[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME war

[Tinku Sampath]

The great battle between the two most popular ( sorry.... if my word hurt
any one whose use other lightweight desktops ...) KDE and GNOME (i am not
the one who can decide which one is better ... ) continues. Here i am not
concerned about spread the war to this mailing list. But we together can
discuss the reasons behind it and conclude with individuals comments.

GNU/Linux is taking small steps.. or creeping... towards desktop users. As
far as the desktop environments, which are built upon Xwindow system, are
concerned, they are gaining popularity and their look and feel and also the
performance are improving with each new releases. Users in the free software
will have so many choices. From hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions to
admirable no. of quality desktops... the same things happens in the field of
applications.

But what is there for the fresh users to the world of GNU/Linux?. Initially
they will be confused in choosing a GNU/Linux distribution at first which
satisfies their requirements. The next difficult thing will be finding the
application which will satisfy their day to day work they continued with
other proprietary systems. But the desktop environments are the most
important instances which will stick the users with GNU/Linux. So each
desktop project has to be working to make the things done with easiness. But
something strange in happening for past few months. The fight between KDE
and GNOME is there from the beginning of the GNOME project which was started
in protesting in the change of license of Trolltech Qt development tool,
tool to develop KDE, to proprietary. But later Trolltech changed its license
in to a dual license scheme which allows free use of qt for the applications
released under GNU GPL V2.0. But the GNOME project continued and also turned
as desktop environment favored by geeks and developers (may be for new
users!). A lot of companies like Novell, Sun, Red Hat etc started supporting
GNOME... and few of the distributions changed their default desktop
environment in to GNOME from KDE.. But majorities are still staying with KDE
giving a second rank to the GNOME. But the fight between these two
environments are now in to public. This is visible if you go through
previous few issues of Tux Magazine (http://www.tuxmagazine.com
)<http://www.tuxmagazine.com/>.


As a newbie GNU/Linux magazine, Tux Magazine's publishers make things going
in KDE way. That means they are answering basic queries considering KDE as
most users working environment. They may be right since all of we admit the
fact that majority are KDE users than those who use GNOME. Since KDE gives a
polished look like other proprietary systems (eg: Mac OS) and it is highly
customizable than any other operating desktop in the world. Additions to
this it provides quality applications of almost all kind. The KDE factor was
also visible in the 2005 READER'S CHOICE AWARDS conducted by the magazine
vendors on August. (Refer September 2005 issue of Tux Magazine).

A lots of letters are coming to include more GNOME flavor equal to that of
KDE. But the publishers are reluctant to give more recognition to GNOME.
They continue to reply why they are strictly following KDE by showing only
the user base. There is section called Q&A with Mango Parfait where newbies
can ask Mango Parfait, a young woman (or may be acting like a young woman),
for help. But her comments and way of convincing is not liked by a few users
(or most?.. I can't say.. But i like her presentation... ). After hundreds
of request from GNOME followers, finally she burst flames towards GNOME in
the September issue of Q&A section. Her few comments are as follows ...

*" Hint to GNOME developers: some of GNOME is okay, but most of it works
like you hate users. Some of GNOME runs like you think users are too stupid
to wipe themselves. What do you do for these users? You do not make GNOME
easy. You just take away their toilet paper and force users to wipe
themselves your way. Some of GNOME runs like you want users to suffer. The
file open and save dialog is worse than bamboo shoots under fingernails.
Better to call Nautilus an attack from space invaders than a spacial file
manager. Here is my advice. Make your monkey-brain environment a
configuration option if you want to keep using GNOME your way. The rest of
us are not monkeys. Give us a default desktop for humans. If you keep having
no clue, less and less people will use GNOME, and the only GNOME users will
be monkey-brain GNOME developers. "*

But the request for GNOME coverage continues. One of the user's comment is
as follows ...

*" More GNOME Coverage. I read the latest TUX today, and somebody asked the
same question as me. Why not more GNOME coverage? Your response was that KDE
is the preference of most new users. What distro are they using? Because in
another breath, you heartily recommend Fedora, which uses GNOME as its
standard desktop. And that's not even mentioning the popularity of Ubuntu. -
Robert Holmes "

*After lots of protest against magazines coverage and Mango's comments, Tux
publisher NICHOLAS PETRELEY addressed readers with more specific reasons for
their GNOME hate. A few of his comments from the P2P column of this moth's
Tux...

" *What bothers me is not GNOME, but that we critics of GNOME have been
accused of disliking GNOME simply because we don't understand it. I don't
think that's the case, but if we really don't understand it, shouldn't that
tell you something? Why wouldn't we understand it? Could it be because GNOME
is one of the most unintuitive, inconsistent desktop environments ever
designed? Could it be because GNOME keeps undergoing dramatic changes in its
philosophy toward how a desktop should behave?...

Indeed, the frequent overhauls to the philosophical approach to how a
desktop should behave puts GNOME evangelists and defenders in a very awkward
position. Take Nautilus, the file manager, for example. "It's great because
it does everything." When GNOME dumped the buggy Midnight Commander file
manager in favor of the original version of Nautilus, the hype was all about
how Nautilus would be a Swiss Army knife for GNOME. It was a file manager,
browser, system administration tool, package manager and more. It was
considered the core component of GNOME. See
http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/ bw.032001/210790539.htm for a sample
press release in 2001. "It's great because it's so simple and does only
basic tasks." Later, GNOME developers decided to rip out most of the
features in Nautilus and strip it down to basics for the benefit of speed
and ease of use. But if you read the press release mentioned above, the
original point of making Nautilus do everything imaginable was for the
benefit of "ease of use". So which approach actually made GNOME easier to
use?


"It's great because it has a revolutionary new spatial design." Then
Nautilus morphed into a "spatial" file manager. This "spatial" file manager
was supposedly revolutionary, although anyone who has used OS/2 knows
better. The idea was that every folder should have its own size and place on
the desktop, which gives that folder a unique "spatial identity". Every time
you opened a folder, that folder would appear in the same position and size
on the desktop you had used the
last time you visited that folder. Unfortunately, whenever you open a new
folder, the previous folder window remains on screen. As you navigate deeper
through subfolders, your screen becomes cluttered with open windows. When I
complained to a GNOME advocate about this behavior, his response was that I
could change the default behavior of Nautilus back to the way it used to
work by changing a registry setting. A registry setting? That's GNOME's idea
of ease of use?
Eventually the Nautilus developers relented and added a preferences option
to choose between the new "spatial" behavior and the old explorer version of
Nautilus. "It's great because it's not spatial anymore." Now I've downloaded
and installed the preview of Ubuntu 5.1, which includes the latest version
of
GNOME. I assume that GNOME still makes the "spatial" behavior of Nautilus
the default behavior. I don't know. But Ubuntu makes Nautilus default to an
explorer mode that works similarly to prior versions of Nautilus. This
raises the question, if the "spatial" approach to file management was so
terrific and simply misunderstood and underappreciated, why did the Ubuntu
team decide not to use it by default? I'd applaud the change, but the new
Nautilus explorer mode includes one of the most abominable features ever
conceived, ostensibly "borrowed" from the hideous GNOME file picker. In one
of the toolbars, you'll see a back arrow, after which buttons appear as you
navigate through folders. Each button represents a folder, a subfolder, a
sub-subfolder and so on, as a history of where you've been. If you go back
one step, it keeps the extra button there, in case you want to go forward
again. Why buttons are supposed to represent folders is a mystery to me. But
here's a bigger mystery. If you navigate deep enough, there's no room for
all the buttons, so a scroller appears. A scroller for buttons? Now that's
revolutionary. This is especially a problem with the file picker, where
there's even less space for the buttons. Worse, I still haven't figured out
why the back arrow I mentioned earlier creates two buttons called home and
then changes into an icon that, if clicked, takes me to the top level of the
entire filesystem. This
is intuitive? Here's the point. GNOME defenders can rant all they want about
how critics simply misunderstand it. The problem illustrated by the crazy
history of Nautilus is that there's no "it" to misunderstand. If "it" is so
great, why does "it" keep going through so many radical changes in
philosophy? I have sympathy for longtime GNOME advocates because they've had
to defend both the original designs and the contradictory overhauls as being
the best approach..... *"

... and the publisher concludes as follows....

" *So, many of the people who complain that we are obsessed with KDE and
never deal with GNOME, obviously aren't reading TUX. Has someone told GNOME
fans and evangelists to spam us with these letters? I don't know. But if so,
it's time to call off your dogs. TUX will become a GNOME-focused magazine
the day GNOME users vastly outnumber KDE users. So if you GNOME fans want
more GNOME coverage, I suggest you improve GNOME first. Until then, we'll
continue to publish according to the balance that we believe serves our
readers best.* "


What is happening every where?. Are you coming to my point?. The fight
continues and have reached at a stage that must be seriously considered by
every member of the Free Software community. I have a doubt. If GNOME is not
great enough ( I am extensive KDE user from the beginning... No doubt in
it... I tried GNOME at each of its release.. But i am not satisfied a little
bit about it in considering as my desktop... I can't see any of my friends
using GNOME as their desktop... I can see a few other people who are newbie
to GNU/Linux using GNOME since most of the beginners start with Fedora and
go for a personal desktop installation where the Red Hat guys continues to
deselect KDE from their install section as default... Fact that, most of
them don't know there is a feature rich polished alternate desktop named KDE
...), then why it can't be improved?. I don't know whether you know this
fact. The birth of Mandrakelinux ( now Mandriva Linux) is a result of this
war which started long ago when Red Hat removed KDE from their distribution
supporting only GNOME. But after the popularity of Mandrakelinux, Red Hat
was pressurised to include KDE with their distro but still GNOME as default.
Even nowadays Red Hat is showing their excessive discrimination towards KDE.
Most people ( including me ) are away from Fedora due to this attitude. Is
GNOME is preferred since GTK is purely under GNU GPL?.

I can see two types of outcome from this fight...

Positive factor : This fight may create a competing environment in FOSS
field and may result in the improvement and enhancements of each of the
desktops.
Negative factor: Rather than concentrating in the spread of GNU/Linux and
FOSS across the world, rather than fighting against those actions that will
wipe out the freedom in software field, this can make the community
development to a debate and result in a creepy progress for free software
revolution.

What you think about all these? Comments please....

- Tinku Sampath