GNOME Trials
I’ve recently become somewhat disillusioned with the annoyances of getting Qt and GStreamer to play nicely, so I thought I’d give Gnome a go. So, I spent a couple of hours emerging the source and getting to know it, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. I spent quite a lot of time trying out little bits here and there, and Nautilus is extremely nippy when compared to Konqueror.
However, after having used it for a few days I’m switching back to KDE. Why? There are certain things that I love doing in KDE that I simply can’t do in pretty much every other OS out there. For example, I can open Konqueror, browse the web for a bit and then open a new tab for browsing the local network, or perhaps transfer a couple of files by FTP. KDE seems a lot more tightly-knit, and for some reason I just couldn’t get along with Firefox.
Perhaps I’m just too picky, but I love the KDE interface. I think it’s one of the most elegant out there, and with a decent font (Bitstream Vera or, in my case, Luxi Mono) it just looks great.
So for now, back to KDE. I’ll probably have to give XFCE another go at some point though.
16/10/2006 10:11 am
I’ve started to use Epiphany over Firefox – it provides a little more integration with the rest of Gnome, like being able to subscribe to RSS feeds in Liferea. There are little touches about the desktop, like the Evolution calendar integration if you click on the clock on the top panel.
In the past, I’ve found myself becoming claustrophobic with KDE - I sometimes find it too integrated. I’m seeing Gnome rapidly improve in many different ways… 2.14 was a milestone in terms of speed. Clearlooks is a nice clean default theme.
Of course, my liking Gnome is also partly to do with maintaining the balance of power between the desktop factions in the LUG.
16/2/2006 2:45 pm
Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s certainly come a long, long way in terms of functionality and speed – I remember using it a long time ago on one of the old PPC distributions, and there have been vast improvements. 2.14 compared to KDE 3.5.3 is quite a bit faster, and I think the guys have quite a lot of work cut out to be able to make that up.
I guess I’m going to stick to this for now, but I’ll see what the future holds. KDE4 and Plasma look especially interesting.