kde in extras - the devel discussion

[Norm]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Norm <norm <at> workingtools.ca> writes:
>   
>> I am somewhat of a newcomer to Linux and at a loss to understand the 
>> almost fanatical support of KDE.  When I was first exposed to Linux in 
>> RH9 I found that KDE did not work consistently and chose to use GNome.  
>> Recently I have started to use core 5.   KDE may work well in the 
>> current distro but I have become more familiar with GNome; apart from a 
>> personal preference I can see no technical reason to consider one better 
>> than the other.  I assume by the strong support from many there may be a 
>> technical reason to support KDE over GNome, what are they.
>>     
>
> KDE is more configurable and thus better to adapt to an experienced user's 
> needs. GNOME works this way: they do a usability study, pick the default that 
> works best with the inexperienced users who are the typical subject of such a 
> study and then make it hard (see GConf) or outright impossible to change (and 
> flame everyone complaining about it saying they're the vocal minority which 
> can't adapt to the rest of the world and doesn't understand that the default is 
> best for them too anyway). See Linus Torvalds's flame against GNOME on that 
> subject. :-) KDE tends to make everything tunable to the user's liking, so if 
> you don't like the defaults, it's no big deal, just change them. Of course, if 
> you don't like having to change configurations, then GNOME's way of trying hard 
> to come up with a default that "just works" will probably work better for you, 
> though KDE does try to set good defaults even if the defaults can be changed 
> (but some people complain they don't do it enough, often saying "just change it 
> if you don't like it, it's configurable"). I'm happy with KDE, I don't like 
> GNOME's lack of flexibility.
>
> There's also the technical issue that some applications require the KDE 
> libraries to run, so if you don't have at least kdelibs (and in some cases 
> kdebase) installed, you can't run them. That's bad. Nobody says you have to run 
> only GNOME apps or only KDE apps, you can use them both, but that's only going 
> to work if you have at least the libraries of both installed. So I don't 
> consider a Linux system without kdelibs or without the GNOME 2 libs complete 
> (unless it's really a high-security console-only server system with no X11 at 
> all).
>
>         Kevin Kofler
>
>   
Thanks Kevin
As I am just getting back with Linux, issues such as defaults in Gnome 
do not stand out as a major issue manly because until I think of 
changing them they are only a minor issue to me. I knew there was some 
reason why so many were so passionate about KDE, given the background I 
will put more time into KDE and give myself time to become more familiar 
with it.
Norm