Ten reasons Gnome has the edge on KDE

• Tags:
• Open Source,
• KDE,
• Gnome

Jack Wallen

Published: 24 Apr 2009 13:38 BST

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Gnome has pulled ahead of open-source desktop rival K Desktop Environment (KDE) in terms of design, stability and usability, says Jack Wallen.

It seems only yesterday I was reading thread after thread of Emacs vs Vi flame wars. Those were the good old days. Now hostilities between followers of the two open-source editors are all but over, ending the infighting between Linux devotees. Well — almost.

A new conflict is brewing, promising more of the sharp-tongued exchanges that characterised Emacs vs Vi. This new dispute? Gnome vs KDE.

Many of you may be shaking your heads. You may be thinking that that particular battle either never started or was won long ago. True, at one point KDE completely trounced Gnome. But now Gnome is slowly but surely pulling ahead of KDE.

Here is why today's Gnome, versions 2.22 and above, is better than today's KDE, versions 4.1 and above.

1. KDE 4
KDE 4 is a significant factor in the change of fortunes of the two desktops. The backlash against KDE 4 has been severe. When it was first released in January 2008, it was simply not ready.

KDE 4 was a complete redesign, from the ground up, of KDE — and it showed. KDE took a solid desktop and pulled the rug from under it. What replaced the ever-popular KDE 3.5 was something unstable, hardly usable, and as configurable as Windows Vista. Gone were the days of tailoring KDE to your exact specifications.

KDE was and is the first-ever 'Microsofting' of the Linux desktop. The developers released something that was worthless and refused to listen to users' feedback. In the rival camp, Gnome was moving steadily forward — just as it has been for years.

2. Start menu
With Gnome, there are three simple menus from the main panel: Applications, Places and Administration. It should be obvious what you can find under each one. It should also be obvious that navigating these menus is efficient and as simple as it is elegant.

KDE 4, on the other hand, has a clumsy menu. If you click on the K menu, you will initially see five tabs: Favorites, Applications, Computer, Recently Used and Leave. By default, the Favorites menu contains System Settings and File Manager. To open an application, you must then click on the Applications tab, navigate to the category the target application will belong to, find the application entry, and click on it.

You can avoid doing this by adding an application launcher widget to the panel. But if you are like me and use numerous applications, you will quickly have a panel full of launchers. This KDE menu system needs streamlining before it can be considered an efficient use of a desktop.

What is worse, at least for the new user, is that finding the menu editor tool is not intuitive. There is no entry in any configuration control panel.

To edit the main menu, you have to right-click the K button and select Menu Editor. But even then, you can edit only entries within the Applications tab. You will also notice another entry in the K button: right-click and Switch To Classic Menu Style. This style is more in line with what most users are accustomed to. But again, how many new users are going to know to right-mouse-click the K button to find this?

3. Nautilus vs Dolphin
With KDE 4 came the new file manager, Dolphin. Before this change, KDE had the best graphical file manager available of any operating system — Konqueror. But now, KDE uses Dolphin, which is similar to Nautilus minus the stability.

Gnome's Nautilus is a no-frills file manager. It does one thing and it does it well: it manages files. It has add-ons for Dropbox, and integrates with that system seamlessly, and is very stable.

Dolphin, on the other hand, was an attempt to get away from what was considered the bloatware of Konqueror and to adopt a simpler, streamlined file manager. What has been created is a file manager that has features most people will find worthless.

Take for instance a file/directory rating and comment system. If you are the only user on a machine, what use is a file/rating system...

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