KDE vs. Gnome

MikeEnIke

So I'm a KDE supporter, and tend to look towards KDE for mosts of my desktops. I'm thinking about installing linux mint, and it's natively Gnome. I think the gnome configuration of mint is much better than Ubuntu, and I've heard that the KDE version(and other 'community' versions) if mint doesn't always quite live up to the updates and usefulness of the supported gnome version.

My question is whether it would be worth the less support for the KDE version or if I should just go with gnome. Note that I'm not really that against gnome, I just want to know if anyone has experience with their being a big difference between the two.

Thanks.

Goineasy9

I know that the KDE version of Ubuntu (Kubuntu) has less of the bells and whistles then the standard Ubuntu. I've tried both. I'm currently a Fedora user, and I know for a fact that the KDE version has deficiencies that the Gnome version doesn't. I've never tried the KDE version of Mint, so I can't say one way or the other. When I want to look at what a distro is capable of, I usually look at their default desktop, in Mint's case Gnome. You can always check out the live CD's of each version and see for yourself. If it was me, I'd go for Gnome Mint, but then again, I stopped using KDE last March when forced to use an unfinished KDE4, and am now comfortable with Gnome. The choice is yours (that's what's so great about Linux).

MikeEnIke

I'm downloading Mint gnome version as we speak. I just wish gnome were as customizable. It's sad to look at kde-look.org and then at gnome-look.org and see how much less gnome has. Will compiz be installable on gnome? (not sure if it's still called compiz, last time i used it 2 years ago it was)

Goineasy9

With Fedora, Compiz is Gnome's desktop effects. If it's not there, I'm sure it's easily installed.

mfillpot

Mike, it is good to seee that you are continuing to ask around.

All,
Mike is trying to find a good user friendly Linux or BSD distro with KDE and good package management, I have already recommended mint and mandriva for him to try. Do you think that Arch may be another potential distro for him to checkout or have any other recommendations?

Goineasy9

A great many of my EX Debian Sid acquaintances are now Arch people. Bleeding Edge, rolling release, it really does sound like a great distro. When I tried it, I just couldn't get it to work the way I wanted to. Besides, I needed to get away from KDE because it was driving me crazy (short trip?), so I settled on Fedora with Gnome and so far haven't looked back.

One of my Sid acquaintances now helps out with the Epidemic distro, which is based in Brazil. It does have a English version, and, it's the only KDE4 distro that didn't annoy me. They obviously did a lot of stabilization on it. Otto (carioca) posts on the sidux-underground.com web site (for English language questions) or you can read about it on Distrowatch.

Warren just released another RC of Mepis today, it should hit the public mirrors by tomorrow, Mepis would be my first choice for user friendly and KDE based distro (the Mepis community is great). Mepis 8.5 is their first KDE4 release and you can still get KDE 3.5.10 on their 8.0 LTS release.

Hey, there's a bunch of Live CD's worth downloading.

aLinuxTV

The QT toolkit is more advanced and feature rich. Has (commercial support). KDE utilises this toolkit.
The GTK tookit (non-commercial) is not far behind QT - still lacking a few functions here and there. Gnome uses this.

So, KDE is a little more functional all-around - but not everyone needs that. Gnome is perfectly suitable for most die-hard Unix users --- where-as KDE fits the rest of us out here a little better.

Good luck

MikeEnIke

Running Linux Mint with GNOME right now. It runs pretty nicely, and after I installed the KDE version it crashed, which I later found out was because of faulty wireless drivers not the KDE but no point in switching back now. Liking it so far, and I'll be installing more linux from time to time just to really find out what I like. Thanks for the help guys, now just to fix my ethernet card.

mfillpot

Mike, it is good to see that you are running happy now on a Linux distro, it only took years of talking to Ray and myself before you decided to put this much effort into it.

MikeEnIke

lol well it's now my main OS I'll have you know. Want to help me install UrbanTerror sometime this week?

mfillpot

It looks like you won't be the onl;y one to install UrbanTerror, I just got a laptop and once I remove windows 7 I will get slackware installed and hopefully I have enough power for urbanterror.

MikeEnIke

Sounds good, I just need it up and running so I can get my gaming fix :P