varunus
January 24th, 2006, 03:44 AM
I've always been a big GNOME fan. I've tried to use KDE multiple times, starting with the 2.0 series (where I actually did use it for a while), and then again with the 3.0 series. Every 3.x version I've used has sent me back to GNOME with a bad taste in my mouth. I just...didn't like it. It felt so cluttered and clunky; configuring the interface to my liking took forever, as I had to dig down to the deepest recesses of the Control Center. GNOME took very little time to configure and get working, and just worked for me. For a long while, I was pure GNOME.
Then, after seeing poofyhairguy's Knome guide, when installing kwin, I saw that it would need a bunch of other KDE dependencies. So I took the plunge. I installed kubuntu-desktop, and logged out and in. I went ahead and got KDE 3.5 as well.
And it blew me away.
Configuring the thing was still a pain; but much less so. I was able to more easily navigate through the control center somehow, but a lot of difficulties still remained. (I think this is KDE's thing they need to work on the most for 4.0.) (A notice to anyone who tries out KDE: to configure konqueror's single/double click behavior, its in the MOUSE control panel, not konqueror's. :( )However, once I got KDE set up (which took around an hour to get everything fine tuned, much longer than GNOME), using it was a breeze. The eye candy, even without compositing, was very nice; the panel tooltips are great, menu's can be made translucent without XRender, and the interface just overall looks polished. Amarok was great (though Rhythmbox's new DAAP support still makes it nice), Kopete has improved a lot since KDE 3.0, and I loved how integrated Konqueror felt for once. The stupid sidebar, that usually plagues the application, was off in Kubuntu. I loved how integrated it felt; PDFs opened in the browser window, as did movie files, with no need for mozplugger. And finally, I noticed something; several of the bugs I had noticed in GNOME were gone. Cedega did not complain anymore about fullscreen games; I always got CS: Source crashes on the GNOME side of things if I ran it fullscreen. Compositing was much more stable and developed. I even got Kat, a replacement for Beagle, working through the repositories. And thankfully, any GTK apps I couldn't lose simply changed appearance to look like QT ones thanks to the GTK-QT engine!
I do miss the GNOME HIG in a lot of cases; Amarok has a lot of clunkiness to it, as does Konqueror (I haven't figured out how to set two homepages - one for my home folder, one for google, depending on what mode i'm running it in).
I think I'm going to have to stick with KDE, despite my longtime GNOME loyalties. After you get it configured and don't have to touch the control center again, its great to use...and 3.5 is much faster than previous iterations.
Has anyone else gone through a desktop epiphany like this one? I urge you, longtime GNOME users; take KDE for a test drive. Set it up with two panels the way GNOME does, and it feels like home (and is a lot nicer IMHO). Make yourself use it for a week or two, and post your experiences with it. And KDE users, do the same with GNOME. Try it out, make yourself use it for a few weeks. You might be surprised by the result.
Then, after seeing poofyhairguy's Knome guide, when installing kwin, I saw that it would need a bunch of other KDE dependencies. So I took the plunge. I installed kubuntu-desktop, and logged out and in. I went ahead and got KDE 3.5 as well.
And it blew me away.
Configuring the thing was still a pain; but much less so. I was able to more easily navigate through the control center somehow, but a lot of difficulties still remained. (I think this is KDE's thing they need to work on the most for 4.0.) (A notice to anyone who tries out KDE: to configure konqueror's single/double click behavior, its in the MOUSE control panel, not konqueror's. :( )However, once I got KDE set up (which took around an hour to get everything fine tuned, much longer than GNOME), using it was a breeze. The eye candy, even without compositing, was very nice; the panel tooltips are great, menu's can be made translucent without XRender, and the interface just overall looks polished. Amarok was great (though Rhythmbox's new DAAP support still makes it nice), Kopete has improved a lot since KDE 3.0, and I loved how integrated Konqueror felt for once. The stupid sidebar, that usually plagues the application, was off in Kubuntu. I loved how integrated it felt; PDFs opened in the browser window, as did movie files, with no need for mozplugger. And finally, I noticed something; several of the bugs I had noticed in GNOME were gone. Cedega did not complain anymore about fullscreen games; I always got CS: Source crashes on the GNOME side of things if I ran it fullscreen. Compositing was much more stable and developed. I even got Kat, a replacement for Beagle, working through the repositories. And thankfully, any GTK apps I couldn't lose simply changed appearance to look like QT ones thanks to the GTK-QT engine!
I do miss the GNOME HIG in a lot of cases; Amarok has a lot of clunkiness to it, as does Konqueror (I haven't figured out how to set two homepages - one for my home folder, one for google, depending on what mode i'm running it in).
I think I'm going to have to stick with KDE, despite my longtime GNOME loyalties. After you get it configured and don't have to touch the control center again, its great to use...and 3.5 is much faster than previous iterations.
Has anyone else gone through a desktop epiphany like this one? I urge you, longtime GNOME users; take KDE for a test drive. Set it up with two panels the way GNOME does, and it feels like home (and is a lot nicer IMHO). Make yourself use it for a week or two, and post your experiences with it. And KDE users, do the same with GNOME. Try it out, make yourself use it for a few weeks. You might be surprised by the result.