kde in extras - the devel discussion
Norm
norm at workingtools.ca
Fri Jun 9 23:47:24 UTC 2006
Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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
>
>
Thanks Kevin
As I am just getting back with Linux, issues such as defaults in Gnome
do not stand out as a major issue manly because until I think of
changing them they are only a minor issue to me. I knew there was some
reason why so many were so passionate about KDE, given the background I
will put more time into KDE and give myself time to become more familiar
with it.
Norm
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