Re: [LUG] KDE or GNOME

> GNOME. It's much faster (on startup, at least),

I find KDE to be quicker across the entire desktop and about equal on
startup. The first time I ran KDE it was slower but after that it was
about the same: you do have to make sure that you close applications
down before you log out though because otherwise they're loaded at
start-up which can make things a bit slower - I guess there's a
setting somewhere for this which you can change.

I found that KDE took about twenty-five seconds to load. GNOME takes four.

>has a more pleasing look and

That's totally subjective - you could probably make KDE look like
Gnome and Gnome look like KDE.

Actually, I was unable to locate the KDE option to install new themes. So much for user-friendliness...

> is easier to program for. It also makes more regular incremental releases
> rather than rehashing the entire system every couple of years;

KDE makes frequent incremental releases as well. The 3 series has been
around for sometime now but within that you see moves to point
releases such as the current 3.5.x . The changes in these releases are
pretty similar in scope to those that occur in a Gnome 2.16 -> 2.18
upgrade, at least from what I know.

The point releases from KDE are point releases, containing minor new features at best, but mainly bugfixes. GNOME's 2.x releases are not point releases - they contain major new features. Their scope is quite large.

The reason there's a big upgrade going on now, i.e. KDE 4 is because
the toolset it's based upon has been upgraded to QT4 - Gnome did the
same thing when GTK moved to version 2 and I suspect if GTK moves to
version 3 so will Gnome.

There is no plan for any version 3 of GNOME at this time, and there is no requirement for a GNOME module to use any particular version of the GIMP toolkit. Currently most GNOME apps use 2.8, but this is changing slowly (without the need to redo the entire desktop.)

> and the
> human-interface guideline is much more sensible (I think KDE might not even
> have one, which would explain a lot.)

Linus Torvalds would disagree with you :-D...personally I like the
Gnome way of doing things more but many people feel that it limits the
user and makes it harder to use some "advanced" features.

Perhaps if KDE had better-thought-through defaults, people wouldn't need to change the settings? To be honest, I don't care what Torvalds thinks.

GNOME's advanced features are not presented as being advanced for the reason that they should not need to be. If I go into gnome-terminal now (fastest terminal emulator on the market as of release of 2.14), I get six pages of configuration tools with perhaps ten options each: none of these launches any other dialogues.

The idea that KDE is more user-friendly because it's more similar to Windows does not merit dignification by response.