Default Ubuntu applications

[Tero Pesonen]

On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 15:36 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 3:21 PM, David Sanders <dsuzukisanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> If good applications are the issue, then a better, or more profitable,
> >> question in my opinion is why is Ubuntu using GNOME to begin with. New
> >> users do not install kubuntu.
> >>
> >
> > Because KDE looks like it was designed by monkeys banging on
> > typewriters? /me ducks
> 
> Well, I wouldn't have put it /quite/ like that, but I'd basically have to agree.
> 
> More generally, apart from the pervading ugliness, KDE is full of
> thousands of little options to twiddle. GNOME keeps it simple. Simple
> is better for beginners. This is not really contentious or
> controversial.

That is true. But simple also means it is difficult, and in most cases
impossible, to make Gnome work for you. Unless you happen to think/act
the way gnome developers do, you are toast, so to say -- You have to
work for Gnome. What I expect from Linux is that the computer works for
me. When I use Gnome I always feel someone else knows better than me how
I should work. Last time I had that feeling was when I used Windows XP
in 2002.

And Gnome *is* ugly.

> Also, KDE was based upon Qt, which was semi-proprietary tech from
> TrollTech of Oslo, Norway. Now it is owned by Nokia & dual-licensed
> under the GPL as well, so this is no longer an issue.
> 
> Personally, I found KDE 3 to be vastly complex, bloated and quite hard
> to fathom, with 2 web browsers, one of which was also a file manager,
> document viewer, download handler, email viewer and who knows what
> else. 

Which was/is great. I always used Konqueror for both web and quick and
simple file management, and even for FTP. I found it refreshing after
Windows that my desktop treated these similar data streams similarly,
with similar UI.

The major plus in KDE was that you could run the same session for as
long as you wanted (a day, a month, a year) without having to log out ->
startx. with Gnome, I now log out once a week to keep it running
smoothly, a la Windows 98. Still, for some reason, my panel lost after a
security-update-provoked reboot the quick menu which allowed me to log
out, suspend, reboot etc. effortlessly, and that menu has not come back,
nor can I make it come back. And I don't even want to start with how
buggy some Gnome applications are.

This is why my home system still runs SUSE Linux with KDE 3.5. It just
works. It is that good old Linux still breathing -- a stable desktop
environment where the computer works for me. I guess that Linux is
slowly evaporating with the need to coax Windows users as the main motif
for building distributions now.

Tero Pesonen

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