left gnome for KDE

well i finally went back to good old KDE. After having used Gnome since 2.2 i got tired of it being slow as fuck and it not really giving me any really good new features between 2.2 and 2.6. So now i installed KDE 3.2.2 from kde-redhat.sourceforge.net and man... i am back home

KDE is just so much more advanced than Gnome... MUCH faster and MUCH more responsive, better looking, and it has a shitload of functionality and options. It's nice to being in control again instead of just accepting what the gnome developers want you to use/do.

Yea the interfaces are cluttered with lots of options and stuff most people will never use... so that will take some getting used to again, but now that i'm back in KDE i feel like a fool for having used gnome for so long

the speed difference is just amazing really... i have a PIV 2.6Ghz and just switching from Gnome to KDE makes it feel like i've got a whole new system here.

have fun...

I personally love GNOME, and it doesn't feel slower than anything on my machine, maybe that's because I can't afford a superfast P4 with DDR memory and all that fancy stuff.. I can live with that. And I kinda like the way GNOME is sane at all costs, but of course I tweak it to my needs.

it's weird though that gnome has become so slow... like playing mp3s in rhythmbox for example. they would often skip if i'd start other applications and or if gnome was doing something.

KDE used to be horrible at playing mp3s and you could even notice a lag between the time you pressed one of the control buttons, and the time before that action was actually performed on the song.

Now with Juk, mp3s play as smooth as XMMS used to play them on my old PIII 450. No skipping at all, and no noticable lag at all.

There is NO excuse for a modern desktop environment like gnome to play mp3s that slowly on any machine that's faster than 300Mhz.

Stuff like simple resizing of windows is another good example. Or just moving a window. In Gnome it is unbelievably slow. you can see Metacity constantly redrawing the window while it's being resized and it just looks extremely slow. Kwin does this much better. Now if you say this to a Gnome user, they'll often go "well that's Metacity's problem"... umm ok, but since Metacity is the default Gnome WM i would definitely say it's a Gnome problem and i don't understand why they just don't fix it. If Kwin can do it faster, then it should also be possible for Metacity.

Then there are the applications... Konqueror starts faster than Epiphany. Kmail starts faster than Evolution. Everything starts faster than it's gnome equivalent really. Remember the days where KDE was ridiculed because it was so slow compared to Gnome? It's like they switched places. And KDE is supposed to be bloatware so even though they have a shitload of functionality that has to be loaded into the memory every time, it is still faster than the gnome equivalents with less functionality. It's fascinating really

next we should compare Konsole to gnome-terminal. try untarring a large archive in gnome-terminal in verbose mode. If it's a large archive, gnome will actually spend more time printing the messages to the gnome-terminal than it spends on untarring the archive. Any process that spits out a lot of text to the console is just horribly slow in gnome-terminal because it wastes too much time on displaying the text. Konsole, while having a lot more bloat than gnome-terminal does not have this problem.

And Lovechild, i know you're gonna say "well the KDE developers perform some dangerous optimizations" but really, if they use those optimizations by default then they aren't dangerous. Using objprelink a few years ago used to be somewhat dangerous according to some people and because of that the kde developers never enabled it by default. I used to build KDE with objprelink for a long time and i never noticed any problems with it. So if the KDE developers think these so called optimisations are safe enough to use them by default, well then they probably have a good reason to think they are safe enough.

The other often mentioned reason why KDE has become so fast is because GCC is finally producing fast C++ binaries. This sounds like a valid argument allthough that doesn't explain why C binaries like those of Gnome are slower than C++ binaries. C binaries should always be faster than C++ binaries so the problem is definitely located in the gnome code base.

Agreed.. GCC is finally producing somewhat usable code from C++, and that affects KDE in a very positive way, also the KDE developers have been actively profiling their software with valgrind and cachegrind, and given their very solid framework any optimizations to that benefits the entire system..

KDE has many strenghts, but I still prefer GNOME, sure there's room for improvement, but that applies to KDE as well.

I use both, well I use GNOME on my machine and my parents use KDE, so I'm forced to go throught option hell every once in a while.

[Tyr_7BE]

Bring it

I'm gonna have to disagree on pretty much all counts. Matter of opinion and all, but still I think a lot of these problems are specific to you. Either that or you're running Gnome on 10 year old hardware. I'm running it on a 4 year old Athlon 1GHz and 2.6 with the 2.6 kernel is the snappiest environment I've used in years! Nautilus has instant response (I really like the spatial thing too...if only they'd get around to putting in bookmarks), and I'm having no issues whatsoever with Rhythmbox...and that's having 6 nautilus windows open along with 4 gvim's, an XChat, 3 epiphanies, and a gnome terminal running yum that's calculating some dependencies in addition to Rhythmbox. The old old versions based on pre-0.6 gstreamer used to talk smack all the time to me when I so much as moved the mouse, but here I am depriving the poor little app of virtually every scrap of CPU and memory I possibly can, and the thing's still chugging away without a pause in music. I've also had no issues with resizing windows or dragging them around on the screen. Perhaps your system needs to be a bit swappier? Try issuing an "echo 75 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" (assuming 2.6 kernel). This will make your system swap unused programs out of memory more easily and free up more mem for what's active. You'll notice pauses when you bring up windows you haven't used in a while, but stuff that's active should be much snappier. If you don't like it, try tuning swappiness to your liking (I _think_ default is 50...test it first by issuing a "cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" ).

I'm also gonna have to disagree with the KDE looks better argument. They can both look really slick. However I find Gnome's interface to be a little more professional, and KDE's a little more amateur. KDE has some mind-blowing capabilities as far as themes are concerned, but if my interface blows my mind it's probably not the most convenient for me to use. I'm at my computer for hours on end each and every day, and I need something that's convenient to use and looks good while maintaining sensibility. Gnome's where it's at for my needs. However I will give you this: Plastik is seriously slick. I'll stop just short of saying it has "Industrial influence" but I will say it's slick. I wish it would come to GTK2. For now I'll settle with my little Polite Theme ( http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/polite/ ;D ).

Now on to the matter of applications. I'll admit, Epiphany startup time bothers me. Any sort of mozilla startup time bothers me. They said it was improved in the latest version, but they're talking out of their asses. Wish that would get addressed. Evolution startup time is slower than KMail (though it's not bad at all), but you also have to consider what's being loaded. Email client vs PIM. It's kind of like saying that a text editor loads faster than OpenOffice. Yes it does, but seriously!

Also, I've always found Gnome applications to be superior to their KDE counterparts. Evo has more functionality than KMail, Epiphany seems to render things so much nicer than Konqueror (and it's simpler to user...I _refuse_ to spend my day trying to navigate the Konq settings dialogues....what a nightmare). I find Gossip to be so much nicer to use than Kopete (I'm using Gossip as an example because it eventually will be the Gnome IM when it gets multiprotocol support, though you really could take any IM client...there should NOT be a way to remove the menu bar from your program without a clear way to get it back damnit! I eventually had to google for the solution, which turned out to be an intuitive press of "F11&quot. I find RB to be prettier than Juk, though when you get down to it they're the same app. I also find Totem to be nicer than that weird media player that's supposed to be a totem equivalent that came with SuSE 9.1 by default. Don't even get me started on KOffice vs Gnome Office. Neither are particularly great (with the exception of Gnumeric which _IS_ particularly great), but with the amount of time KOffice has been around I'd expect something at least usable by now.

You're right about Gnome terminal though...console output is a CPU hog. Hopefully this will be fixed in upcoming versions. However, as it stands I don't open nearly enough large archives from the command line for this to be an issue with me. If I do have to open them I use file-roller, which has finally stopped resizing the window every time it prints something to the screen so it's somewhat efficient now.

Now I'll admit that KDE has some stuff going for it. Like I said it's eye-candy central, and its kdevelop IDE is fantastic if that's what you're about. It's also highly configurable, though some would argue too much so. But I just can't justify dumping Gnome, which I find to be a very well thought out desktop environment (examples include spatial file manager and gnome volume manager, which I've yet to get up and running). You can keep your KDE, but I'm keeping my Gnome.

So there.

EDIT: Just reread your post. Gnome's slow on a 2.6 GHz? You either need more RAM, or something's really wrong.

Just one little thing or two to add to your post Tyr.

Gossip will not be a multi protocol IM client, they dropped the idea in favor of staying Jabber only simply because they didn't have the manpower to support it at the present. I would like to see more people use Jabber anyways, and there should be a movement to encourage using only open standards per default - not saying we should rob the people of their beloved MSN/ICQ/etc. though, those are useful, but only to fill the gap between Windows and Linux users.
There's a greater chance that Gaim will be included at some point, when the GUI lives up to the HIG, since the Gaim core has already been tied to stuff like evolution. I'm thinking they will propose it for 2.8 anyday now.

Oh and yes, the developers are finally profiling vte (the widget that's actually to blame for gnome-terminal's slowness) and metacity. Preliminary results are promising in this area, but still it's long over due for these two apps at least.

oh and Tyr how can you possibly dog AbiWord.. it's my favorite GNOME app at the moment - I simply love it, sure it's doesn't sport all the features OpenOffice Writer does but for all my personal needs it's fine, and it blends perfectly with my desktop.

As for themes, the GNOME team are now picking up on Mark Finlay's work on making GNOME visually appealing out of the box (I like "simple" but it's maybe not as flashy as people like these days). The new default theme will be based on the industrial engine, but with some usability and accessability tweaks - mainly making it less white (yay), and removing the rounded edges on the metacity decos since we don't have the technology to do that correctly yet (notice how the edges look jaggy, we need Keith's X server to fix this) - the initial work is in a package called Indubstrial on Jeff Waugh's homepage, other people are working on themes as well.

[BurntAsh]

if you are into lightweight linux, maybe you wanna check out Cobind

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7355

http://cobind.com

[Tyr_7BE]

[quote author=Lovechild link=board=6;threadid=9344;start=0#msg84645 date=1087343405]
Just one little thing or two to add to your post Tyr.

Gossip will not be a multi protocol IM client, they dropped the idea in favor of staying Jabber only simply because they didn't have the manpower to support it at the present. I would like to see more people use Jabber anyways, and there should be a movement to encourage using only open standards per default - not saying we should rob the people of their beloved MSN/ICQ/etc. though, those are useful, but only to fill the gap between Windows and Linux users.
[/quote]



Damn I didn't know that. I love Gossip. Dead sexy. Really if you could put the Gaim backend with a Gossip UI you'd have my ideal messenger.

oh and Tyr how can you possibly dog AbiWord.. it's my favorite GNOME app at the moment - I simply love it, sure it's doesn't sport all the features OpenOffice Writer does but for all my personal needs it's fine, and it blends perfectly with my desktop.

I don't dog abi in principle. In fact it's my primary tool for things like lab reports and one-pagers, etc. It's really well designed and they take a very innovative approach to a lot of issues. However, it's the features that get to me. Whenever I finish a four month workterm I have to write a workterm report consisting of a technical discussion. That means diagrams, figures, references, multiple sections, multiple page numbering schemes, and above all an easy way to handle all this. Every 8 months it's time to write another workterm report, and every 8 months I give abi a try desperately hoping it's ready. Every time it's a little closer, but still no deal. I need auto TOC (coming soon, from what I understand), as well as the ability to do multiple page numbering schemes across multiple sections (ie, roman numerals before the TOC and arabic numerals after it with the TOC not being numbered...department requirement, and I never could figure out how to do it in abi).

Another big issue is Windows compatibility. It's all good and fine to request that someone send you documents in abiword format, but when you're dealing with large groups of developers who are trained on Word, as well as some non-technical personnel to whom it's a big deal to switch word processors, that usually just doesn't happen. I've had projects where we've been working in groups of 6 or 7, passing a design document around with everyone making revisions and cross-checking each other's work. OpenOffice performed admirably, and several people commented how they were impressed that I was able to do it (they didn't think Linux could handle word docs at all, let alone one that's been worked on by 5 different people). Abiword crashed while trying to open the doc.

So yes, Abi's on its way to being something good...but it's still on its way.

[quote author=Tyr_7BE link=board=6;threadid=9344;start=0#msg84640 date=1087339448]
I'm running it on a 4 year old Athlon 1GHz and 2.6 with the 2.6 kernel is the snappiest environment I've used in years! Nautilus has instant response (I really like the spatial thing too...if only they'd get around to putting in bookmarks), and I'm having no issues whatsoever with Rhythmbox...and that's having 6 nautilus windows open along with 4 gvim's, an XChat, 3 epiphanies, and a gnome terminal running yum that's calculating some dependencies in addition to Rhythmbox. The old old versions based on pre-0.6 gstreamer used to talk smack all the time to me when I so much as moved the mouse, but here I am depriving the poor little app of virtually every scrap of CPU and memory I possibly can, and the thing's still chugging away without a pause in music. I've also had no issues with resizing windows or dragging them around on the screen.
[/quote]
what system are you running? I'm talking about a standard FC2 install. That's right... Fedora Core aka The Distro Formerly Known as Red Hat Linux. As we all know, the Red Hat/Fedora guys seriously prefer Gnome over KDE and it's in their best interest to ship a Gnome which is at least as fast as the KDE they ship. Even the default FC2 KDE3.2 rpms are faster than gnome. I've seen this on 4 different machines with different hardware each time. Only one of those machines was an old machine and it was still a P3 733Mhz which runs Windows XP pretty well. The other machines were all fairly recent. KDE was clearly the fastest and most responsive on each of those machines. The slowness in resizing/moving windows in Gnome was very noticable, even on 3Ghz machines with top of the line video cards. Once Red Hat ships a Gnome that isn't as responsive/fast as their KDE, you just know something's wrong.

Perhaps your system needs to be a bit swappier? Try issuing an "echo 75 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" (assuming 2.6 kernel). This will make your system swap unused programs out of memory more easily and free up more mem for what's active. You'll notice pauses when you bring up windows you haven't used in a while, but stuff that's active should be much snappier. If you don't like it, try tuning swappiness to your liking (I _think_ default is 50...test it first by issuing a "cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" ).

i don't see the point in telling my kernel to swap more if i usually have over 100MB of unused RAM left. Trust me, memory is not the issue here.

Evolution startup time is slower than KMail (though it's not bad at all), but you also have to consider what's being loaded. Email client vs PIM. It's kind of like saying that a text editor loads faster than OpenOffice. Yes it does, but seriously!

have you ever heard of Kontakt? it's PIM consisting of several components all being loaded at startup time... these components are kmail, korganizer, and some other useless crap that i don't even use. Kontakt starts up as fast as regular KMail. So even when we compare PIM vs PIM, the KDE equivalent beats the shit out of it's gnome counterpart

Evo has more functionality than KMail

like what? i know of some small convenience features in Kmail that Evo doesn't have but i really can't think of any feature that Evolution has that KMail/Kontakt doesn't have. Unless you include their Exchange server plug in. But that's not yet part of the default Evo package so it doesn't count

Epiphany seems to render things so much nicer than Konqueror

well i guess this is subjective... it also makes me wonder why Apple chose KHTML as its rendering engine instead of Gecko. And you know Apple is all about making shit look good

and it's simpler to user...I _refuse_ to spend my day trying to navigate the Konq settings dialogues....what a nightmare

yea the konqueror settings dialogues are horrible... that i'll agree with. However, if you just go through them one at a time, it doesn't take longer than a few minutes to configure it. and it beats having hardly no options at all like epiphany

I find Gossip to be so much nicer to use than Kopete

I haven't used Gossip yet, but lemme tell you something about kopete that you may not know. I use Kopete for IM. So when i want to send an instant message to somebody, i just click their name, then i type my message, then i press send. is there some revolutionary way of IM'ing that Gossip offers? can it really be that much nicer than the process i described? But like i said, i haven't used Gossip... i used Gaim when i was in Gnome. I think it's fair to say that Gaim is very popular application among Gnome users. Featurewise, Kopete beats Gaim hands down. User management for instance is much better in Kopete IMHO.

I find RB to be prettier than Juk, though when you get down to it they're the same app.

RB is the only gnome app that i'll miss. Juk just isn't there yet, allthough it performs much better (not just in playing music, but also in importing music into it's libary or updating the library). But Juk will get the job done, and the most important job it has (playing music) is being done better than in RB. I guess that's more important than having a nice way to browse the artists and the albums. Juk's way of doing it is good enough i guess.

I also find Totem to be nicer than that weird media player that's supposed to be a totem equivalent that came with SuSE 9.1 by default.

well.. nothing really comes close to the original Mplayer IMHO so i'm not gonna comment on this one

Don't even get me started on KOffice vs Gnome Office. Neither are particularly great (with the exception of Gnumeric which _IS_ particularly great), but with the amount of time KOffice has been around I'd expect something at least usable by now.

I'd say they both suck and i consider them both to be an extreme waste of time. OpenOffice can use all the help they can get... so why even spend time on inferiour software like KOffice or Gnome Office? I'd be happier if they could just provide both a Gnome frontend and a KDE frontend for OpenOffice.

You're right about Gnome terminal though...console output is a CPU hog. Hopefully this will be fixed in upcoming versions.

don't count on it... it's been a problem since at least 2.4 and possibly even 2.2 but i'm not sure about this. This is what bothers me the most about Gnome: a turtle that's just smoked an ounce of weed moves ahead faster than the Gnome codebase.

Now I'll admit that KDE has some stuff going for it. Like I said it's eye-candy central, and its kdevelop IDE is fantastic if that's what you're about. It's also highly configurable, though some would argue too much so. But I just can't justify dumping Gnome, which I find to be a very well thought out desktop environment (examples include spatial file manager and gnome volume manager, which I've yet to get up and running). You can keep your KDE, but I'm keeping my Gnome.

You're right about Gnome being well thought out... in that regard it is much better than KDE. What bothers me though is the complete lack of control. I'm not saying you have to go all out like KDE does in regards to configurability... but for fucks sake, there's a lot of stuff you simply can't change in Gnome. Of course the Gnome purists will say that this is to ensure that Gnome stays as user-friendly as possible. That is just complete and utter bullshit. Take Spatial Nautilus for example. You know a lot of people are bitching about them not providing an easy option to always use the classic browser right? Well, most of the Nautilis defenders will say that is to make sure that people don't use the evil and wrong other way. But then i beg you to search the nautilus mailinglists... at one point, the lead developer of nautilus actually said that he didn't wanna maintain the code which allows the user to simply turn it off. WHAT THE FUCK? that shouldn't even cover more than a few lines of code. And they actually have added that easy option in the 2.7 series to get rid of all the bitching. Way to stick to your principles fellas. And what if people simply prefer to use the classic way? By making it hard to change (changing a setting in GConf is not an easy way to do it for your regular computer user) they simply tell those users to either adapt or to fuck off. Gee, how user friendly of them.

EDIT: Just reread your post. Gnome's slow on a 2.6 GHz? You either need more RAM, or something's really wrong.

seriously RAM isn't the issue... i have 512MB of RAM and i almost always have between 200 and 100MB of unused RAM (unused by apps i mean... i know it gets used by the kernel as a cache so don't bother pointing that out).

As I am a helpful nice fella... If you miss Rhythmbox and don't think JuK is there yet why not try http://amarok.kde.org/.

I don't like the interface, I think it's confusing but I'm told it's the best KDE player there is, and it does sport some swanky features.



I don't know if there's a nice annouce script for it though.