Difference between KDE and GNOME

[Lee Braiden]

On Thursday 13 October 2005 10:32, Jayasimha Yerramilli wrote:
> What are the primary functional differences between GNome and KDE
>  In depth answer highlighting the functional differences would be help me
> understand the environment's better.

My personal opinion, but I stand by it:

KDE is more integrated.  For instance, the RSS news aggregator, Akregator, 
works as a plugin for the Konqueror, the web browser, so that you can find 
RSS feeds in your browser and easily add them to Akgregator.  Akregator, 
besides running as a standalone app, can also run as a plugin for Kontact, 
which is the KDE equivalent of Evolution or MS Outlook or other PIM tools.  
Likewise, Kopete integrates into the KDE Address Book, so that your contacts 
have IM details, photos, etc.  

KDE is also more feature-complete.  It's really good at providing the features 
you need, even if it's just something you randomly decide you want.  Like, I 
was picking wallpaper for my desktop one day, and just decided to try adding 
a folder instead of a file.  It worked, and gave me a randomly changing 
desktop wallpaper, with no effort at all.  Next, I decided that I wanted to 
be able to "fast forward" through those wallpapers, or to delete a currently 
displayed wallpaper, and move onto a new one.  KDE didn't have those features 
explicitly, but it was VERY easy to add both, with the dcop command line tool 
and two small shell scripts.  You can control and script almost all of KDE 
through DCOP, which really makes it fit the unix philosophy, I think.

GNOME... I really like GNOME.  It was the only desktop I used, back around 
GNOME 1.4.  I wish I could say more good things about it.  Personally, I 
think the drive to make it user-friendly has made it too simplistic.  I can 
say two good things about GNOME though, and they're both very good.  The 
first is that it's accessibility focus has been great.  That's really 
important stuff, and it's good to see they took that seriously.  The second 
is international language support.  GNOME seems to handle foreign languages 
like arabic better, just because it's font engine is smarter.  Also, it has 
better support for inputting strange languages that don't use a normal 
keyboard mapping with one character per key.  That language support is also 
really important.

KDE 4 will have those features too, though, so even though international 
language support is pretty important for me, I'm not about to give up a 
highly functional KDE desktop for the current state of GNOME.

I also get the impression that KDE is more popular than GNOME now, and more 
actively developed.  Either that, or the KDE guys seem to get more done with 
a smaller team, due to the object-oriented structure of KDE that probably 
makes major improvements easier to affect.

Again, my personal view -- nothing more.  Others may well have different 
views.

-- 
Lee Braiden
http://www.DigitalUnleashed.com