POSTS
kde vs. gnome
By astrophoenix
I can’t believe I’m typing this.
I’m logged in with gnome as my desktop.
I’m going to use it on all my computers for the next few days or a week and see how it goes.
KDE4 bothers me this much.
KDE4 keeps getting better, but I believe it will take at least another year to reach the polish of KDE 3.5. and I’m finding that in ubuntu, gnome is actually MORE polished than my beloved KDE 3.5!
A big draw, and pleasant surprise, has been evolution. last time I tried evolution, it sucked. that was about 5 years ago. These days I’ve been whining that there are no good Linux GUI email clients. Kmail sucks, in 3.5 or 4.0, its performance with IMAP is abysmal. Thunderbird is fast, but will not cache IMAP messages (plus its calendar sucks, with obnoxious notifications that are hard to dismiss). Evolution seems willing to cache IMAP emails, runs fast, and the calendar seems to work great (at least, I was able to import my calendar files seamlessly; the true test will come at work when I try to sync my work appointments to it).
Everything I’ve tried in gnome so far seems very smooth, polished, and lightning fast; this is on my old old workstation at home, where kde 3.5 runs acceptably but with flickery redraws, and kde4 is a tick slower than that.
the gnome clock even kicks kde’s clock’s ass! the gnome folks took all the ideas from the kde clock, improved on them, and ran with it. one click on the gnome clock gives me a current calendar, a list of appointments for the day, and current time and temperature in as many cities as I want.
and there is even a memory usage gauge on my gnome panel, something I was having trouble finding in kde4.
still some questions I need to answer: does gnome’s file manager work as well as konqueror or dolphin? does it support ssh, like the fish IOslave in kde? and I need a new RSS Reader for the gnome desktop to replace akregator. and then there is digikam, with the best red-eye correction I have yet found; I wonder if g-spot or f-spot or whatever the gnome photo collection program is called can match that. although, there is of course no reason why I can’t run digikam on my spiffy new (possibly) gnome desktop.
I thought I would have trouble replacing kdepim (kmail, korganizer, and kaddressbook) but evolution seems to handily take care of that.
we shall see.