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KDE vs GNOME (for Ubuntu)

A

Alex

Diamond Member
gonna install the new 5.10 ubuntu release tonight and i was wondering whether i should pick Gnome or KDE... in the past I've always liked KDE mainly because i hated the foot icon used in Gnome... 😀
i've decided i no longer care so basically which of the two is more user-friendly and generally 'better'?

thanks! 🙂

-frang
 
Ubuntu doesn't use the foot icon in gnome.

KDE is too cluttered for me, I use gnome on my desktop and fluxbox on my laptop.
 
Since I'm not a linux nerd I have to ask:
If the have the choice of both, it is possible to log off and log back on with a different one?
How does that affect things like shortcuts and document location?

ALSO, are there any sites with images that show me quick side-by-side views of the two interfaces?
 
Originally posted by: shortylickens
Since I'm not a linux nerd I have to ask:
If the have the choice of both, it is possible to log off and log back on with a different one?
How does that affect things like shortcuts and document location?

ALSO, are there any sites with images that show me quick side-by-side views of the two interfaces?
Click to expand...

You can have as many Desktop Environments/Window Managers as you want


All of your documents are stored in /home/shortylickens

as well as all of your application preferences and such. In Linux you can log off and log back in using any window manager you have installed. Each one will have their own shortcuts and "start" menus, and desktops. Some don't have anything though, it all comes down to which WM you use.

http://www.lynucs.org/

That site has a lot linux screenshots.
 
I prefer Gnome. Ubuntu tends to concentrate on Gnome and in the past KDE was broken, which is why people created Kubuntu. I am a Debian user personally, which doesn't have a preference to one or another.

If your using a graphical login manager like gdm or kdm, then when you login you can go to 'sessions' and you can choose to select Gnome or Kde everytime you feel like logging out and logging back in. It'll ask you if you want to set your choice as the default, and you can choose yes or no and yet be able to change it again anytime you feel like it.

If you learn enough to be able to setup multiple X servers at once, or use xnest to build a X server session inside your current X server session then you can run multiple X enviroments at once if you feel like it. Some programs like Firefox don't like having multiple sessions running with the same user on the same home directory, but that's their problem.
 
Between those two, I prefer KDE for a variety of reasons, mainly applications(Kate vs Gnome edit, etc), Gnome's lack of easily accessible(and this part is important) config options, and Pango(Gnome's text rendering engine).

I mainly use XFCE these days though, but I tend to keep both around on my Debian box, so when new versions come out, I get them installed and can try them out to see if there's anything new I like.

Oh and Drag, both KDE and Gnome have "integrated" xnest these days, so starting a new session is just a mouse click or two away 🙂
 
thanks for the replies! i guess i will install both and try them both out before i decide to stick with any one... what i remember liking about KDE was how easy it was to change system settings etc with their control center or whatever it was called...
 
Originally posted by: shortylickens
Since I'm not a linux nerd I have to ask:
If the have the choice of both, it is possible to log off and log back on with a different one?
Click to expand...

You can with Suse. You can choose the WM at login. Not sure about version 9.3, but you can do with this version 10.0.
 
On systems with lesser amounts of RAM, KDE has been much more sluggish in my experience.

GNOME hasn't had any particular problems with speed for me on a little testbed I've been tinkering with, an old AX6BC w/500 PIII (@733) and 256mb of memory. Kubuntu was pretty sluggish with the same setup. It likely won't matter in the end anyway, since it'll be used primarily for a samba fileserver...Though I might change the system setup a little bit and go strictly commandline once I've got everything setup the way I need it to.

 
In terms of user interface, Gnome seems a lot more user-centric than KDE, at least from my limited experience with earlier versions for both 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Satyrist
On systems with lesser amounts of RAM, KDE has been much more sluggish in my experience.

GNOME hasn't had any particular problems with speed for me on a little testbed I've been tinkering with, an old AX6BC w/500 PIII (@733) and 256mb of memory. Kubuntu was pretty sluggish with the same setup. It likely won't matter in the end anyway, since it'll be used primarily for a samba fileserver...Though I might change the system setup a little bit and go strictly commandline once I've got everything setup the way I need it to.
Click to expand...

Command line! Heathen! 😛


Command line rocks. Ever use 'screen'? Liked it?

If you liked screen for the command line, try it with X Windows!!!!

Use RatPosion. It rocks. Use a Window manager so 1EE7 that your little brother can't figure out WTF is going on! 😀

For multi-windowed applications like Gimp I used a script to launch a xnest'd enviroment with lwm (lightweight window manager) just for that application. Otherwise everything is full screen. Also I used Mac-on-Linux on my Ibook with so that I could get OS X, kde, and gnome inside ratpoison all at the same time. (although kde was a bit crash-happy) Just to make Apple fans cry.

Still though Gnome is nice because I am incredably lazy. KDE has apps like koffice going for it.. but gnome still works best for me.

Check out Krita from Koffice though. Currently only in SVN, but due out in Januarary 1.5 release (I think) you have all these neato features:
Like 16bit per channel color support for 64bit RGBA color support.
OpenEXR support. (Think "Industrial light and magic", then think "They use it for all their movies")
And CMYK support among others.

It's not a replacement for Gimp or Photoshop. What it is is a painting program. With Gimp you have a image editing program, for editing photos and such.. with a paint program it's designed to create images. Now you can paint in Gimp and you can edit in Krita perfectly fine, but they target different focuses. But then again if things like Gimp's interface and lack of 16bit color support turns you off, then check out Krita from their svn or the current one from the latest release of koffice, or wait till all the features are in koffice proper in a few months.
 
Originally posted by: drag
Command line! Heathen! 😛

Command line rocks. Ever use 'screen'? Liked it?

If you liked screen for the command line, try it with X Windows!!!!

Use RatPosion. It rocks. Use a Window manager so 1EE7 that your little brother can't figure out WTF is going on! 😀

For multi-windowed applications like Gimp I used a script to launch a xnest'd enviroment with lwm (lightweight window manager) just for that application. Otherwise everything is full screen. Also I used Mac-on-Linux on my Ibook with so that I could get OS X, kde, and gnome inside ratpoison all at the same time. (although kde was a bit crash-happy) Just to make Apple fans cry.

Still though Gnome is nice because I am incredably lazy. KDE has apps like koffice going for it.. but gnome still works best for me.

Check out Krita from Koffice though. Currently only in SVN, but due out in Januarary 1.5 release (I think) you have all these neato features:
Like 16bit per channel color support for 64bit RGBA color support.
OpenEXR support. (Think "Industrial light and magic", then think "They use it for all their movies")
And CMYK support among others.

It's not a replacement for Gimp or Photoshop. What it is is a painting program. With Gimp you have a image editing program, for editing photos and such.. with a paint program it's designed to create images. Now you can paint in Gimp and you can edit in Krita perfectly fine, but they target different focuses. But then again if things like Gimp's interface and lack of 16bit color support turns you off, then check out Krita from their svn or the current one from the latest release of koffice, or wait till all the features are in koffice proper in a few months.
Click to expand...

I've still got to get comfortable with going to command line only, I'm rather the n00b when it comes to Linux, Ubuntu was the only one that I felt somewhat comfortable with, even if it was for little more than a simple file server...Didn't care for Suse, Redhat, or Clarkconnect (based off RH) for that purpose. I felt Kubuntu (5.04 was the only version I had tried) felt...'broken' for some reason.

Never tried screen, much less ratpoison 😀

Maybe later
 
Originally posted by: drag
Check out Krita from Koffice though. Currently only in SVN, but due out in Januarary 1.5 release (I think) you have all these neato features:
Like 16bit per channel color support for 64bit RGBA color support.
OpenEXR support. (Think "Industrial light and magic", then think "They use it for all their movies")
And CMYK support among others.

It's not a replacement for Gimp or Photoshop. What it is is a painting program. With Gimp you have a image editing program, for editing photos and such.. with a paint program it's designed to create images. Now you can paint in Gimp and you can edit in Krita perfectly fine, but they target different focuses. But then again if things like Gimp's interface and lack of 16bit color support turns you off, then check out Krita from their svn or the current one from the latest release of koffice, or wait till all the features are in koffice proper in a few months.
Click to expand...

Wow... I can't wait to try this out. Wonder if it is compatible with Wacom pressure sensitivity.
 
After using Gnome on both of my rigs for several months (one Debian and one Ubuntu), I switched to KDE a few days ago and as of tonight I'm settled into a nice, comfortable UI configuration where everything works nicely.
I've already forgotten what it was about Gnome that was starting to bug me. It was probably some little thing, like KDE's old menu-editor bug that discarded all of my changes to the K menu if I made more than a dozen or so, and made me want to use Gnome instead. Thankfully that bug is gone now, and the only drawbacks I've noticed to KDE vs. Gnome is that KDE is noticeably slower on my laptop (Athlon XP-M 2400+, 512MB mem), and setting up my multimedia keys in KDE took quite a bit more work.
 
Originally posted by: Satyrist
Originally posted by: drag
Command line! Heathen! 😛

Command line rocks. Ever use 'screen'? Liked it?

If you liked screen for the command line, try it with X Windows!!!!

Use RatPosion. It rocks. Use a Window manager so 1EE7 that your little brother can't figure out WTF is going on! 😀

For multi-windowed applications like Gimp I used a script to launch a xnest'd enviroment with lwm (lightweight window manager) just for that application. Otherwise everything is full screen. Also I used Mac-on-Linux on my Ibook with so that I could get OS X, kde, and gnome inside ratpoison all at the same time. (although kde was a bit crash-happy) Just to make Apple fans cry.

Still though Gnome is nice because I am incredably lazy. KDE has apps like koffice going for it.. but gnome still works best for me.

Check out Krita from Koffice though. Currently only in SVN, but due out in Januarary 1.5 release (I think) you have all these neato features:
Like 16bit per channel color support for 64bit RGBA color support.
OpenEXR support. (Think "Industrial light and magic", then think "They use it for all their movies")
And CMYK support among others.

It's not a replacement for Gimp or Photoshop. What it is is a painting program. With Gimp you have a image editing program, for editing photos and such.. with a paint program it's designed to create images. Now you can paint in Gimp and you can edit in Krita perfectly fine, but they target different focuses. But then again if things like Gimp's interface and lack of 16bit color support turns you off, then check out Krita from their svn or the current one from the latest release of koffice, or wait till all the features are in koffice proper in a few months.
Click to expand...

I've still got to get comfortable with going to command line only, I'm rather the n00b when it comes to Linux, Ubuntu was the only one that I felt somewhat comfortable with, even if it was for little more than a simple file server...Didn't care for Suse, Redhat, or Clarkconnect (based off RH) for that purpose. I felt Kubuntu (5.04 was the only version I had tried) felt...'broken' for some reason.

Never tried screen, much less ratpoison 😀

Maybe later
Click to expand...



Oh, then you definately need to use Screen. It's great for using over the internet via ssh. It calls itself a 'terminal multiplexer' and what it does is that it allows you to create multiple instances of your shell (the command line enviroment) over one connection. It also runs everything independant of how your connected. So if your running thru ssh and your downloading a big file onto the server and you get disconnected.. it will continue running the download like nothing happenned. When you connect back you can issue the 'screen -r' command to recover the screen session (sometimes you need to do 'screen -d' to detatch the old session or maybe kill the specific instance of sshd that was your old connection (don't kill the main instance of sshd though!)). Otherwise if you get disconnected then your stuff your running gets killed along with your connection.

You just start if up by installing it (usually aviable by default or thru official distro stuff) then start it by typing 'screen'. Screen is controlled thru ctrl-a + <a keypress> style controls. So if you want help you can go: ctrl-a then ? (question mark)

Originally posted by: M00T
Originally posted by: drag
Check out Krita from Koffice though. Currently only in SVN, but due out in Januarary 1.5 release (I think) you have all these neato features:
Like 16bit per channel color support for 64bit RGBA color support.
OpenEXR support. (Think "Industrial light and magic", then think "They use it for all their movies")
And CMYK support among others.

It's not a replacement for Gimp or Photoshop. What it is is a painting program. With Gimp you have a image editing program, for editing photos and such.. with a paint program it's designed to create images. Now you can paint in Gimp and you can edit in Krita perfectly fine, but they target different focuses. But then again if things like Gimp's interface and lack of 16bit color support turns you off, then check out Krita from their svn or the current one from the latest release of koffice, or wait till all the features are in koffice proper in a few months.
Click to expand...

Wow... I can't wait to try this out. Wonder if it is compatible with Wacom pressure sensitivity.
Click to expand...

I haven't had a chance to try it out, but it says that in the current version that it supports wacom tablets.

Gimp supports wacom tablets too. The difficult thing is that you often need to download the pre-built wacom X driver from http://linuxwacom.sourceforge.net/ and copy it to the correct directory. I find that the default wacom module from my kernel is good enough and I don't have a need to build a custom module. But it may be different for you. Maybe on latest versions of X.org the built-in wacom driver is good enough.

The after that and you test to make sure that the /dev/input/event* files are working correctly then the pain in the rear part is to configure X correctly. There are details and sample in the howto aviable on that website. This is the part that I have most trouble with.

To then have it work in Gimp in a usefull way you have to go thru the toolbar menu 'file' ---> 'preferences' and then 'input devices' then select 'configure extended input devices' how you want them to behave. It'll support having tools for each idependant wacom device (stylus, eraser, mouse), support pressure sensitivity that is configurable for each gimp tool item, and then also tilt on certain wacom tablets with that feature.

I figure it should be similar to get it working with Krita.
 
I use gnome. The reason is simple. THere are no QT apps that I use, so there is no reason to have QT on my box. If that changes I'll look at going back to kde. I found it very nice, but gnome works just as well.
 
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