Kde Vs Gnome

This page discusses which DesktopEnvironment? is better: KayDesktopEnvironment or GnomeDesktopEnvironment? Some say Gnome sucks - others say so about KDE, Windows, and MacOsx. One could also say: Both are GoodEnough to be used for EveryDay? work. You can also switch between the two or even use other options like XfCe.

Things both have:

Alt+F2 gives you a command line from which programs can be started quickly
EpiphanyBrowser and KonquerorBrowser are both lightweight browsers.
Both look really good these days.

About KDE:

KDE gives the user a lot of options
KDE allows the user to customize much more
KDE looks really good these days.
KDE has a Office Suite of its own: KayOffice?
KDE uses Qt (CueTee?) graphical library

About GNOME:

GNOME does not confuse users with many options
GNOME users ususally do not have to customize a lot.
GNOME uses the Gtk (GtKay?) graphical library
GNOME is lead by the GnomeFoundation?.

Things that suck about BOTH:

Both still use up too much memory and system rescources
Both have not eased the application installation (i still need to open terminal every day)

For some features & screenshots of KDE 3.2 go to <http://static.kdenews.org/mirrors/www.lugod.org/presentations/kde-user-persp/> and for GNOME 2.6 go to <http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/marketing/en/2004/two-six-screenshots/html/index.html>.'' -- CarlosNsRodrigues

From a programmer's standpoint they really are quite different. gtk+ is a C GuiToolkit of architecture comparable to Xt-based libraries. KDE is a C++ class library layered on top of Qt, a C++ GUI framework. Of course each comes with a plethora of alternate bindings, but under the hood you have a choice of C or C++. (Actually, KDE uses a meta-compiler, so it's not quite standard C++.)

Why did Trolltech use that meta-compiler? Its perfectly possible to do the signals and slots stuff without it. -- BillWeston

Got a URL on that? I tried some years ago and didn't find documentation to clue me on on how; presumably that's all changed.

Gtk's C++ binding is quite good and makes good use of the StandardTemplateLibrary. Some prefer it over the native C library.

Surely points which are common to KDE and Gnome (such as the 'select a URL' point and 'Alt-F2 for a command line' are best ommitted so that we can focus on truly novel features in deciding what gives each desktop its personality? -- PaulRuane

KDE and Gnome don't rule each other out completely; it is possible to run KDE applications while using Gnome and vice versa. There are some drawbacks:

different look and feel, but which is configurable
- Redhat's BlueCurve theme has basically solved the different look and feel problem.
  - Although it is a not uncommon opinion that BlueCurve solved the problem in much the same way that Russia solved the 'oh no, Germans/Napolean is invading' problem.
more memory usage, since both desktops use their own libraries
slightly less interoperability (Some things will be configured separately, while DragAndDrop between Gnome and KDE was enhanced substantially after absolutely not working in the beginning) but these drawbacks don't prohibit you from running KonquerorBrowser under Gnome, if that is your preferred browser and desktop. Some LinuxDistributions such as DebianGnuLinux ease this, e.g. by merging KDE apps into Gnome menus.

Oh, and it is of course also possible that the KdeProject? and the GnomeProject? themselves will coexist in the future too. Just as well as it may be, that ten years in the future there still will be MicrosoftWindows XP^5, MacOS XXV and a LinuxKernel 2004.12. Diversity is a nice thing.

To me, it seems Gnome tries to be true to both Unix traditions and being friendly towards end-users. KDE, on the other hand, sometimes even seems to me to be an attempt to actually implement something Windows is only trying to be, on the existing Unix infrastructure. KDE has very much infrastructure compared to Gnome, and has even longer startup time. The lack of man pages for KDE is sometimes irritating - and both manage to make it very hard to find out what doesn't work (when something doesn't work).

The one point that annoys me as a beginner user of Linux is that GTK+ based applications aren't responsive to system font changes. If you want to have, e.g., the same menu font throughout your programs, you have to stick to KDE applications -- they will use your font settings everywhere. That is the only field, for example, where I like Ximian Evolution LESS than KMail: Evolution sports an invariable font, as The Gimp (another GTK+ program, I guess) does.

While GNOME, especially 2.x, seems to be more responsive, simpler, and slightly faster than KDE 3.x and above, one cannot forget the sheer coherence that KDE sports compared to GNOME. KDE seems to be much more tightly integrated than GNOME, which feels more a like a collection of interoperable applications than an "environment."

Take the printing systems, for example. KDE decided relatively early on (~2.0) that it would be necessary to have a unified printing system. And it has worked. KDEprint is arguably better than Windows's system -- you can easily select the printer from which to print, and kprinter has practically eliminated the need for an application-specific print preview option, because kprinter itself handles it!

However, KDE has its disadvantages too, namely its huge mass of applications, and its cluttered menus. And Konqueror seems to do almost everything and anything these days. But when it comes to business and corporate environments, you can't beat GNOME -- Nautilus seems to handle SMB network browsing so seamlessly, while Konqueror's LISa often has trouble finding her way.

Try sometime pointing Konqueror at a SMB machine (The url format is smb:// or samba://) and then opening a text file there. The reason Konqueror appears to do everything is not because Konqueror does but because its file protocols are part of the KDE libraries. Every KDE application can use every filesystem supported by Konqueror even if there is no support in the underlying kernel.

I haven't been paying very much attention for a long time, is application interoperability a completely fixed issue these days? Apps that run under Gnome run under Kde and vice versa?

They can, and many do, but I believe in some cases it may take work.

''If so, is that except for window managers, or what?

I believe so, yes.
"No, KDE's window manager runs just fine with Gnome, and many people that dislike metacity use it. No clue about the opposite."

There's a signals and slots compatibility package?

It seems like it, but I'd like to see a URL for this myself.

Drag and drop was finally standardized for the first time in history?''

This is a definite "yes", I followed the development of this over the years in some detail and implemented it just as it became widely used, and since then, yep, it became the standard. Here's a (somewhat dated) description of Xdnd: http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/

We're all also completely forgetting the LicenseIssues?. GNOME is pretty much free, but KDE has some restrictive policies about win32.

This is no longer the case. As of version 4, TrollTech? provides CueTee? for Windows under the GeneralPublicLicense, while previously they only offered win32 CueTee? under a commercial license. This means KDE 4 can be (and has been) freely ported to Windows.