[lug] [Fwd: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com, Wednesday, March 21, 2001]

[Matt Clauson]

On Wednesday 21 March 2001 13:12, you wrote:
> HI,
> For those of you who haven't seen this article yet - I found it quite
> interesting.  Just FYI - I don't want to voice a personal opinion
> through this article.
>
> Ferdinand

[ article re: Why KDE/libQt may become the new 'gold standard' snipped ]

Interesting piece.  I've been a Gnome user for about 3 years now, and used 
KDE right before and during the 1.0 stage.  I just switched back to KDE 
(under the Debian testing tree) on my laptop this week...  And I find the 
user interface to be much cleaner and more integrated than Gnome at this 
point in time.  While I appreciate what the Gnome project is trying to 
accomplish, many users will find Gnome as another barrier to 'making the 
plunge' to Linux.

With KDE under Debian, I get a full suite of apps with the same look and 
feel.  Konqueror is fast, yet lightweight.  I still can't do Java, which a 
lot of webpages want now, but SSL works great for me.  The word processing 
app is nice and featured, while being less of a bloat than its Microsoft 
counterpart.  Same with the spreadsheet.  Kmail is beautiful, and with a bit 
more tweaking, could become a good competitor for Outlook.

Gnome, in comparison, seems to be more of a 'hodgepodge'.  There's no 
consistent look and feel, apps are constantly in beta with broken or missing 
features, and while it will satisfy the hackers among us, as it has me for 
many years, the fact that it's unpolished and occasionally unreliable shoos 
away the newer users.  I wouldn't deploy Gnome for my mother to use, for 
example, because she'd just end up being confused.

Don't get me wrong.  Gnome has some good objectives, and I applaud them for 
following them.  But KDE/Qt has a good head start, and the product that KDE 
presents is a lot more polished and consumer-ready.  Gnome has a good amount 
of catching up to do, and with so many people re-inventing the wheel (5 or 6 
mail clients in the Gnome CVS?  Come on!) repeatedly, they're wasting time 
writing basic code when they can be polishing a good product to release.  
Ximian Gnome (formerly Helix Code) is helping with this aspect, but it's 
still an uphill battle.  Eazel's new file manager looks pretty sweet and is 
probably the coolest app I've seen under Gnome to date, with the exception of 
the Gimp, which KDE still doesn't have an alternate for.  However, Gnome 
overall still feels massively unpolished and, overall, 'not ready for prime 
time'.  The 'infinite monkey' hackers still haven't come up with Shakespeare 
in that department.

Working in a business environment where I want to show the best Linux has to 
offer in hopes of swaying persons over to using it, I find myself now 
preferring KDE over Gnome.  It has more of the features and polish I find 
that I use and need in everyday business at this point.  I look forward to 
playing more with Gnome, but KDE appears to be becoming more of my desktop 
environment of choice, at least for the time being.

YMMV, of course.

--mec