[ale] Slackware to drop Gnome?

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 20:18, John Wells wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/10/218246&tid=131&tid=190&tid=8&tid=106
> 
> Funny...I've always been a big Gnome fan.  While KDE is admittedly nice,
> I've always felt a little funny using it.  I think a big reason for this
> is that GTK is truly free for both non-profit and commercial use, while Qt
> is definitely not (and surprisingly overpriced, I might add).

I was with you until about 4 years ago when QT was released with an Open
Source license.  Then I tried KDE and it was so much better than GNOME
that I never looked back.

> Anyone care to comment on why they use KDE rather than Gnome?

I don't tend to like GTK widgets.  I find them to be ugly.  GNOME has
started pulling out customization options, so I can't make things work
the way I want.  KDE has a much better customization engine, and all
kinds of things are in it.  For instance, I can set up my desktop to
have a menu at the top like in MacOS with KDE and all my KDE apps change
on the fly,  Now that is some cool technology.

GNOME doesn't have a real office suite and KDE does.  Abiword/gnumeric
do not work well together.  OOo is not a GNOME app.  Koffice is a
completely integrated set of applications with a much better UI than
OOo.  If only it didn't crash so much...:-(

GNOME doesn't really have a browser, either, and KDE does.  Mozilla
isn't GNOME and the GNOME one isn't complete.  Konqueror is fast and
lightweight, and lets me browse filesystems, http, ftp, sftp, smb, etc
all in one place.  It does a nice job handling all kinds of plugins and
embedded viewers.

And because of the way KDE works, all applications can handle remote
filesystems.  From my kate editor I can read/save files on ftp sites, or
over sftp.  We do so much sftping around here and I can usually move
files faster than anyone else because of KDE.  (There are some really
cool libraries out that that leverage KDE and user file systems to
enable all applications to do this.  The coolest use I've seen is the
"gmail file system" which lets you mount your gmail account and execute
files from it.  I gotta try it.)

KDE has really simple and efficient system of web shortcuts.  For
instance, I type "gg:sooterkin" to do a google seach on "sooterkin". 
"dict:sooterkin" will look it up in a dictionary.  "ask:What is a
sooterkin" will send that query to AskJeeves.  I've added my own macros
to query out internal wiki and also our bugzilla database here at work.

dcop is very cool for scripting KDE apps and I haven't seen anything
equivalent in GNOME.  Does GNOME still use corba?  That always seemed
kinda heavyweight.

Is that enough?  Maybe it is time to have the GNOME vs. KDE shootout at
some ALE meeting.  Any volunteers?

Michael