In the great OS wars, Mac and Windows have been waging a battle that is often quite comical. While both OS's have their strong points, I have decided to use Linux as my main OS. I thought that going to Linux would keep me away from the Gods of War. I was wrong.
There are actually a few battles being waged in Linux Land and they can be almost as amusing as the Mac/Windows scuffles. The war I want comment about is the Gnome/KDE desktop battle. Gnome and KDE are the two biggies in this arena, although there are many, many others. These two make up the default desktop of about 90% of the current Linux distributions. While it is normally quite simple to change which DE (desktop environment) you want to use, most distro's have a favorite and center their product around it.
The other day I was reading an article on slashdot about Linus Torvalds and his disdain for Gnome. I realize that I currently prefer Gnome because it is very easy to navigate. When I use KDE, I feel like I am relearning WIndows again...things are scattered and hidden and while they work well and are very configurable, it just isn't for me. I cannot understand why a group of people who thumb their noses at Microsoft have to get bogged down in a petty debate over which DE is better. Come on, at least you can easily change the DE in Linux and it stays stable. Try that with Windows.
I have been using Linux for about two or two and half years. I started using Gnome because it was the default DE of Ubuntu, the distro I prefer to use. I have tried other distros, and I used whatever DE was the default, but I always came back to Ubuntu. I also have used other DE's (IceWM and XFCE) on machines that do not have enough horsepower to run a "heavy" DE and like them well enough to keep using them, although for servers IcwWM is plenty for me.
I installed Mepis on an old laptop and liked it but I thought KDE was too confusing...like I said earlier, it is like relearning Windows. However last night I installed the kubuntu-desktop package in Ubuntu and gave it a spin. I will admit two things: It is shiny but I have NO idea where anything is yet. I will keep working it and see if I like it. Maybe I will do a "30 days of KDE" to give it a fair shake.
I am not going to chose sides in the war...I plan on playing Switzerland. The battle is over OS's, not DE's. Why don't we get along and sell the point that with Linux, YOU HAVE A CHOICE and the choices are many.
1 comment:
I think you should. If I hadn't done it with ubuntu I would not be running linux today. I have it on a laptop that I use and it is still running on the 30 day test machine I wrote my blog about, although it's being used by someone else. The person I gave the test linux box to had very little computer experience and picked it up easy enough and even rejected my offer to reconnect the MS XP hard drive, stating that they did not want to have to learn to deal with the constant security patching and XP tweeking.
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