KDE vs. Gnome

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.