It wasn't that long ago everyone was booing the KDE dev's for making an unusable desktop. For me, though, it was a different story. I made my switch to Linux around 4 months after the release of KDE 4.0, but, my Linux-guru of a cousin got me on GNOME.

Now, I'll just say this, I don't think GNOME is a bad desktop, I admire it's devs continuing to provide a stable desktop.

But I had a few issues with it. Call me old-fashioned and vain, but I like eye-candy, I like usability. I didn't like looking through GNOME's buglist and seeing many ideas put up as a Wontfix. I think GNOME put too much into stability, rather then usability. But that wasnt much of a problem, GNOME's rather modular behavior sort of countered that and the community filled in the holes.

So, what made me switch?
It was a mixture, really. The apps I had come to love were going to be replaced, or they were too resource hungry. I had attempted to install KDE side by side with GNOME, but every time I did, GNOME went flaky. Mono was here. Now, I am an end user and the polotics of Mono don't really concern me that much, sure, there have been great apps made with it, but what a cost...

Consider Banshee and Rhythembox, for example. Identical down to their GUI's, save for Rhytembox, written in GTK, and Banshee, written in Mono. The former used up 25mb of my system memory when idle. Banshee used up 500mb when idle. I have 1500mb on this machine, and a third of it is taken up with a music player? I'm sorry, thats a horrible amount of system resources. For that I'd expect Banshee to start writing it's own music!

Combine that, with having to relearn the desktop metaphor for GNOME 3.0

*sigh*

So, I thought; "I might as well switch to KDE!"

Loading up Kubuntu 9.04...I was very, VERY impressed. Had to do a bit of tweaking to get the system properly functioning, though; KNetworkManager hates me, and a Linux OS is all but useless to me if it can't get online.

So, after I picked my jaw up from it's earlier position on the floor, I set about running a few tests.

My old system; 20 Firefox tabs open, Banshee playing music, Pidgin active.
Total memory usage; 1.1 gigs
CPU usage; 40% - 60%

Now with KDE; 20 firefox tabs open, Amarok playing music, Kopete active.
Total memory usage; 520mb
CPU usage; 6% - 8%

Now, forgive me, ladies and gents, if my jaw hit the floor, passed right through and popped up in China somewhere; 顺便说一下，我想回来，请。
But my computer should not be able to go so low. I'm almost sure I did something wrong in my test. Until I ran another one; temperature (measured by my hand) and battery life (with the aide of a stopwatch)

GNOME;
Heat; Sauna level.
Battery life expectancy; 59 minutes.

KDE;
Heat: Tepid
Battery Life expectancy; 1 hour, 56 minutes.

Very odd results.
That was with compositing on, too!


Since then, I've been dazzled by everything from Kopete's huge array of functionality, to Amarok's KISS approach to playing music, to Okular, to the plasmaoids..and lets not forget Oxygen, oh no, brilliant stuff! I hope the people behind the Oxygen project are proud of their work, they deserve to be!


But..why else do I prefer KDE? Dolphin...the split view is wondrous, the integrated visual ability to show me how much diskspace is left on external drives...not to mention it applies an appropriate graphic for the device.

All that, plus the semantic desktop in it's infancy...my god. I'm on the verge of rushing off to the nearest airport, going all around the world, shaking the hands of everyone involved. AND you let people download and install community made files from KDE look.org and other similar sites....sheesh....


About me;

Ok, my wording here may sound a little...odd, I admit. But to me, my computer is my life, that isn't a choice. I'm disabled, permanently, my social life exists within the confines of my computer. I can't work (at least in the capacity of not doing anything that isnt strictly computing) and I don't have much money. I will, however, donate some of my money when I can to continue to fund KDE and keep this system rolling on. Of course, I will also assist by providing bug reports and brainstorming (expect a thunderstorm). Without Linux, I wouldnt be able to afford a computer. Without KDE...well, I'd have a hard time working on the damn thing.

Wow! Those are some figures... I was always complimentary about KDE4 but experienced temps of 45 or 50 degrees centigrade - this was with KDE4.1 on Kubuntu 08.10. With KDE3.5.10 I usually kept below 40 degrees. This is for my IBM T41.

Since 4.2, however, I am back down to between 38 and 40 degrees (on arch).

Your post makes interesting reading and I am happy to confirm your positive findings. I might even download gnome one of these days to see how it behaves...

520mb used vs 1.1gb used are NOT valid measures for gnome vs kde. e.g. kernel likes to use memory as disk buffers. in fact on any linux system that was running for more than 15 mins, you will find only 50mb of mem free. the rest will be consumed by apps, libraries and kernel buffers. go ahead, look at "top" output.

having said that, kde 3.5 is indeed a lot slimmer and lighter on resources than gnome. i cant comment on 4.0 as i havent used it, but i imagine that giant clock that occupies 1/4 of screen estate must soak up some serious CPU time lol

Well, it was an important distinction for me. Here was KDE, dripping with eye-candy and every possible feature being improved. There was GNOME, almost the reverse. My gut instinct tells me I should be expecting higher measurements, both with tempreture and memory usage...and...I wasnt getting them.

I ran both for a full hour. To this day, KDE's memory usage has never gone beyond 1.1gigs. Only in the recent heatwave did the fans come on. Only when I was uploading my 20gigs of personal data onto the system did the hard-drive really wind up and sound like a spanner in the works. (Whereas with GNOME it was doing it every single day)....KDE has turned my computer from being a chore to being pleasurable.

I'm a long term GNOME user, (since GNOME 1.x) and am now beginning to take a lot more interest in KDE since the 4.x release.

I have looked in from time to time, and didn't really like what I saw, only from the point that I'm something of a minimalist and KDE always seemed horribly kluttered to me.

For mine though, I take my hat off the the KDE dev's.

They've taken the plunge and done the total rewrite thing, and copped a lot of flack for it.

I well remember the GNOME 1.x to 2.x transition. It was pretty much the same, which is hardly surprising. Those blokes copped a heap of flack back then too.

As I mentioned earlier though I've watched the development of KDE 4.x with interest, each release has improved, the feature set has grown, and it's quite clear to me that a lot of careful thought has gone into it.

Take a bow KDE dev's as far as I'm concerned you've done an excellent job, and somehow managed to strike a good balance between ease of use and function overload, the over zealous asceticism of GNOME and bling overkill of Compiz.

I love it. :thumbs_up:

I admit, minimlism is not my thing; I was talking with my cousin the other day (the one who got me on GNOME) and he told me KDE was horrible. I told him;
"Look, I have a dependable system now, I'm not reinstalling it every other week, I'm not using an outdated and obselete window decorator, my computer isnt melting, and I can install themes, addons, scripts..from a downloader that connects to a community site. I have a music player that dosent gum up my music, I have an IM messenger that supports video AND file transfers, I have sane, usable notifications....so tell me, why the hell would I go back to GNOME when all my needs are satisfied and many are MORE then satisfed?"

His responce;

"GNOME has improved a lot."

Mine;

"Correction; Ubuntu improved GNOME a lot. KDE devs give a damn about KDE and it's users. GNOME devs don't."

He didnt reply.

I have managed to install gnome, fired it up, but couldn't be bothered to test it properly yet - I find it rather ugly, but that is a purely personal thing which I am sure could be changed given an hour or two. Some things are nice about it, though. Cairo-dock is cool and there is a bunch of software written in gtk.

What I would like to see from KDE:

- a package to get firefox look native
- a package to get Ooo to look native

As for reinstalling, Dante Ashton - if after some time you get sick of constantly reinstalling I would suggest you try a rolling release distro such as Sidux or ArchLinux

My GNOME desktop would just hang. My cousin had drilled it into me that GNOME never hangs. In the past, I had modified it to a serious extent, and wasnt really suprised it hung, but even with a fresh install...it hangs. Cairo I liked, but it's wiki wasnt in english (most of it) so I found it hard to really see what else I could do with it. GTK is nice, I was talking about emerald in that above statment (which is by far the prettiest one I've ever seen)


Getting Firefox native would be nice. I've downloaded two 'stopgap' fixes for it, an addon that sets Oxygen as it's default icon set, and another to get it to use the KDE notification system (though it still brings up a download menu, annoyingly)


I was just sick of using Empathy for video, Pidgin for file transfers, not being able to install ttf fonts easily (I do a bit of graphics work) and having my CPU and hard-drive's life expectancy take a plummit...the list goes on and on, all of those were something I could live through....

...but then, with GNOME becoming more and more Mono-ish (I've nothing agaisnt Mono, I just LIKE having, oh, you know, a few megabytes to spare on my memory! And with the GNOME Shell and the fact that I'd have to relearn the desktop metaphor any way I went, I jumped ship.

Boy, oh boy, am I so glad I did!

Re your firefox troubles - you may well from benefit from this:

how-to-integrate-f ... 17786.html

I would highly recommend installing QtCurve and making it your default GTK theme. It looks a lot like Oxygen (there's a KDE and GTK Qtcurve theme if consistency's your thing) and it does the icons for you for all GTK apps without the need for application-specific addons.

I would like to use Konqueror instead, but it crashes if I go so far as to try and get to Google.com.

That does bring up a question, though; After using some of Konq's addons as a file maanger, I wonder if Dolphin would get a similar set of abilities?