GNOME

I wrote a month ago a little about my experiences with GNOME and KDE, the two most popular desktops for Linux-based systems, and, being a long-time KDE user, decided to spend a month using GNOME. A month later, I will now relate my experience and opinions.

So... has a month using Ubuntu's default choice of desktop environment convinced me of the wisdom of switching more permanently? Have I been shown the error of my kways? In summary: No. For me personally, the difference between the two desktops is still stark, and GNOME has very little to offer anyone used to the functionality and configurability of KDE. Plus, in other places, I found that it just didn't work.

Firstly though, some positives. GNOME's default look has certainly been well polished. Its use of shadows, and choice of fonts are well made. The integration of compiz enables a fun and useful three-dimensional desktop, with very few glitches given how new the software is. Plus, it's easy to use (if a little confusing to configure). "GNOME looks better" is often the first comment people make when they realise that I'm a KDE user. They've perhaps installed KDE and played with it for a bit, but never long enough to want to customise its looks very much. And let's be honest, the default look of KDE (even the pre-release KDE 4) really sucks.

Ubuntu's default GNOME look.

Ubuntu's default KDE look.

However, we are urged not to judge a book by its cover, and this is no exception. Firstly, because KDE's look and feel is so highly configurable when compared to GNOME (my KDE desktop is altered almost beyond recognition from the default), but also because looks aren't everything.

As ever, it's functionality that really counts. Now, GNOME's feature-set is fairly standard, and what it does do, it does relatively well (for the most part). It has a web-browser (either Epihany, or else Firefox fits in well), which does what it says on the tin, it has an email and calendar program (Evolution), a movie player (Totem), music player (Rhythmbox) and a file browser (Nautilus), all of which do what you would expect, but there are very few added extras. This was my initial opinion upon first using the system, and it came to be backed up over time.

For example, take Totem, the movie player. Upon firing it up, you have three buttons, play/pause fast-forward and rewind, plus the usual menus to load files and discs, and the beginnings of some playlist support (though the way this worked really wasn't obvious to me, and there's no "add to queue" option in any other application). So far so okay, but there's strangely no stop button, and the position of the seek bar doesn't seem to particularly relate to the current position in the movie, especially when used with the mouse-wheel, which sends the film backwards then forwards somewhat in an oscillating motion. Okay, so there's a couple of bugs, but that's okay, I'm sure they'll be ironed out.

I've alluded to the main annoyance I found with Epiphany and Nautius already, a real lack of context-sensitive options for files and links. Why the default option for mp3 files is "open in movie player" I don't know, but for files to be opened in either Totem or Rhythymbox there is no "add to playlist" option. While I can live without this for films, it's fairly useful for building music playlists.

Another program of which I've become a heavy user of over the last couple of years is yakuake, a terminal emulator which sits just off screen, ready to slide onto the screen at the touch of a button (rather like the one first used in Quake and still in many games). Doing without this has been the most clumsyfying part of the last month; I just don't like having to alt-tab through dozens of windows to find a terminal. And yes, I tried tilda, but it didn't really cut it.

Okay, so I'm going to stop picking at small annoyances now (which to be honest can be overcome), and deal with some more fundamental issues for me. These issues can be largely summed up as a lack of integration and configurability. Integration, something which KDE does so very well, is just not there in GNOME. Okay, so all the programs use the same "open file" dialogue, but there is a general lack of awareness between programs, exemplified by the lack of "add to queue" option already discussed. I dislike using Firefox under KDE since it is not part of the integrated desktop, and hence its context-sensitive options must all be separately configured by hand. Konqueror behaves much better, knowing how to deal with items from local directories, ftp servers or websites. Epiphany falls down here however, providing usually only a simple "open link" option, which behaves like a poor cousin of Firefox's.

The lack of configurability of menu options doesn't make it any easier. Take Evolution, GNOME's flagship email and calendar program. As with most GNOME apps, it does what it says on the tin, but no more. In KDE, one consistent feature is that you can right click on a menu bar and configure which buttons it has. I find this most useful in KMail, where I replace the single "reply" button with three: "reply to author", "reply to all" and "reply to mailing list". All three have very different but highly useful functionality. I could not find a single way to achieve this in Evolution. The most it allows me to configure the menu is to decide whether I want text next to the icon or not. Evolution's threading support also lacks features to the extent that it makes a large folder of threaded messages difficult to handle, but I won't get back into small grievances...

This post was not intended as a blow-by-blow review of GNOME or KDE, and as such I will not cover every feature and gripe I have with each. There are enough websites around which do that already. Instead, I hoped to simply point out a few of the possibilities which are available, but which GNOME's lack of extended functionality prevents users from perhaps even realising exist. GNOME works, don't get me wrong. But Windows XP also works, as do Windows 98 and AmigaOS. When moving from Windows to Linux for the first time, it suddenly seemed that my computer would behave how I wanted it to, rather than me having to conform to the paradigm provided by its user interface. The feeling has been comparable but contrary this last month. KDE certainly gives the user more control over their interactions with their computer than GNOME does, and has more functionality. I believe that GNOME's restrictive "user friendly" design approach is bad for the cause of free software, which should encourage people to think about and use their computer in new and imaginative ways (such as IMAP resources for contacts, session management and consistency between handling of files wherever they are based), rather chaining them to what the designers think they want. Open, extensible and configurable functionality is the only way for this to be an option for the vast majority who are not prepared or able to dive into the code themselves.