Among those new to Linux, KDE vs. Gnome has become a topic of religious zeal. It seems everyone needs to choose a tribe and show their pride to the entire internet. However; most of us need a desktop that makes us productive, and the choice is not straightforward.
I tend to use KDE at home, and Gnome at work. For most of the things I do, it doesn't really matter which desktop I use. Most applications run equally well in KDE or Gnome, though Gnome applications tend to work better in KDE than KDE applications in Gnome. The feature that makes KDE stand out above all other desktops is its KIO slave technology. With KDE you don't care where a file is physically located. There's a KIO slave for everything to make sure stuff just works. You can have a file on an FTP site, a network share, a CD, your desktop, or just about anywhere else, and access them through just about any application. Lets say you wanted to take an audio CD, rip a track to MP3, preview it to make sure it sounds OK, then mail it to someone through webmail. You insert your CD, browse it when prompted for an action and drag the track you want from the CD to a location on your hardrive (or a network drive, or FTP site... it doesn't really matter). After this you will have an MP3 automatically named and ID3 tags filled in from the internet. You can then place the mouse over the icon for the mp3 to preview it. When it's time to upload the file in your webmail, you can either browse to it through the browser the standard way, or simply drag it into the file location upload box in the compose mail screen. That's slick. KDE also has a lot of customization options, for people who like to tweak settings like taskbar transparency level. I really like KDE's kbluelock applet. When the bluetooth broadcast from my Blackberry is out of range, kbluelock locks the desktop. Conversely, the desktop is unlocked with my phone is back in bluetooth range of the computer. I take a lot of photographs, and digiKam is the only application for Linux designed to manage such a large volume of photos. Gnome's f-spot has a clever name, but is otherwise unsuited to the task. All digiKam needs is a new thumbnailing system (the current one is horribly slow), a revised tagging system, and a bit more functionality on the light table, and it will be approaching the Lightroom/Aperture league of photo management for jpeg files. It still has a long way to go for raw files, especially 14-bit raw files.
I use Gnome at work for more practical reasons. As simple as it sounds, it's a big deal to me that Nautilus, Gnome's file manager, can store settings for each folder independently. Some folders I need sorted by date, and some by name. Some ascending, some descending. Nautilus does this. Konqueror, quite surprisingly, doesn't. Gnome's GUI for the Beagle search index is also better designed than KDE's. Evolution is better for my needs at work than Kontact. When Evolution sends meeting requests to my Blackberry, it works. With Kontact, it doesn't. Evolution can let me sign email with my Thawte s/mime certificate, Kontact can't. It's worth noting Thunderbird does everything Evolution does except Gnome integration, but with the added bonus of being able to manage my IMAP sieve scripts. I don't need to access sieve scripts often, so I use Evolution for the Gnome integration. Things like calendar events being linked to the clock in the system tray are small yet convenient touches. Newer versions of Gnome are tempting me to make the switch at home too. To my eye, Gnome has better font rendering than KDE. That's not to say that KDE has bad font rendering, but everytime I open Firefox in KDE, it reminds that KDE has room for improvement there. Gnomes tighter HAL integration gives it better support for some pluggable hardware than KDE. My iPod seems to work better with Gnome/Banshee than it does with KDE's Amarok. Pidgin is shaping up to be a better IM client that Kopete, which hasn't seen new functionality in over a year. Unfortunately Gnome lacks a good photo management tool, but Picasa works in a pinch, and digiKam mostly works in Gnome. For people with more casual photo management requirements than mine, Picasa is probably a great photo manager, though it will ignore video clips.
This post may be obsolete soon. KDE 4.0 has already been "released," which will probably change things quite a bit some day. KDE 4.0 is rubbish as far as productivity goes, but its potential can already be seen. Developers are claiming that KDE 4.1 will be out this summer, and that it will be usable.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Linux Distro Comparison (Early 2008)
I should begin by saying that while I'm not one of those people who have been using Linux since the beginning, I first dabbled with it in February 1998 but didn't make it my primary OS until March 2002. Initially I played with Caldera, SuSE and Red Hat, but Mandrake eventually became my favourite distribution. Since then I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva both at home and at work daily, but I check in on other distributions from time to time since I'm not completely satisfied with it.
If you have a home desktop operating largely as a standalone box, Mandriva 2008 barely gets my vote as the best distribution. Reasons I like Mandriva may not apply to everyone. The open source Broadcom wireless drivers are incredibly unstable for me, so I need NDISwrapper for now. I'll probably change my hardware to something Atheros-based since I've had good luck with those chipsets. Until then, Mandriva's NDISwrapper setup is first rate, as is its network setup in general. So thumbs up for that. Mandriva 2007.1 had the best network setup tools available, and Mandriva 2008's networking is a pretty close second. Unfortunately Mandriva removed the ability to delete network configuration profiles in the 2008 release, so I had to resort to vim to make it stop using the open source Broadcom drivers. Another minor quirk of the 2008 release is that gdesklets doesn't work, and it seems Mandriva has no intention of providing a bugfix for the 2008 release. Mandriva's network tray icon tool isn't bad, but could stand some improvement. As with any OS, it lists wired and wireless networks, and lets you choose among them prompting for WEP keys, etc. Sometimes it lists some wireless networks multiple times, and the tray icon has a tendency to crash after a few weeks of uptime. Menu options in the tray icon are also organized in a counter-intuitive fashion, but it's not a big deal once you're used to it. Mandriva's software installer, urpmi is a very flexible tool that works well, and in the 2008 release, they speed of the GUI frontend has been greatly improved. If you have multiple locations set for the same repository and one or more fails, the graphical installer loses the ability to count packages remaining to be installed properly. At first I thought it was a bug, but since that has been the behaviour since at least 2001, I assume that's the way the Mandriva guys like it. Overall, thumbs up for a good package management system. Mandriva's repositories are very complete, even offering packages for basic Blackberry support, which is a rarity. The Mandriva Control Center is among the best setup tools available for system configuration. The reason I only recommend it for home use is because Mandriva really doesn't have a plan for business users. Mandriva's position is that if you call them, they can probably work something out for you. I know from experience that if you call them with a business requirement, chances are they won't call you back.
OpenSUSE 10.3 is a much tougher distribution to judge. SUSE does so many things well. There are hardly any packaging glitches to be found, and those usually get fixed quickly. One of the great features of SUSE is the ability to add 3rd party repositories automatically. That means people new to the distribution can get up and running without having to research repositories like you have to with other systems. Because of this, OpenSUSE, which is free, essentially provides the same support for non-free drivers out of the box as the relatively expensive Mandriva Powerpack ($120/year for what used to be a club membership). Unfortunately, package management in SUSE is a thing of misery. Since none of its repositories provided Blackberry support, I downloaded SUSE packages from the barry project. In Mandriva I would just open a prompt, go to my download dir, and enter "urpmi *". All package dependencies are resolved and I have my software installed. This is not exactly new technology. Debian has been doing that since at least the Linux 2.0 days (yes, I know Linux 2.0 wasn't that long ago for Debian). SUSE's package manager is called zypper, which is somewhat of an ironic name since it's anything but "zippy." Maybe it gets its name from being as much fun as having your scrotum caught in a zipper. "zypper in *" did not install my packages, after taking forever to go through its repo updates because the files it found could not be found. I have no idea what that means. I couldn't find any options in zypper to install local packages. Basically, zypper can kiss my YAST. Speaking of which, apparently yast can be used to install local packages. I haven't tried this yet, but I'll assume it works. Even so, package installation is brutally slow no matter what you do. I disabled auto repo updates, and it still takes around five minutes to install a 500KB package on a Core 2 quad with 4GB and a fast internet connection from the time you first click "install software" in the menu. Even more annoying is that while YAST is setting up to install something, you get a billion modal windows opening and closing, each stealing window focus, so can't even work while installing something -- you basically have to plan your software installation around sandwich breaks. There are a few other minor quirks in OpenSUSE. SUSE has a crazy menu system for KDE called Kickoff that's designed to slow you down. Fortunately, switching back to the normal KDE menu is very simple. YAST for KDE is a very elegantly designed piece of software once you actually get to the software installer, but for some reason they made a very rough and unfinished version for Gnome. For example, in KDE if there is a problem with package package dependency resolution, YAST tells you which packages are in conflict. The Gnome version doesn't, it just tells you there's a problem. Also, if there is a software update available, you can click on the tray icon to see what's available in KDE. In Gnome this requires the root password. I still haven't figured out how to get Gnome to use the KDE version of YAST. If the SUSE team threw its software installation system in the garbage and just used Mandriva or Debian's system, it would easily be the best Linux desktop I've used.
I'm currently testing Fedora Core 8. More to come later.
If you have a home desktop operating largely as a standalone box, Mandriva 2008 barely gets my vote as the best distribution. Reasons I like Mandriva may not apply to everyone. The open source Broadcom wireless drivers are incredibly unstable for me, so I need NDISwrapper for now. I'll probably change my hardware to something Atheros-based since I've had good luck with those chipsets. Until then, Mandriva's NDISwrapper setup is first rate, as is its network setup in general. So thumbs up for that. Mandriva 2007.1 had the best network setup tools available, and Mandriva 2008's networking is a pretty close second. Unfortunately Mandriva removed the ability to delete network configuration profiles in the 2008 release, so I had to resort to vim to make it stop using the open source Broadcom drivers. Another minor quirk of the 2008 release is that gdesklets doesn't work, and it seems Mandriva has no intention of providing a bugfix for the 2008 release. Mandriva's network tray icon tool isn't bad, but could stand some improvement. As with any OS, it lists wired and wireless networks, and lets you choose among them prompting for WEP keys, etc. Sometimes it lists some wireless networks multiple times, and the tray icon has a tendency to crash after a few weeks of uptime. Menu options in the tray icon are also organized in a counter-intuitive fashion, but it's not a big deal once you're used to it. Mandriva's software installer, urpmi is a very flexible tool that works well, and in the 2008 release, they speed of the GUI frontend has been greatly improved. If you have multiple locations set for the same repository and one or more fails, the graphical installer loses the ability to count packages remaining to be installed properly. At first I thought it was a bug, but since that has been the behaviour since at least 2001, I assume that's the way the Mandriva guys like it. Overall, thumbs up for a good package management system. Mandriva's repositories are very complete, even offering packages for basic Blackberry support, which is a rarity. The Mandriva Control Center is among the best setup tools available for system configuration. The reason I only recommend it for home use is because Mandriva really doesn't have a plan for business users. Mandriva's position is that if you call them, they can probably work something out for you. I know from experience that if you call them with a business requirement, chances are they won't call you back.
OpenSUSE 10.3 is a much tougher distribution to judge. SUSE does so many things well. There are hardly any packaging glitches to be found, and those usually get fixed quickly. One of the great features of SUSE is the ability to add 3rd party repositories automatically. That means people new to the distribution can get up and running without having to research repositories like you have to with other systems. Because of this, OpenSUSE, which is free, essentially provides the same support for non-free drivers out of the box as the relatively expensive Mandriva Powerpack ($120/year for what used to be a club membership). Unfortunately, package management in SUSE is a thing of misery. Since none of its repositories provided Blackberry support, I downloaded SUSE packages from the barry project. In Mandriva I would just open a prompt, go to my download dir, and enter "urpmi *". All package dependencies are resolved and I have my software installed. This is not exactly new technology. Debian has been doing that since at least the Linux 2.0 days (yes, I know Linux 2.0 wasn't that long ago for Debian). SUSE's package manager is called zypper, which is somewhat of an ironic name since it's anything but "zippy." Maybe it gets its name from being as much fun as having your scrotum caught in a zipper. "zypper in *" did not install my packages, after taking forever to go through its repo updates because the files it found could not be found. I have no idea what that means. I couldn't find any options in zypper to install local packages. Basically, zypper can kiss my YAST. Speaking of which, apparently yast can be used to install local packages. I haven't tried this yet, but I'll assume it works. Even so, package installation is brutally slow no matter what you do. I disabled auto repo updates, and it still takes around five minutes to install a 500KB package on a Core 2 quad with 4GB and a fast internet connection from the time you first click "install software" in the menu. Even more annoying is that while YAST is setting up to install something, you get a billion modal windows opening and closing, each stealing window focus, so can't even work while installing something -- you basically have to plan your software installation around sandwich breaks. There are a few other minor quirks in OpenSUSE. SUSE has a crazy menu system for KDE called Kickoff that's designed to slow you down. Fortunately, switching back to the normal KDE menu is very simple. YAST for KDE is a very elegantly designed piece of software once you actually get to the software installer, but for some reason they made a very rough and unfinished version for Gnome. For example, in KDE if there is a problem with package package dependency resolution, YAST tells you which packages are in conflict. The Gnome version doesn't, it just tells you there's a problem. Also, if there is a software update available, you can click on the tray icon to see what's available in KDE. In Gnome this requires the root password. I still haven't figured out how to get Gnome to use the KDE version of YAST. If the SUSE team threw its software installation system in the garbage and just used Mandriva or Debian's system, it would easily be the best Linux desktop I've used.
I'm currently testing Fedora Core 8. More to come later.
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