Linus uses KDE

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:42 am

He's apparently fed up with the interface of Gnome:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usabilit ... 00021.html

And attitude of the Gnome developers dumbing things down:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usabilit ... 00022.html

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:52 am

I smell a flamewar

Anyway, I agree with Linus on the "sacrificing functionality for simplicity" point, but "interface nazis" that one is a little rough in my opinion.

I personally disgust the word nazi, and the people who believe in that shit, if you don't agree go to Google and do an image search for holocaust then you'll agree with me.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:59 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:I personally disgust the word nazi, and the people who believe in that shat, if you don't agree go to Google and do an image search for holocaust then you'll agree with me.

Dude I agree the Nazis were horrible people but that was so long ago. Unfortunately people tend to use it when name calling. When we talked to Richard Stallman he said the US government were a bunch of fascists. I told him to go talk to someone who's actually lived under a fascist dictatorship or a communist dictatorship for that matter. The reality of it was quite horrible. Any totalitarian regime sucks!!

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 8:09 am

Patrick wrote:Dude I agree the Nazis were horrible people but that was so long ago. Unfortunately people tend to use it when name calling. When we talked to Richard Stallman he said the US government were a bunch of fascists. I told him to go talk to someone who's actually lived under a fascist dictatorship or a communist dictatorship for that matter. The reality of it was quite horrible. Any totalitarian regime sucks!!

Well, when you think about it, it wasn't that long ago, and when if you take a look at some of the pictures from the concentration camps, I've seen video footage from in there scary shit man, you think to yourself "Was this shit happening only 65 years ago, to me, when I first saw it, I thought "MAN this gotta be something from at least 500 years ago", but no, innocent people was murdered like that just 65 years ago".

Anyway, don't wanna talk about that shit, I also think that Richard exagurated a little by using the word "facist", but I do agree with what he said about laws being for sale, because the RIAA and MPAA just gives some dickhead a bag of money and then get something like the DMCA passed, which pretty much pisses on the end-user.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 8:18 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:Anyway, don't wanna talk about that shat..

Agreed, let's stay on topic. I agree with Linus. KDE is a better desktop. It's more functional and full featured. It's simply a more mature desktop than Gnome. I think the only reason the Enterprise distros use it is because they don't have to pay for developer licenses from Trolltech.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:06 am

Patrick wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:Anyway, don't wanna talk about that shat..
Agreed, let's stay on topic. I agree with Linus. KDE is a better desktop. It's more functional and full featured. It's simply a more mature desktop than Gnome. I think the only reason the Enterprise distros use it is because they don't have to pay for developer licenses from Trolltech.

Alan Cox said this a little while ago:
"KDE provides more configuration and control, and Gnome more ease of use while giving up that control."

One argument that the GNOME guys always throws at the KDE people, including myself, is that allowing that more control to the end user is confusing him or her, I take the exact opposite, if I have a newbie on the phone and the person don't like something about the window decoration or something, I wanna be able to eaisily guide them through the process of changing it, or maybe adjusting some color settings....

One thing that really discourages me from recommending Ubuntu to completely new Linux users is that it requires A LOT of tweaking to get perfect multimedia support, and I find changing file associations in GNOME a real nightmare. With SUSE it's simple I just tell 'em to add a little source to YaST's package manager and then install about 7 packages and boom, done! Then we have MPlayer or VLC and stuff. In general I just find that a lot of people comming to Linux from Windows, gets comfortable a lot quicker with KDE than with GNOME, because it seems familiar in a lot of places.

I completely agree with the point you make about the enterprise not wanting to pay the price for Qt licenses, I just find it very funny that they can muster up the cash to pay for Visual Studio or some other of Micro$oft's crab.
If you deploy Linux on the desktop, in a big corporation that's been using Windows for maybe eight years, I think you'll find that KDE is a heck of a lot eaisier to get the workers used to, also I think the "light" look of KDE is important, remember that light do have impact on people's mood, a gray and boring color scheme and wallpaper is, to me, something that gets me in a bad mood, I have a nice green shiny KDE wallpaper (You can find it here: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=29850) along with SUSE's default color scheme, which is basicly Plastik's color scheme but a bit lighter and fresher in the colors.

Another thing that I think that software developers forget when they decide on GTK over Qt is that with Qt, you have the ability to port your application to another platform eaisily, remember what Aaron Seigo said about the importance of cross-platform? I don't know how good GTK accomplishes this task of cross-platform, but a friend of mine who loves Qt says it's easy, he gave me an example of a little simple application that he made, took him 19 minutes to port it from Linux to Windows.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:17 am

Tsuroerusu wrote: One thing that really discourages me from recommending Ubuntu to completely new Linux users is that it requires A LOT of tweaking to get perfect multimedia support, and I find changing file associations in GNOME a real nightmare. In general I just find that a lot of people comming to Linux from Windows, gets comfortable a lot quicker with KDE than with GNOME, because it seems familiar in a lot of places.

You are truely enlightened!! I appreciate the gained visibility that Ubuntu has brought to linux but it's not for me. I recommend Kanotix or regular Debian before Ubuntu. If it works for you, great! Keep running it if not try something else. Most former Windows users seem very at ease with KDE. I remember I was running fluxbox on an old machine and my wife was like "what the hell is that?!". KDE on Kanotix and on my new Arch system is super fast and responsive. Not sluggish at all. And it's very easy to customize and configure. Don't get me wrong there are many great gtk based apps out there that I use regularly. For me KDE is better than Gnome. Just my opinion, that's all.

treehead · Post by **treehead** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:23 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:... but "interface nazis" that one is a little rough in my opinion.

I personally disgust the word nazi, and the people who believe in that shat, if you don't agree go to Google and do an image search for holocaust then you'll agree with me.

;i could not agree more. i have witnessed people using this term more and more since the advent of seinfeld's "soup nazi" episode. there is simply no excuse for the frequency with which people use the term in conversation. if i am personally taking part in a conversation in which someone flippantly uses that reference, i will call them on it. i remind them of who the nazis really were, and usually they apologize and say that it was a poor choice of words. if you need a substitute, use "fascistic"--it's much harder to say, but much more apropos.

;oh, and there was an interesting response from nat friedman on the subject in the same thread.

;treehead

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:40 am

Patrick wrote:You are truely enlightened!! I appreciate the gained visibility that Ubuntu has brought to linux but it's not for me. I recommend Kanotix or regular Debian before Ubuntu. If it works for you, great! Keep running it if not try something else. Most former Windows users seem very at ease with KDE. I remember I was running fluxbox on an old machine and my wife was like "what the hell is that?!". KDE on Kanotix and on my new Arch system is super fast and responsive. Not sluggish at all. And it's very easy to customize and configure. Don't get me wrong there are many great gtk based apps out there that I use regularly. For me KDE is better than Gnome. Just my opinion, that's all.

Hehe, well, there are people that just don't get all the hype, and I'm one of them. I don't get why Ubuntu "Just Works" more than SUSE or Fedora, all of them require at least a little post install steps to get multimedia suppor perfect, but Ubuntu is the one that's worst on this one IMHO. Even as the gamer I am, I'm not excited about the Xbox 360 and all the hype about 3.2 GHz PPC CPUs..., the only thing about the Xbox 360 that excites me is the amount of posibilities for a cheap piece of hardware once the damn thing is cracked

One of the things that really makes me love SUSE is that it almost always gets the Xorg refresh settings correct, the only time it was a little off was on an old-ass onscure monitor that it didn't have the definitions on, a couple of my friends always asks me for the sync rates and stuff because they use Kubuntu and it's always a world apart from the correct setting.

SaX2, SUSE's X configuration system which is also part of the now dead UnitedLinux efforts, has a BIG database of monitors, a little like Windows do, and their correct Xorg settings, which is uses to set the monitor stuff at the installation, one thing I've always found dificult about manually configuring X is that unless the monitor manufacturer mentions the correct values for the refresh rate in the manual, it's a pain in the ass to find them sometimes.
It does the same thing with soundcards and video cards, and has a script that installs the NVIDIA driver by just checking a check box during an update, same thing with Microsoft webfonts by the way.

Even freaking Linspire was a total missery on this dillemma of monitors when I tried it out for fun.
This whole issue is not that big for LCD monitors but there are a heck of a lot more CRTs out there than LCDs.

By the way, Aaron Seigo threw in a nice reply to that whole "Linus, KDE thing":

Aaron Seigo wrote:"We have better things to do than discover what we don't agree on (that's easy, actually; I could stay home by myself and do that),"

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:51 am

KDE's where it's at for me, too. I find it much more robust and configurable than Gnome and it does as much or as little as I want it to do with little effort on my part.

Personally, I find it to be the more mature and professional desktop environment.

As for bloat, well, if 3.5 runs as good as it does on my test PC, then it can't be all that bad. For everything it can do, it's well worth the sacrifice of any performance lag I may experience.

Go, Linus!

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:53 am

Flame War on!:
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2005/12/13/1

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:55 am

Judland wrote:As for bloat, well, if 3.5 runs as good as it does on my test PC, then it can't be all that bad. For everything it can do, it's well worth the sacrifice of any performance lag I may experience.

I've done a bunch of Gentoo installs in the past to try it out, and no I'm not enjoying the GCC compiler screensaver, and when you just do "emerge kdebase" you get a pretty much barebone KDE system, I really don't see why ANYONE can blame that for being bloat, or look at Kubuntu, I don't really see bloat of anything but bad default settings. I really don't get what people say about KDE and bloast, and come on, if you blame KDE for using too much RAM, buy some more for crying out loud!

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 9:58 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:I really don't see why ANYONE can blame that for being bloat, or look at Kubuntu, I don't really see bloat of anything but bad default settings. I really don't get what people say about KDE and bloast, and come on, if you blame KDE for using too much RAM, buy some more for crying out loud!

I think the issue was on older versions of KDE on slower machines. Yeah RAM is cheap these days. KDE 3.5 definitely feels quicker and more responsive. I really like the auto menu updater feature. It saves a lot of time not having to go in and create menu entries.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 10:02 am

Patrick wrote:I think the issue was on older versions of KDE on slower machines. Yeah RAM is cheap these days. KDE 3.5 definitely feels quicker and more responsive. I really like the auto menu updater feature. It saves a lot of time not having to go in and create menu entries.

KDE 3.1 certainly did use quite a bit more of resources than the current version of KDE, that I'll agree to, but come on people they're worked out a lot of unoptimized code since then!

Auto menu updater you say? Well, when I install a GNOME app in SUSE, Totem for example, it automatically gets added to my KMenu and I'm using KDE 3.4.2.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 10:06 am

Tsuroerusu wrote: Auto menu updater you say? Well, when I install a GNOME app in SUSE, Totem for example, it automatically gets added to my KMenu and I'm using KDE 3.4.2.

Most distros support this including the Debian based system. Slackware doesn't, I'm sure there are others. This is good for the programs you compile yourself. On my Arch system, qtdesigner didn't have a menu listing by default. The auto menu updater picked it up and generated it. Nice touch!

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Linus uses KDE

Linus uses KDE

the "n" word