incadudeF wrote:i have only used GNOME and im wondering how hard it is to change to KDE and get used to it?

Having just begun to spend more time with KDE recently, (with every intention of using it full time), after using GNOME since the 1.x days I'm really enjoying it.

Mind you I have dabbled with it before, and always gone back not because I feel that one is better than the other but that GNOME more suited my way of doing things at the time.

Since the inception of KDE 4.x my interest has been peeked significantly, and I've been running it on my second string machine for a while.

OK enough of the rambling Dave.

Ultimately it comes down to how you approach the transition.

Research is a good start, browse forums, ask questions, (as you have).

Spend a bit of time checking out KDE alternatives to your favourite apps.

Linux being what it is you can run apps from other desktops regardless of your main desktop choice.

This would help you get familiar with applications before taking the plunge. Then again you might be one of those folks who like to jump in off the deep end.

Persevere also, I've found KDE to be significantly different in many ways, there's a good deal more accessible ways to configure / customise your system.

Not to mention finding out where it all is.

I've found browsing through screenshots and reading reviews quite helpful for this.

The other thing to be aware of is that there are those who will try to convince you to stay with GNOME for all the wrong reasons.

i.e KDE 4.x is 'buggy' and 'lacks features', blah blah.

Many seem to have forgotten that GNOME went through the same teething problems with the transition from 1.x to 2.x

I can tell you this though if you love tweaking and tinkering, you'll enjoy learning about KDE.

Cheers.

From my personal experience I find it to be the complete opposite. Except I don't use Compiz Fusion.

PoL666 wrote:well, I like gnome because is simple, easy to configure, more applications, and integrates with Compiz Fusion. also, Gnome Is faster than KDE even, but it's uglier. (this is my opinion certainly)

(My printer works in OpenSuse 11.1 Gnome version but fails to install in KDE 4.1)

You don't need to install the printer in every desktop environment. Just configure your printer in yast and you can use it from every application, even command line versions.

Comparing KDE and GNOME is like comparing operating systems. They aren't easily comparable as a whole - and which components constitute the "desktop environment" in making such a comparison can vary wildly. Sometimes a window manager plus any extra set of programs providing menus and/or widgets could be considered a desktop environment.

I personally prefer both coding with, and the appearance of QT over GTK. The underlying framework of KDE is more robust, more modern, more tightly integrated, which some may not see as advantageous. I've definitely noticed this since I no longer use KDE (tiling wm pretty much replaces its UI), but keep it installed due to the number of KDE applications I run.

If you are an advanced user you will hardly notice the difference because most of the things you do with your system will be independent of the DE's suite of system administration front-ends. Both kde and gnome are simple to both configure and use. Its hard to even really talk about stability and maturity as this varies by application.

Basically, if you're a newbie, you will tend to want your DE to provide the necessary tools and an intuitive interface to familiarize yourself with and use your system. If you're more experienced, you'll tend to want your DE to stay out of your way so that you can get things done. It all depends upon your needs.

If you're anything like me, you'll see a desktop environment as nothing but an overly complicated "start menu" which offers little to usability from a unix user standpoint. It becomes more valuable for its API than its UI in this case.

This is the most correct view that I've come to. To the user, things like plasma and kwin really do not provide a lot of functionality. You can get the exact same feature set from any window manager and things like conky and dzen2. They just do their job and nothing more. Theres nothing to configure to speak of. No fancy features. Most of the bling is behind the scenes.

Judging from the amount of comments about GNOME 3.0, I suspect the communities there are in for a rough ride. Sure, they'll get used to it, but they'll be screaming bloody murder until they do.

Something that has struck me, though, was not KDE 4 itself, rather the transition to it. The devs could of made incremental adjustments until the whole thing was QT4 based. This would of allowed for a greater range of feedback from the community, instead of that 'culture-shock' that people are only getting around now due to KDE being so diffrent. When KDE 5.0 is on the drawing board, you bet I'll be pushing for an incremental change.

Due to the nature of the difference between Qt3/4 it is not possible to incrementally change things, since huge sections of the API have usually been renamed, abstracted, refactored or deprecated.

Doing it incrementally just simply isn't possible, since you can't use both Qt3 and Qt4 classes or libraries at the same time, since they use the same namespace.

Would it of not been possible to get QT3 to behave like QT4, at least cosmetically?

Dante Ashton wrote:Something that has struck me, though, was not KDE 4 itself, rather the transition to it. The devs could of made incremental adjustments until the whole thing was QT4 based. This would of allowed for a greater range of feedback from the community, instead of that 'culture-shock' that people are only getting around now due to KDE being so diffrent. When KDE 5.0 is on the drawing board, you bet I'll be pushing for an incremental change.

The change from Qt3 to Qt4 was huge, so many developers have chosen to completely rewrite their applications. For example, Kicker from KDE3 was in such a bad state (code-wise) that it would be easier to start from scratch than porting everything to Qt4 and add new features without introducing a lot of hard-to-track bugs.

So what we've got instead of a slightly improved Qt4-based Kicker (and KDesktop etc.) is Plasma. Personally I like the "a step back and a leap forward" approach; seems like Gnome is going for a similar way with Gnome 3.0.
The thing that was done wrong with KDE 4.0, in my opinion, was that some distros shipped it as a stable desktop environment.

Oh, and I don't think you need to worry about KDE 5.0, the change will probably not be as huge as kde3 -> kde4 (but more like 2 -> 3).

By writing a Qt3 style that mirrored the behaviour of the Qt4 style, being used by KDE 4, it would be possible to cosmetically emulate the look.

Maybe impossible, yes. Some acclimatization would of made everything easier. Perhaps this could of been done by patching major problems in KDE 3.5 until 4.2 was out (which seems, for the most part, stable)

I'd love to see what people are thinking of for KDE 5.0, envisioning the future is one of my favourite passtimes :P


As a side note, looking back on the release notes of previous versions, does KDE do a 'bugfix' release, then 'new features' release, then bugfix....etc? Or is it just me?

Once a minor ( 4.x ) release has been done, development starts immediately on the next version in that series ( KDE 4.4 is already under development ). Developers backport any bugfixes they make to the previous versions branch ( KDE 4.3 in this case ) which is released as a patch release.

Already? Sheesh, you people move fast!

This is exactly the type of information I was looking for. I'm glad I found it, I'm going to give KDE a go.

I'm a desktop linux newcomer (although a bit experienced in servers with command line tools), as I installed Ubuntu, it come with GNOME. I installed the OS on my Lenovo T400.
GNOME was quite good, spent a few days to try every configuration, then I tried KDE (4.3). It is very beautiful, but as I don't see "behind" what else a window manager does, that is all I can see from it. It sucks every resource from my laptop, on battery power the performance is slow. KNetworkManager makes me crazy, crashing about every 30 minutes. Kontact is crashing about every 45 minutes. I sent about 20 crash report within 3 days. So I returned to GNOME. Then my User Switcher panel crashed, I had to reconfigure the login manager to gdm to correct this.
Wouldn't it be better to have less functionality, but a robust, working, heavily tested one? The current version feels like an airplane being repaired while flying...

I've been looking at GNOME 3. I can honestly say they've done a really good job with the interface; it's a sort of fluid/physics dynamics mix now...but with one apparent hitch; it requires the proper graphics card drivers, this is all well and good for a good deal of people, but for me; I need the Nvidea drivers, you know, the ones that aren't open source?

Without them, X won't start...oh dear...


Karatedog: I know, KDE is still slightly temperamental; but the devs are doing a good job. With a few modifications, I've got 4.2 running in a stable way (though I dare not to put too many gtk+ programs in, as that often scrapped the whole system)