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I find it very annoying the the apple developers fail to provide many of the features that have been standard with oranges for years. For example in oranges there is a very hand segment feature which allows the fruit to be broken up into small convenient bite size peaces. With apples the only way to do this is to use a third party utility such as a knife. I have tried to submit patches to get segments into apples but the developers arn’t interested telling me that it is just to much the orange way and thats not the way apples are. Against this kind of mentality what can you do. Lets not even get on to oranges convenient juice feature and how hard it is to get juice out of apples. (Hint requires a full application suit).

This made my day.

So Linus wrote a few patches to make GNOME work his way. The above quote is a comment to that article.

I find Linus’ GNOME-bashing phenomenally, umm, retarded (**). GNOME is made for those who want computers to be usable. I am sure there are many who appreciate KDE’s configurability, but the first feeling that hits me on logging into KDE is a feeling of being lost. I dread having to find something, since it most definitely will be placed in some non-intuitive sub-menu. I dread to think I have a choice to change “anything I want” to the way I want it to be, since I will have to find where to change it first, or what “feature x” is called in KDE. I lack KDE context - maybe with a few months/years of use, I will feel at home in KDE. But that brings home the beauty of GNOME - I felt at home by the time I had logged out of it after the first time I used it recently.

A little bit of history, now, if you will. The first time ever I used Linux was in the Summer of 1999. I was an undergrad back then, and on red hat I had the choice of GNOME and KDE. GNOME use Enlightenment as the window manager back then. I hated it the first time I used it, and I used KDE. But back then I did not have a computer to call my own. So whenever I used Linux (which was like once in two months or so), I used KDE.

The bad impression I had about GNOME persisted in my mind.

Then, when Ubuntu was released, I sort of regretted the fact that it used GNOME by default. Still, now that I had a computer of my own, I decided to give it a shot, after failing to get my network card working with a whole lot of other OSes.

I fell in love with GNOME. It was love at first sight. The emotional response was inexplicable, hence I call it “love” - which is a strong word! I could not figure it out, given my bad memories related to GNOME. Later, I installed Kubuntu as soon as it was available, to see if KDE would be better for me. Surprisingly, after a few months of GNOME, I could not stand KDE.

None of this goes to say that I hate KDE. In fact, I love some things KDE gets right, like how their apps interoperate beautifully (DCOP), and how apps like Amarok blow my socks off. I love the Konqueror idea - one browser to browse everything from files on a remote server, to webpages, to local files. I just happen to love the clean, orgnaized world of GNOME better. I like the way GNOME display fonts on the screen. I don’t want to have to change every little variable to get the perfect system. I want a good, functional, usable system. I will trade-in customizability for usability. Yes, I find GNOME’s lack of some features frustrating. I’d rather live with that than with the frustration of not finding where or how to change behavior “X” in KDE. The knowledge that something is customizable makes me want to customize it, and causes frustration when I am not able to find out how to do it.

Someday, I will do a side-by-side comparison of GNOME and KDE with respect to various factors like usability, features, etc. Finding a baseline list of “which is better” is hard, especially when it comes to usability. Defining a series of “tests” to impartially compare the two systems with regards to usability is hard, if not impossible - and that keeps me from going forward. X vs. XP does a pretty good job of comparing OSX and Windows XP. So, with an investment of a significant amount of time, I should be able to create a comparison. Searching for feature comparisons, or guides to choose from between KDE and GNOME either yield subjective articles, or biased commentary, such as this article. This has to change. There has to be a page to answer the question, “so what is the essential difference between KDE and GNOME, and what can I read to make a good decision regarding which of the two to use?”