So last week Linus slammed GNOME to the whole F/OSS community. Reading his words stung, and I found it hard to believe that such a popular figure would have the nerve to say such things openly. Surely his words would cause fire and brimestone, women and children to run fearful in the streets and Novell to develop all of their products for MS Windows… oh wait…
In anycase, after reading through the entire thread on the GNOME-usability list, I agree with Linus about the points me makes about GNOME. I have the same issues, and have for a long time. I guess somewhere along the line I have just got use to it. GNOME does most of what I want. What it doesn’t do I can fix with a little elbow grease.
What I couldn’t agree with Linus about was the superiority of KDE. The last time I used KDE, Qt was still commercial only. KDE was one of the first desktops I tried when I was a new linux user. It was ok, ugly gray and boxy. There were 12 or so packages, and it took a year and a day to compile. I have developed a strong alignment with the FSM’s (Free Software Movement) mentality when it comes to licensing. The fact that Trolltech has now dual licensed Qt under the GPL as well was noteworthy at the time, but by then I had moved on to GNOME. The strong community drive behind GNOME was aluring, and it was perdier. Not to mention it was modular, and even though there were like 30 packages to install, you only needed to install the ones you wanted.
If Linus suggests everyone switch to KDE, and he’s having the same problems I am, as a mere non-kernel-creator, I figured I should at least give it a spin again.
In all fairness, I have seen screenshots of KDE in the past 6 years and it has improved greatly.
What is so attractive about GNOME is Gtk, and the applications that are based on Gtk. The GNOME desktop itself is sorely lacking, compared to my recent experience with KDE. But in reality, in comparision with Windows and OSX as well.
