some > areas. I felt that things got worse in KDE2 on the slowness factor as well > (however I was using a PII or the likes at the time). I used multiple > desktops (including ion!) inbetween for a while, and then plonked for Gnome. > > Whilst on the whole, I have no severe disaffection for Gnome, and for the > people that use it, however, I find that I often end up asking myself two > questions when I use it: > > 1) That makes NO sense! Why the hell did the developers do that? It's > not > logical to do this? (eg: WTF is Behavioural browsing? Why do I want it?)
I think you mean spatial vs browser. Now that I am used to spatial I don't think I could give it up. Browser mode is still supported, you can enable it in the preferences. > 2) Why is everything not integrated into easy to find/use menus, why is > it > strewn between programs that have weird names. Not sure what you mean here, my Fedora Core 6 system has very nice integrated menus. > Oh - and why is it so ugly, despite all the things that Red Hat / Ubuntu etc > have tried to do to make it look nicer. GTK2 *is* nasty-looking. I would say the same thing about KDE and QT :-) > Let's take CD burning as example 1 of how KDE is better: > > If I use KDE, and I want to burn a CD, I pop a blank in, it pops up with a cd > burner. Good. Last time I did that with Gnome, it had no bloody idea what to > do with it. I spent hours tweaking the program 'Graveman???' to get the cd > burning working. GNOME does the right thing for burning CDs, pop in a blank CD and it asks if you want to burn files to it. From Nautilus (the file manager) I can right click on files or directories and burn them to CD, this also works for ISO images. > And for example 2, My Ipod: > > plugging in the ipod in KDE remarks, "Open up ipod, or do nothing", click on > Open up Ipod and then you can see all your tunes in Amarok. simply drag the > music you want to the ipod from your collection and then click transfer. > > In gnome - you use a selection of tools, gtkpod being the best I believe. The > last time I used that fugly piece of turdware I ended up installing kubuntu > in frustration, just to see what KDE was like in 3.5. Gtkpod never mounted my > ipod properly once and when i mounted via command line, it would unmount it > corrupt via the interface after transferring the tunes. Bad, broken software > that works on some pcs, but not others, is not welcome on my pc. KDE stuff > generally has more options, is more mature than Gnome apps, and works faster. GNOME isn't perfect with iPods. When I plug in my iPod it automatically appears on my desktop as a USB storage device, and I can browse and create files on it. If I launch Rhythmbox (music library application like iTunes) my iPod appears and I can browse and play all of the music. Where I am let down, with Rhythmbox 0.9.5, is that I cannot drag and drop music from my computer to my iPod. I believe this is supported in more recent versions. > Don't take my word for it, listen to the words of Linus Torvalds himself, or > the recent critique on KDE vs Gnome in Linux Format. I am not sure that being a low-level kernel hacker gives someones views of desktop usability any more credibility :-) I don't read Linux Format so I cannot comment on their review. > Gnome sucks. Plain and simple. It's ugly and its never worked quite right. > KDE > is almost there, although I don't understand why they use such stupid names > for all their software! It sounds like you haven't used a recent GNOME desktop, perhaps you should give a recent Ubuntu or Fedora Core a try. In fact if you take the above sentence and swap GNOME and KDE about and you would have a reasonable statement of my opinion :-) > The end :) Never, from debating the merits of GNOME and KDE we can move onto Emacs vs VI, Bourne Shell vs C Shell, C vs C++, Mono/C# vs Java. etc etc :-) Keith. _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
