Gnome 2 vs. Lovechild

I wiped KDE off my hd and decided to try Gnome2 on for size (again), and after a full days use I must say Gnome has some strong points but also many weaknesses.

I like the Workspace Switcher, it's much nicer than the one in KDE, I like the fact that I can directly grab an application and dump it on another desktop it's simple and efficent.

I also like the graphical logon manager GDM, it's much prettier than KDM.

The desktop itself appears somewhat anonymous, but the scalable icons are a neat detail.. The rounded icon text highlights are friendly to look at. The default icons are fairly pretty, and functional.

Gnome2 has exellent font handling... I love it...

now the bad points.

It completely lacks an "always on top" option for windows, a feature I liked very much in KDE. It becomes VERY annoying after a while, especially when you are doing something in phoenix and watching Futurama in MPlayer at the same time.

The configuration is cumbersome, a perfect exsample is the themes. Seeing as gnome is based in modularity the themes only apply to Nautilus (the god awful file manager, it's slow... but again it's cute) now to apply a theme to the windows manager (Metacity per default) you have to edit the registery, which while nicely commented and easy to edit using the GConf tool iis simply illogical....

The end result is that I'm holding out for KDE 3.1 final, it's simply a better DE, it's easier to use and the applications written for KDE, I personally find to be of a higher general quality. Aside from gFTP and XChat I found Gnome applications to be hard to use, and while Gnome might appeal to some people, I find it to lack consistency and good applications.

One other very annoying fact... The gnome coders have the niceness of gtk+ 2.x but due to what I can only say is the pure stupidity of the previous gtk design it seems that porting to gtk2 is so damn hard that even now most programs are still coded for the older (and uglier) gtk1 toolkit.... this hurts consistency a lot as there has been many design choices in Gnome2 which breaks the look from Gnome1, and gtk1 doesn't support nice stuff like antialiasing and svg.. it's simply ugly to look at.

I think this is currently the main problem for the gnome people, they might be technically up to date, but porting to the new interface is so big a task that it will take a substantial amount of time to get every app up to date... and then again Gnome 2.2 is due sometime this year, and I'm guessing that there will still be apps left at gtk1 when that comes out, which are needed for a core system, and then goes another round of porting to a new interface (but this time it's not likely to be so bad)....

This marks a strong point of KDE, every app known to KDE mankind is ported to QT3... most even before the official release of the final.

[Tyr_7BE]

It's very true that Gnome isn't where KDE is...yet. However, there's been substantial development since the release of Gnome 2.0. 2.2 was released today with a whole buch of new features, and some nice things are already being discussed for 2.4. I'm sure you've heard the story behind the shittiness of Gnome2. Schotty describes it well here: http://www.linuxjunior.org/yabbse/in...;threadid=6286

Basically, they have a decent base from which to work. They'll now start adding features and good stuff to what's there. The difference is that this time they plan to be smart about it.