KDE vs. GNOME: Is One Better?

April 16, 2007
By

Bruce Byfield

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Recently, GNOME developers seem to have been especially active in developing panel apps, some of which, like Tomboy, are showing such an increase in complexity that they deserve to be considered full-fledged programs rather than utilities. Both desktops allow multiple panels and their positioning on any side of the desktop, and customized menus, either in the form of GNOME's drawers or KDE's Non-KDE Application Launchers or Quick Launchers.

Other features shared by both: the ability to rollup windows so that only the title bars are visible; a broad choice of keyboard shortcuts; and a traditional if technically unnecessary selection of screen savers.

A lesser known shared feature – and one that both KDE and GNOME developers seem to prefer to hide – is that, users can replace the default window managers, Kwin and Metacity. From both desktops, you can change the window manager temporarily by typing new windowmanager --replace from the command line. In KDE, you can permanently change the window manager by changing the environment with export KDEWM=windowmanager, while in GNOME you can do so by editing .gconf/desktop/ghome/applications/window-manager/%gconf.xml in the current user account's home directory. However, before doing so, you should check that the new window manager is compatible with the desktop.

At this point in their development, the differences in basic desktop features are mostly minor. However, if I had to choose, then KDE has the edge.

It begins with a wizard that helps users customize their desktops and, even more importantly, choose the amount of eye candy they use; many, I suspect, automatically turn off the bouncing icons that appear while a program is loading.

Startup tips are also available, which are useful way for new users to learn the desktop in painlessly small increments. In addition, KDE includes menu items for organizing open windows, several different types of panels, and a multiple clipboard that is so convenient that I use it in GNOME as well.

Historically, too, KDE tends to have more complete help files, although the last few releases of GNOME are rapidly closing that gap. The one annoying feature in KDE is the truncating of long file names below icons.

Customization

From their earliest days, the do-it-yourself tradition found among users of UNIX-like systems has ensured that both KDE and GNOME are so highly configurable that new users are likely to develop option-anxiety if they try to deal with them all at once.

A surprising exception is the main menu, which, in GNOME, only recently became editable again thanks to the addition of the Alacarte Menu Editor after several years in which no menu editor was available.

Otherwise, looks and behaviors are highly customizable in both GNOME and KDE. Both allow a customized screen resolution and mouse behaviors, a selection of sounds and fonts, and the setting of preferred applications, such as web browsers, terminal emulators, and file manager.