KDE vs Gnome

install fluxbox. It is lightweight and configurable.

In short: the differences between the two, these days, as far as a user is concerned, are cosmetic.

If you're going for Gentoo, Gnome builds a bit faster. KDE applications start up a bit faster. It really boils down to what you're most familiar with, and whether you prefer a C (gnome) or C++ (KDE) foundation.

I'm a long-time KDE fan, and although I think Gnome is fine, I know exactly how to set up my KDE for maximum productivity and eye-candy. So for me, it's KDE. For a new user, I say: try both! On a reasonably-fast system, like my Dell 9300, I can build both fairly quickly.

Both WM's have their plusses, minusses, annoyances, and great features. They routinely "borrow" features from one another The original reason for the creation of Gnome was that KDE, though robust and excellent at the time, was encumbered by a high-quality but "non-free" library (TrollTech's QT). Eventually, TrollTech GPL'd QT, but rather than dry up, as many thought Gnome would, support for it grew.

It partially boils down to your philosophy, too. Gnome has several big industry players behind it (Sun and Novell, for instance). KDE, on the other hand, was created by hackers for hackers, and although it's received financial backing in various forms from many companies, and has a very slick interface, there's no major company like Sun pushing for its adoption as a corporate desktop.

Other plusses/minusses:
* Ximian/Novell's Evolution is a feature-for-feature competitor to Microsoft Outlook. If you're an Outlookian, you may want Gnome for this alone.
* KDE's Konqueror is faster, more standards-compliant, and lighter-weight than the Mozilla suite powering Nautilus and most Gnome desktop web browsers. It's an integrated file and web browser, with great drag-and-drop integration and amazing abilities to browse bizarre remote file shares (try "fish://" as a protocol for SSH connections). Konqueror was also the basis used to write Apple's Safari web browser, so Mac OS users will notice some rendering similarities.
Note: the "standards-compliant" claim above for Konqueror is subject to debate. Most folks find the Mozilla (Gecko) engine better-supported across the Web.
* Gnome has a very unique default look and feel. Quite "UNIX-y". KDE has several styles, and by default most closely resembles Microsoft Windows.
* One of KDE's killer apps is "Quanta Plus", a web development tool which compares favorably with Dreamweaver.

The simple fact is, you can run Gnome apps under KDE, and vice-versa. I use "gaim" as my instant messenger client, and it works equally well under either environment. I say build 'em both, use 'em both, and then settle on whichever one suits the way you work best.

Of course, my bias shows :)

I freely admit my pro-KDE bias. I've just found that it's well-designed from the ground up, so even a non-programmer like me can do nifty stuff like make command-line DCOP calls to spawn new windows, play with widgets, turn stuff on and off, etc. Gnome just "feels" more utilitarian and pragmatic, rather than beautiful and well-designed under the hood.

They're both really good, though, and I'm absolutely certain my love for KDE is largely due to my familiarity with it It's like an old car to me now, and I can make it do some fun tricks. The latest one is trying to figure out how to read the foreground media-playing application to remap the start/pause, forward, back, and stop buttons from the front panel. KDE doesn't detect the keypresses in the shortcut editor...

i was a kde-fanboy but now i have converted to gnome.

like it was said above, you can run progs for either one on either one. I run KDE progs (k3b) on gnome all the time and its not an issue. I actually believe Epihany to be FASTER than Konqueror.

Cosmetically, at it's bare skin, KDE looks more like windows, Gnome looks more like mac os.

There is quite a bit more support and quite a bit more KDE apps out there, but gnome is by no means a bastard child.

As far as eyecandy goes, you can run superkaramba on either desktop, or you can always run gnome's native gdesklets (less desklets available vs karamba though).

In my recent opinion, if you want a more professional "unix=y" feel, go gnome, if you want a toy-like windows-y feel go with KDE.



On a side note, how do you pronounce "Gnome" ?

as in "nome" or as in "g-nome" (with g as in "great")

Hard G, like "Gun". Gnome (GNU Network Object Model Environment) was spawned to be direct competition with KDE (not a bastard child, by any means, just a complete re-engineer of a desktop environment due, originally, to licensing concerns), and the hard "G" was to make sure the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) was stressed. It's designed to be totally "free software".

As far as which is harder/easier to use? Umm, you click their program menu to run programs. You save office documents to the hard drive. You can use all the same applications. They're both easy to use. You have to go a bit deeper than ease-of-use to adequately compare the two, and even then, a feature-for-feature comparison will come up with a lot of duplication.

The apps that keep me tied to KDE:
* Konsole. Best terminal app I've ever used.
* Konqueror. It can browse just about anything with the right plugin, and do drag-and-drop file moves between them.
* smb4k: All your windows shares are belong to us. Not a very mature app, but KDE-based Windows share automounting is the bomb.
* Konqueror as a web browser. I wish Mozilla or IE had some of the cool features it's had for ages. Sure, you can get them (like spellcheck-while-you-type) by downloading and installing plugins. But Konq when surfing the web just works.
* Alt-f2 file execution and manpage reader. Gnome implemented this 3 or 4 years ago by default, but KDE had it since 1997
* Very easy ClearType-style font rendering setup.
* Clean font implementations that I can zoom in or out of by CTRL-mousewheel, and have been able to for several years. Yeah, on-the-fly: if that web page's fonts are too small, CTRL-mousewheel fixes it swiftly.
* Device mounts on the desktop, like Mac OS
* Menubar on top like Mac OS if I want. I land on the side of a common menu location, regardless of application location. I use it a lot. I just wish that so many apps didn't automatically assume their menubar was within their window.
* Superkaramba
* I Love the Kicker. Easy to write applets for, too.
* A real screensaver implementation, rather than grafting-on an old X-Windows implementation that really, really shows its age (*cough* Gnome)
* Really good multiple-monitor support that's been there for many years.

The list goes on. Many of these features work in Gnome now, too, and Windows flagrantly stole a bunch of KDE features for XP. Still gotta be a geek to get the most out of Linux, though. I don't know if the "Desktop OS for Grandma" thing is ever gonna happen for the operating system...

Maybe it's my own stupidity, but I know one thing for sure: When running KDE, GTK programs look like crap, but when running Gnome, KDE programs look fine. Obviously, I'm a die-hard gnome user now, after switching from KDE

I find the top bar very useful in gnome. All the useful monitoring applications are at the top so I can keep track of useful things. The new Gnome 2.10 really sped up nautilus, speed is no longer an issue. Either way, I don't know... I've tried the new KDE 3.4, and I had to switch back to Gnome. It's just more polished feeling, more "homily" if you can call it that... Functionality wise, it's almost identical to KDE, so there's nothing missing.

One thing that you definitely need to change is the stupid spatial navigation. Whoever over a gnome headquarters that thought up that mess should really get their heads checked out. That kind of navigation hasn't been around since Windows 95 . Just use gConf and go to nautilus, and change it to always use browser mode.

like others have said, if you're more familiar with windows than os x, you'll probably adjust to kde faster. gnome looks and works more like os x

not *always* true. In its base appearance, that is so. But there are some distros that make gnome look like KDE, for instance Red Hat. No top bar, the menu is on the bottom and blah blah blah

Well this dispute is new here, but not new to linux. You should note that there are some up comming copetitors to the two powerhouses. As a few have mentioned here and elsewhere Enlightenment, X-Fce, and several others. As others have also stated both have their high and low points, but what really is the determining factor is how the distro makes use of the desktop interface. Look at SuSE and Red Hat as companies who have changed the interface and modified some key elements to make the winmanager more useful for that distro. Xandros relies soley on KDE, and thus their enviornment is very refined and they have more time to develop their distro to suit the needs of their customers. There are other Distros that use Gnome solely as well. The difficulty usually lies in user taste. Now for the comment that Novell's newly acquired Ximian Evolution only being usable on Gnome, well that is far fetched. KDE easily uses this great application, so don't be fooled, many apps can be used across the boards. However, you will have to download the necessary libraries to get the app to run on the other winmanager/desktop.
What about using mandrake which is one of the closest distros that put out a pure Gnome and KDE enviornment? Well this is actually a great place to learn linux and make the true distinctions between Gnome and KDE in their pure form. Mandrake has several features added to their distro that make kde and Gnome slightly modified, but not on the scale of SuSE or Linspire. The only problem with this approach after learning the differences, you may notice the refinement is less than what you will find in let's say linspire. if you look at thier latest version, (they use KDE) you will see a beautiful interface designed by Everaldo, plus some great features like lphoto, lsongs, and others which are very nice. However, that distro has an installer that requires a premium to install freely distributable apps, yet offers to do so in a one step click n run operation.
So a word for the wise is to look at the distro and see the differences, know that pure debian, mandrake, and a few others offer a truly pure form of Gnome and KDE while Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, Gentoo, Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE, and Lycros offer modified window managers. Their speed and reliability really depend on how modified they have become by the distro itself. Get a copy of the pure distros, then look at the distro to see if they have modified the windowmanager/desktop to suit your needs.
Eric

linspire's CNR does nothing for me :-\. Why shall i pay a premium to download openoffice or gaim? One click? Well...I can always use Porthole (for Gentoo) or synaptic (for Debian). All it takes in 1 click and you're on.

GNOME builds faster!?!?!? You gotta be kidding me. It has so many programs and so many dependencies that I find that hard to believe. Now I know KDE has a ton of programs too but you can opt not to install *all* of them. Like the education, office, games, etc. packages.

I agree, but it is an option many windows converts look for, as they want the .exe-like envirorment. Hee Hee, with Xandros I use Xandros Networks for free, which does the exact same thing as click and run, but not as commercialized. We have apt-get as well and synap if we desire, but XN works pretty well.
Eric

i tried the free version of xandros....lasted me 20 minutes before i diched it for my next distro to try out


btw...Ubuntu is now a solid #1 most watched distro on distrowatch shibby

I am sad to hear you didn't stay with Xandros. But like all free versions you are getting what you pay for, and so distro surfing will generally lead you to the next latest and greatest. That is of course until the wave takes you to what others will be naming the newest of the latest and greatest. Hee Hee. My case in point is the African distro Ubuntu which is now being hailed as the greatest. Note that the old Mandrake and Yoper were in that seat and so to were many others, but that seat shifts. You should consider also evaluating customer satisfaction, and other factors that make the distro work for customers.

Eric

i started using ubuntu way before it was in the top 10, hardly even just making the top 40. you're right the seat does shift, but as of right now ubuntu is the king of all the free distros. Gentoo is an amazing distro but its not really high on the chart because most noobs are scared of it, even more experienced people are scared, or just don't want to spend the whole day installing it. And not everybody feels like paying $30 for Vida, although I have done that and am succesfully using that distro right now on my desktop.

There were a few factors that scared me away from xandros.

1) although its all skinnable, the WinXP clone look, sorry but i didn't convert to linux to live in the windows-looking world.

2) my wifi and cd-rw didn't work correctly (probably an easy fix, but i was lazy).

3) it would occasionally crash during boot-up sequence.

If it works for you....great. Hell, if Linspire works for you...enjoy it! Each distro has its own fanbase, each distoro works best in different systems...it all just depends

Amen. The reason I do not like KDE and GNOME is because they have too much useless stuff bundled together. I like a fast, leightweight (I boot my Gentoo box off about 50MB RAM, Fluxbox included) UI that gives me full control over what I use. Sure, both KDE and GNOME have useful utilities, but I can get them separately if I need them.

Mikhail

Oh and guys, please don't start another distro war . Linux is about choice - every person is unique and has a distro that suits them better.