A debate sparked late last year by Linus Torvalds over the best Linux desktop environment is still continuing on blogs around the world.
In mid December, Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of its development kernel, said KDE was superior to its main alternative desktop environment, GNOME. He claimed that GNOME has lost too much functionality in its effort to be user-friendly, and recommended that people switch to KDE.
"I don't use GNOME, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do," said Torvalds in a posting to a mailing list. "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."
In a later posting, Torvalds expanded on his comments, claiming that GNOME developers often remove functionality or refuse to add new functionality because of concerns about usability.
"Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'," said Torvalds in the posting. "GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'."
Over the last few weeks bloggers have been commenting on the pros and cons of both desktop environments. Some agreed with Torvald's comments, such as Efbee, who said he was frustrated that some actions in GNOME take longer than they used to because flexible shortcuts are no longer available.
"Finding this quote by Linus was really refreshing. Here's the father of the Linux kernel bashing GNOME and their severe dumbing down of the GUI... If that doesn't affect some change out of them nothing will," said Efbee.
Other bloggers sided with GNOME, claiming that it is easier to use than KDE. For example, a blogger known as Lucent Plum said the GNOME interface is more intuitive and is less complicated to pick up.
"Usability and human factors are important issues in software development and I think GNOME has done a better job than KDE at both," said Lucent Plum in the posting.
Other bloggers were neutral in their preference and claimed that KDE and GNOME are both good, but for different purposes.
"KDE is like the cockpit of a 747 simulator. Lots of things to switch and buttons to push. There are a lot of options and some can confuse you. Gnome is like an old Atari game console — a single joystick with one button. Not confusing and it does what it does very well," said a blogger, known as Mecworks.
One GNOME developer, Jeff Waugh, responded to Torvald's comments.
"We absolutely have a responsibility to design software that doesn't confuse users. The reality is that most software developers can't even get this right! So if we've rejected ideas, features or designs based on their inscrutability, I don't think I need to defend that," wrote Waugh on the mailing list.
ZDNet UK recently reviewed five leading desktop Linux distributions and concluded that Ubuntu, which uses the GNOME desktop environment, was the most suitable for small businesses.
Talkback
One thing I've noticed is that GNOME and KDE seem to have swapped philosophies. Four years ago, KDE was the faster, more minimalistic and straightforward system, but seemed very lacking in features compared to GNOME. Nowadays, neither are exactly fast, but GNOME is concentrating on simplicity and performance. KDE in my opinion is more featured and better integrated than GNOME, and probably easier to use on an optimised system. But it's just that it's so slow, that's the problem. I think GNOME has done right in not having several features, all of which quickly cumulate into bloatware.
I've mostly used KDE, but with SUSE saying they will be moving their tools to support Gnome natively, I've started using Gnome as well.
Gnome looks fairly pretty, but feels clunky in places and looks inconsisent. The lack of flexibility is also very frustrating. Don`t like a colour scheme? Tough. You can change the window border style, you can change the icons and window controls (buttons, sliders etc.) appearance, but you can't change the colour scheme unless you write a new theme yourself!
Some of the applications feel a little clunky in use as well (Evolution and Pan for example). They are feature rich, but interface poor. Evolution is a little more polished than Kontact in some functions, but the interface feels more child like, while Kontact feels cleaner, more polished and "adult".
KDE isn't perfect, but it feels more grown-up than Gnome in many ways.
Gnome has potential and has better "eye candy", but it is so restrictive at the moment that I keep going back to KDE because it is easier to set-up and get things done in.
Neither is perfect, but there again, they both look better than Windows Lego(tm) interface...
There simply is no comparrison between gnome (gone) and kde i have to agree totaly with Linux gnome(gone) sucks , It is difficult to use cant do the vast majority of things a desktop ought to be able to do is unstable a total dog to update the list is almost endless not forgetting it is clunky rather like using a 32mm spanner on a 10mm nut it dont work ..
I've found KDE to be slower on my (older) systems than Gnome, though not by much but still, slower.
KDE to me appears more polished and soup-to-nuts but the trade-off is the responsiveness (which I will admit they are working on). Prettiness-wise KDE wins but it also looks strangely like Windows!
Once I begin making changes to the interface to make it look like I want, I find it unstable (=<3.4) and slower the more I personalize.
Gnome looks acceptible even if it is a bit more limited in what you can change and feels more stable even after my personalizations.
My other Desktop Environment is Xfce which has some of the nice things about Gnome, but without the same bloat. Their only weakness, I've seen, is their file manager and Thunar is due to come out soon so I am very optimistic.
Honestly, you use what you like and that's the great thing about Linux ... CHOICE! It doesn't matter if you like "x", "y" or "z" and if you remove the choices then you are making Linux just like Windows.