What is wrong with Gnome?

[magomago]

I've noticed this previously to a degree on the forums, and other places I've posted. Then while readint that TUX Linux Magazine it became even more apparant~ what is wrong with Gnome! I've used KDE 3.3 and while it had a lot of cool little dongles, it didn't feel anywhere as polished at Gnome~ Gnome looks and feels more "professional" (And I'm especially liking a very nice MACOSX skns that I'm using for it).
What is the main problem with Gnome though? The only thing I can think of, is the fact that it can't get IMs to flash on the taskbar without some kind of elaborate workaround. But I ended up getting rid of the task bar, and I use "window selector" which gives it all to me in a nice single little icon. Everything else is on the top panel.

But again, why no Gnome love? And if you love Gnome and know more about linux than I do (Which is 90% of the people here) what causes people to have a distaste towards gnome in general?

 

[daniel49]

I am sure I don't know more about linux, but I prefer gnome to kde.


my 2 cents

 

[AmberClad]

I don't hate Gnome, I just prefer to use KDE because there're more themes, icon sets, and eye candy plugins available (Karamba for example). For a work computer, I might go with Gnome; I agree it's more clean looking. But for home computers, I really like to go all out with the snazzy themes, whether it's XP or Linux.

 

[KoolDrew]

I don't like either, but Gnome > KDE.

 

[Tbirdkid]

KDE is ok, enlightenment and xfce is better. I am going back to kde because of my wife.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Last time I used Gnome (1.2 maybe?) it wasn't as polished as KDE. I plan on trying it out again when I get an OpenBSD or Linux machine that can run it decently.

 

[Brazen]

short answer: there are things I like about both, some things Gnome does better, some things KDE does better, but the clencher for me is the plethora of custimization available in KDE that is not available in GNOME.

 

[The Linuxator]

I find Gnome very professional and can be made as polished and fancy as KDE is with some effort , but it's at the end just a matter of prefrence. but I would like to have an OS X theme for
gnome on my fedora core 4 install on my Thinkpad, can you hook me up with that OS X theme ? I would appreciate it, it would compliment my Firefox's AquaFox nicely.
But for my Workstations I don't accept to have anything else other than Gnome's default theme that comes with FC4.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

I prefer Gnome. I find the minimalistic look is more professional, KDE just has too many things that all shout "look at me", IMHO, and that is a fundamental design flaw. This, I suppose, is why Apple and Microsoft pay big money to experts in ergonomics and interfaces, but in Linux (sad to say) all the work is done by developers, without many resources spent on useability. Gnome seems to have picked up much of the look-and-feel of MacOS X, which is certainly a very easy-to-use and well-designed UI, even if it is a little slow at times.

I don't think there's a hatred for either one. The vast majority of Linux users will have a preference for one particular WM, but they will also acknowledge that other ones have their strengths too. It's nothing like the enmity between OS zealots.

 

[Nothinman]

The most direct comparison is that the Gnome devs are going for Mac OS-type simplicity and the KDE people are going for Windows-type configurability and familiarity.

The Gnome people are trying to make everything as simple as possible and in their eyes this means finding the best defaults and removing lots of options in the UI so as to not confuse people. Most things can still be changed with gconf settings, but you have to dig more to find them. It's not really that bad of an idea, but some people don't like the hoops you have to jump through to change some things.

The KDE people have the opposite affect, every dialog has multiple tabs filled with dozens of sliders, check boxes, radio buttons, etc. The last time I looked at KDE I couldn't find any of the options I was looking for just because there was so damned many of them.

Personally I don't like either of them. They both provide way too much crap that I don't need so I run E16 with a quicklaunch applet I found a while back. But I prefer Gnome apps, they come with a lot less background cruft and IMO GTK looks a lot better than QT.

 

[nweaver]

I run xfce4, nice and tight. Use flags have a -kde and -gnome and I have QT and GTK installed so I can use gnome apps alongside kde apps no problem. especially nice for machines with less ram/proc. I can run XFCE4 with a few apps (firefox, terminal, thunderbird) on 256 megs of ram and not hit the page file.

 

[Sunner]

Things I don't like about Gnome:
Pango sucks, making text rendering glacially slow
The new file selector sucks ass
Nautilus is kinda slow, and the new spatial mode sucks(yeah I know you can turn it off somewhere in GConf, but gimme a damn menu option please!)
Overall too dumbed down in recent versions
Many apps suck compared to their KDE counterparts, for example GEdit is IMO vastly inferior to Kate.

If I have to pick one of the two I'll pick KDE.

 

[R3MF]

i prefer KDE because it is more familiar coming from windows.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Last time I used Gnome (1.2 maybe?) it wasn't as polished as KDE.

That was my impression as well. At least a few years ago, it wasn't even close in my opinion.

I plan on trying it out again when I get an OpenBSD or Linux machine that can run it decently.

I've tried it on occasion since then, but never seriously. Nothing really struck me as superior enough that I wanted to dig into it further. I've developed enough inertia with KDE, and I'm pretty happy with it, so it's not really worth my effort to make a switch.

I don't hate it though - just indifferent.

 

[Haden]

I prefer KDE because it has and is oriented to solid framework (Qt, KIO-Slaves etc.): good framework for end-user apps = more/better end-user apps, more developers, more integration.

 

[sourceninja]

I like a lot of the features of kde, but I know gnome, and most of my apps are gtk apps. I have both installed right now (along with a few other gui's) and I try to switch around so I am familair with them. But I keep going back to gnome when its time to get real work done.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Armitage

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Last time I used Gnome (1.2 maybe?) it wasn't as polished as KDE.

That was my impression as well. At least a few years ago, it wasn't even close in my opinion.

I plan on trying it out again when I get an OpenBSD or Linux machine that can run it decently.

I've tried it on occasion since then, but never seriously. Nothing really struck me as superior enough that I wanted to dig into it further. I've developed enough inertia with KDE, and I'm pretty happy with it, so it's not really worth my effort to make a switch.

I don't hate it though - just indifferent.

See, I generally use neither. My preferences are _old_ and way out of date. It's about time to try it out again.

 

[TGS]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey


See, I generally use neither. My preferences are _old_ and way out of date. It's about time to try it out again.

Sounds like someone won't give up init 3 and links...

Example

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Armitage

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Last time I used Gnome (1.2 maybe?) it wasn't as polished as KDE.

That was my impression as well. At least a few years ago, it wasn't even close in my opinion.

I plan on trying it out again when I get an OpenBSD or Linux machine that can run it decently.

I've tried it on occasion since then, but never seriously. Nothing really struck me as superior enough that I wanted to dig into it further. I've developed enough inertia with KDE, and I'm pretty happy with it, so it's not really worth my effort to make a switch.

I don't hate it though - just indifferent.

See, I generally use neither. My preferences are _old_ and way out of date. It's about time to try it out again.

But are you unhappy with what you're using now? Is it worth the learning curve & time?
I'm the same way with IDEs - a few weeks ago after a makefile pissed me off for the Nth time, I decided that I really need to enter the 90's and learn an IDE. So two days later, after Eclipse, KDevelop and Anjuta had all pissed me off, I was back to nedit/grep/ctag/make/cli again

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: TGS

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey


See, I generally use neither. My preferences are _old_ and way out of date. It's about time to try it out again.

Sounds like someone won't give up init 3 and links...

Example

BSD doesn't have init levels, and I have lynx. I also use a variety of window managers.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Armitage

But are you unhappy with what you're using now? Is it worth the learning curve & time?
I'm the same way with IDEs - a few weeks ago after a makefile pissed me off for the Nth time, I decided that I really need to enter the 90's and learn an IDE. So two days later, after Eclipse, KDevelop and Anjuta had all pissed me off, I was back to nedit/grep/ctag/make/cli again

Using them temporarily will probably remind me why I like minimalist systems.