Norm <norm <at> workingtools.ca> writes:
> I am somewhat of a newcomer to Linux and at a loss to understand the
> almost fanatical support of KDE. When I was first exposed to Linux in
> RH9 I found that KDE did not work consistently and chose to use GNome.
> Recently I have started to use core 5. KDE may work well in the
> current distro but I have become more familiar with GNome; apart from a
> personal preference I can see no technical reason to consider one better
> than the other. I assume by the strong support from many there may be a
> technical reason to support KDE over GNome, what are they.
KDE is more configurable and thus better to adapt to an experienced user's
needs. GNOME works this way: they do a usability study, pick the default that
works best with the inexperienced users who are the typical subject of such a
study and then make it hard (see GConf) or outright impossible to change (and
flame everyone complaining about it saying they're the vocal minority which
can't adapt to the rest of the world and doesn't understand that the default is
best for them too anyway). See Linus Torvalds's flame against GNOME on that
subject. :-) KDE tends to make everything tunable to the user's liking, so if
you don't like the defaults, it's no big deal, just change them. Of course, if
you don't like having to change configurations, then GNOME's way of trying hard
to come up with a default that "just works" will probably work better for you,
though KDE does try to set good defaults even if the defaults can be changed
(but some people complain they don't do it enough, often saying "just change it
if you don't like it, it's configurable"). I'm happy with KDE, I don't like
GNOME's lack of flexibility.
There's also the technical issue that some applications require the KDE
libraries to run, so if you don't have at least kdelibs (and in some cases
kdebase) installed, you can't run them. That's bad. Nobody says you have to run
only GNOME apps or only KDE apps, you can use them both, but that's only going
to work if you have at least the libraries of both installed. So I don't
consider a Linux system without kdelibs or without the GNOME 2 libs complete
(unless it's really a high-security console-only server system with no X11 at
all).
Kevin Kofler
