[KLUG Members] difference between gnome and kde

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I am not intending to start a flamewar.  

Aw, come on!  Wheeny..

> I am just looking for some info....
> I have heard people talk in the past about how gnome is better than
> kde or that kde is better than gnome.  

It in large part depends on what you want to do, what your focus is, etc... and
of course what apps you want to use.

One answer to this question is "less and less".  Things like gstreamer
(originally a gnome multimedia module) hae been modularized to make the bulk of
the functionality DE independent, and both GNOME & KDE wrap it up in their
component.  Lower level stuff like D-BUS is also pretty DE independent.

> There are scattered bits of
> data why the person thinks this is true.  

Well, I'm a GNOME bigot and could go on for ages, but briefly...

> I am wondering if someone from each side could deliniate why the one
> is better than the other in their opinion?  

As far as user stuff goes,  my experience is that MY users find GNOME more
intuitive.  This is of course ancedotal and based on lots of little things. 
Like the fact that the "Print Screen" key takes a screen capture, etc...

GNOME's Bonobo component model is REALLY powerful, and it uses CORBA which is
REALLY REALLY powerful;  but if you don't intend to develope or communicate
with backend-style systems - the user doesn't care (although I'd argue that you
have apps like evolution in GNOME for precisely this reason).

Ximian does GNOME, and the're version is very polished and takes care of lots of
wierd little oddities that the basic distro DE installations don't (like
printing just works, plugins are nicely installed, etc...)  They take hours of
work off making what I would consider a true windows/mac comparable DE.

Gconf in GNOME makes it much more managaeble, all the configuration through a
daemon and it's API.  And nailling down users options is just coming down the
chute (thats alot harder to do right that you might at first think).  Corporate
networks *NEED* this functionality.

GNOME 2.6 integrates the address book & calendar everywhere, right down to the
clock applett.  This is unspeakably wonderful.   And because the address book,
etc... are little CORBA servers you can drop in your Groupwise plugin, the
OpenGroupware plugin, and things 'just work' (as an example of the fruit of a
good component model).

And of course there is Mono, which sits on all the GNOME functionality anyway.

Adam Tauno Williams
Network & Systems Administrator
Morrison Industries
Grand Rapids, Mi. USA