[SATLUG] KDE vs. Gnome

[Al Castanoli]

On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 09:17 -0600, Bob Tracy wrote:
> Geoff wrote:
> > go read 'em first, Bob, then make a judgment.
> 
> I did, as soon as I sent the posting :-).  Pretty even-handed treatment,
> and refreshingly devoid of any mention of developer politics.  I stand
> by my original posting, however, because I related *my experiences* with
> the two environments.  Do I have to include the standard YMMV disclaimer?

I try to stay away from the industrial strength WMs when using older or
less capable hardware (also when having to divvy up limited amounts of
RAM across several concurrent VMware sessions), and I like xfce,
blackbox, and fluxbox where there I don't have the resources for KDE.  I
used to like gnome quite a bit, but I've gotten hooked on tabbed xterms
in konsole, and have gotten uneven results trying to run konsole in
gnome.  Konsole will work fine in one version of gnome, but then comes a
new patch set with an updated version number, and konsole doesn't quite
act the way I expected it to.

The gnome-terminal is fine when you can lay out eight or so terminals on
a desktop, but I don't always have that much real estate.  I still use
gnome, though, on 18 or so Solaris 9 boxen, and it's nice to have some
consistency between OSes.  KDE is available for Solaris, but doesn't
quite seem to be much out of beta yet.  At least nobody's seriously
trying to push CDE on linux anymore, and I'm glad to do without it.

I'm writing this on an OpenSUSE 10.2 box running KDE, while in another
window I have Fedora Core 6 in a VMware session setting up some
scientific linux packages for a 64 bit server I'm building in a couple
days.  The Fedora session's running gnome for consistency with the
scientific linux build, where I'm leaving KDE out.  At least EMACS works
the same in all these environments, so if you have to have eye candy on
the desktop, you might as well pick some that appeals more to you than
the other offerings.

Regards,
Al Castanoli