Differences between KDE & Gnome

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 14:50 +0100, DB wrote:
>  Now, I'm wondering--do I "need" to have both KDE & Gnome installed?
> Are 
> there "things" that only work (properly) in one and not in the other? 
> (apart from the bouncy doo-dads which I assume are a KDE TM).

OK, I'll bite. The short answer is that KDE apps such as Quanta need the
KDE libraries to run, and Gnome apps such as Evolution need the Gnome
libraries to run. You can have both sets of libraries and use both on
*either* of the desktops, i.e. Quanta under Gnome or Evo under KDE.

> If I keep both installed, are all the updates done in one
> automatically available to the other?  Are hand-installed programs
> equally available?

In the light of the above, it should be clear that updating 
Evolution just updates Evo and updating Quanta just updates Quanta. You
can still use either of them under either desktop.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hand-installed programs". If they're
packaged as rpms you can install them as long as the dependencies are
satisfied. If you compile them from a tar.gz source then in most cases
the "config" script that comes with the source will set things up
correctly.

poc