On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 07:29:43PM -0800, Robert Eanes wrote:
> Hey Folks,
>
> I recently installed Ubuntu on an older machine. I
> love it. I haven't tested many of the newer distro's
> out there so my opinion is in ignorance of other just
> as refined distro's. After looking at the distro's
> website, I saw a parallel project Kunbuntu. I haven't
> installed this out yet, but seeing how the Ununtu
> project handled the two desktops made me wonder about
> which one is used more, and why.
>
> My initial impression of Gnome is favorable. It's
> less "windowy" than KDE, but is notable harder to
> configure / modify. It also seems a bit sluggish when
> loading programs. Granted that I'm running it on a
> 400mhz system; everything is going to be a little
> slow, but Gnome just seems a little sluggish in
> comparison from how KDE seemed.
>
> What are your experiences with the two desktops? Why
> do you use one over the other? Is one desktop easier
> to program for than the other? Are there
> architectural differences that make one better than
> the other?
KDE iz da bomb!!! GNOME sux rox!!! (Just kidding, folks. ;-)
I prefer KDE (though I run Blackbox for a WM). My experience with GNOME,
which is a few years old, was that it was less stable and less polished.
I never spent enough time with it to be able to pass judgment on Linus'
opinion. He may be right. I also prefer KDE apps to GNOME apps. For
example, K3B seems to be the most recommended GUI CD burner software.
Works better than anything else I've tried. I don't know for sure, but I
believe that most of the Debian derivatives use KDE rather than GNOME
(with Ubuntu a notable exception). Debian itself is agnostic, as far as
I know.
As I recall (correct me if I'm wrong), GNOME had an event model on the
inside that used something like CORBA. The overall effect was that
messages were being passed all over the place all the time. Every time
you moved the mouse, for example, numerous events were generated, which
all had to be passed down the event-handling chain to where they were
finally destined. Made for an exceptionally slow system. I could be
wrong here, and GNOME could have tweaked this for speed since then.
Unfortunately, what seems to happen with this kind of software is that
they code every kind of function they could possibly need inside,
including some functions already handled by a decent C compiler, and
every single application has to drag all this code along with it. Shared
libraries generally lighten the load for individual apps, but the
overall system drag from all these libraries and functions is
considerable. Leading to the fact that you need quite a hefty machine to
run KDE or GNOME with any real crispness. Of course, my viewpoint is
probably skewed by the fact that I'm used to instantly responsive
console apps, and generally run on underpowered machines (200-800MHz
processors with 256-512M memory).
Paul
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