KDE, Gnome, or Other

[Gregg Bolinger]

Those of you running Linux, what desktop do you run? KDE, GNome, or another? I'd also like to know why.

Thanks,

[Tim West]

I run Enlightenment...for me it's a decent compromise between the resource-hungry full Desktop Environments (KDE, Gnome), and the thin, barren Window Managers (Blackbox et al). I want to also look into Fluxbox, which looks like Blackbox with "just enough extra".

Enlightenment can also can be set to provide extra techy things that scare/impress Windows users ;-) .. stuff like the "architect-style" measurements when moving windows - it shows lines to each edge of the screen and pixel measurements etc. I get a kick out of that lame stuff ...

I find the minimal window managers a pain to set up how I like, and often missing little things. Eg, BlackBox requires extra configuration and packages just to enable keyboard shortcuts (for minimise etc); it also lacks "snap-to" when moving windows. These two things alone are enough for me to ditch it.

That said, I use a relatively underpowered machine (Athlon 1200 / 384Mb RAM), at least for what I often do on it, so I'm keen to save resources. I'm also about to buy a laptop, so using less RAM = turn off Virtual Memory = less HDD activity = longer battery life. I worry sometimes that I fall into the Gentoo-like premature optimisation camp.

My preference was Gnome over KDE...in the last versions I tried I liked the menu/toolbar structure more, and the default KDE screensaver is crap compared to XScreensaver ;-).

To be honest I'm fairly ambivalent about the whole issue...if someone can bring up strong arguments one way or the other I'd be interested. Open-ness of the TrollTech GUI toolkit (underpinning KDE) is one issue I don't know enough about.

Cheers,



--Tim

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I use KDE. Why? Just used to it, I guess. I recall having negative impressions of Gnome the first few times I tried it; a lot of that was the awful default color scheme and font selections, which were pretty much completely illegible for me -- and KDE's default look, in contrast, was very clean and easy on the eyes.

In the olden days, I used FVWM, the main reason being that it worked well on both the SGI machines we used at the time, and those newfangled Linux (1.x) machines we used as compute nodes. I think another reason I later went with KDE was that kwm was more FVWM-like than Gnome, which gave me a kind of nasty CDE vibe. We need a "shudder" emoticon to express my loathing of CDE and HP-UX.

[Gregg Bolinger]

Thanks for the input. I am running KDE 3.2 right now which runs rather quickly compared to GNome 2.4 or something like that. But KDE still eats some memory.

I will look at Enlightenment. Seems I had looked at it before but was turned of because of ugly widgets and it just seemed unprofessional looking. But I'm after performance, so who cares, right?

I used to be a big fan of Blackbox. Simple, light, looked desent. But it has it's issues, as Tim pointed out. I've never heard of Fluxbox but will check it out also.

Thanks

[Tim West]

Let us (or me) know how you go with FluxBox. I've been meaning to look at it myself, but it's in the "things to do when I have truly nothing to do" bucket...and that bucket is a bit like write-only memory.


--Tim

[Stefan Wagner]

I'm using fluxbox, (on the laptop) because:
+ no nonsense icons, animatated trash-cans and things like that
+ therefore: speedy - starts from console in 10s on a 1.1 Ghz machine, (35s from bootmenu)
+ low ram-usage (system: 256 mb)
+ easy to set up the context-menu in an editor.
+ enjoy switching virtual desktops with scrollmouse
- sometimes trouble by resizing windows close to the bottom
- I'm not absolutely happy on switching virtual desktops, and switching between normal, hidden and minimized windows.

On the desktop, which I use seldomly (it's very loud) I use KDE
+ I'm more used to it that gnome
+ hadn't time to install fluxbox
+ have 1 GB ram
+ have more video-ram

[Gregg Bolinger]

I tried installing fluxbox on my system and it through a few errors on 'make'. One of the things I actually hate about Linux.

[Tim West]

Which distro do you use? You should be able to get it packaged...

www.rpmfind.net is good



--Tim

[Stefan Wagner]

Gregg: If you would have been more specific, which errors, perhaps we could have helped.
Or did you solve it on your own?

I'm allways happy on make-errrors, so my c/c++ - learning pays off
And I refuse to use rpm-apt-others

[Stefan Wagner]

My laptops harddrive went the way of everything on earth.
Yes - I backup often, last time in Januar 2004.

So I activated my desktop, where I had to install fluxbox too.
Make-errors on fluxbox.cc, Toolbar.cc. (B_European not defined).

I googled for fluxbox B_European, found a patch, patched it.
Works.

How to patch:

 
opt/
 +fluxbox_x.y/
 |
 -fluxbox_x.y.patch
with patch in the same directory as the directory with the sources, Makefile, INSTALL, README...

from the directory /opt/ I called:

 cat fluxbox_x.y.patch | patch -p0 -E 

Note: To patch a kernel from a kernel-patch.bz2 you need a different command, described in the kernel-dir.

I would like to see patching jdk and jdk-docs.
I had to download about 40 MB for an update of my docs from 1.5.0-b1 to 1.5.0-b2.
Similar for the jdk itself.
BTW: everything lost with the harddrive...

[ June 10, 2004: Message edited by: Stefan Wagner ]
[ June 10, 2004: Message edited by: Stefan Wagner ]

[Dean Jones]

I use Gnome. KDE was WAY too Windows-ish feeling for me. I've never liked the look/feel of Windows and is the main reason I started learning Linux 7 years ago. I try KDE every major release, and I just can't seem to like it. I HATED Gnome back in the 1.4 release days. It was simply awful. However, now with 2.6.1, it's amazing, I think. Very simple feel to it while still being very advanced. Sure, it takes up more resources than Fluxbox or something, but hell, I have the resources. Since computers are being sold with 1 Gig of memory and 3Ghz processors, there is no need to worry about it now. I run Gnome 2.6.1 on my work box which is a 800Mhz with 196MB of Ram and it runs VERY nicely. KDE on that box bogs down nicely. :-)

I used Blackbox for the entire Gnome 1.4 release days because it was the best thing back then. I also tried Enlightenment by itself. However, keep in mind, those are ONLY window managers. They're not desktops. KDE and Gnome are Desktops. You can actually run Fluxbox, Blackbox or Englightenment while you run Gnome. The default window manager for Gnome 2.6.1 is called "Metacity". It's pretty decent. I ran Fluxbox with Gnome 2.5 for a while since Metacity was complete crap the... It ran VERY nicely together. I was impressed.

If you have no need for a desktop, just use a window manager. No need in running stuff on your box that isn't being used. However, if you need the more advanced items that a Desktop can bring, then use Gnome or KDE. I just simply prefer Gnome.

[Sanjaya Sugiarto]

XFCE ( http://www.xfce.org/ ) is in my opinion a very good alternative to KDE/Gnome. It is FAST and neat with nice GUI.

[Pavel Kubal]

I can also recommend XFCE 4. After start xwm it takes me about 40 MB of RAM. The most important in XFCE is imho panel with icons etc. You can add some useful plugins such like minicmd bar, xmms plugin, cpu/swap/mem/uptime monitor etc.