challenge to KDE users
 

After reading up on the recent almost flamewar involving Linus Torvald discussing Gnome I started to think 'why do I use Gnome and not KDE?'

Well, after a recent new install of my, to date, favourite distro (FC4) I decided to give KDE a try, mainly because the gist of the thread about Gnome being restrictive and incomplete and it treats the user as if he were stupid (that's my conclusion, not a quote) to me was that anything that can be done with gnome can be done with KDE and better.

I am not talking about apps (I have to admit there are certain KDE apps I prefer - KPPP for one - although there are also gnome apps I like better than their KDE counterpart - Gedit over Kate), but simply the look and feel of the whole DE. Well, I hereby challenge any KDE user to prove me wrong, but I haven't been able to do anything like that.

To start off, here's my first gripe with KDE:

1. The panel:
   
   Having used Gnome for the last two years I've grown used to the way the panel works and quite like it. Whan I swithed to KDE (just to try it) the first thing I did was move the panel to the top (that's the way I like it) and I tried to create another panel at the bottom. This cased two problems:
   
   
   • try as I would, I was unable to get a real second panel started, I can get a sidebar with some specific functions or a top (or bottom) bar to see the apps I have open, but what I want is to really cusomize these bars the way I want them i.e. the way they look in a standard Gnome install, putting the open apps in the bottom bar together with a 'desktop' icon and a desktop switcher and maybe another launcher or applet.
     
     
   • I want my panels slim, but as soon as I make the top panel so slim the desktop switcher becomes completely horizontal, the icons in the panel become so small I can hardly see them.

If you want a true KDE experience then install any distro thats not Fedora or Redhat. From personal expereince, Fedora seems to polish up GNOME and cripple KDE by trying to make it behave like GNOME.

Are you using KDE 3.5? If so, right click on your kicker (panel) -> Add New Panel -> Panel. Once thats done, Right click on the new panel -> Configure Panel -> Arrangement and then select the position where you want the panel placed. Go down to where is says Size and choose the size you wish or input a custom size.

I'm making space for a debian install...
I've just done a fresh FC4 install and upadating is going to take somewhere around a month (56k :()

I've tried tha 'add panel' and changing position and place is not a problem. It's te crappy icons on the small panel and not being able to put what I want on the second panel. I'll have another go as soon as I get KDE 3.5 back or Debian installed (which I'm afraid will have a very low KDE version).

It's not a question about being stupid or not stupid to use Gnome or KDE window managers.
Use what you prefer: if Gnome gives you what you look for use it and if KDE doesn't give you what you like don't use it. That's all.
Why should there be an opposition between two groups of users?
It's only of matter of taste or usage convenience.

As the previous poster said, it's all up to what you prefer. If it does the job you want, then use it. Just let others go their way also.

Personally, I don't have much experience with Gnome, but when I last tried it I didn't like it very much. I just wasn't able to control the way it looked and behaved the way I can with KDE. I especially remember one thing I couldn't stand, which was if you set up a auto-hiding sidebar it never actually "hid" completely. There was always an ugly little edge protruding. And when you maximized a window the whole thing would be offset because of it.

With KDE, OTOH, I have set up on the right side of my desktop a nice little half panel that doesn't autohide, but stays in the background behind whatever windows you have open. And when I touch the mouse to the bottom of the screen it pops up to the top and I can access some of my lesser-used applets. It's quite convenient.

There's only one minor thing I wish the panel had, and that's a nested application launcher. It's not a big deal though. You can work around it by setting up a menu folder with the applications you like and add it to the taskbar, but I don't like having the extra folders cluttering up my menu. I just think it'd be nice to have an "application drawer" type applet as well.

As for setting up a panel as you described, I had no trouble doing just that. I created a new panel. shrunk it down to a narrow size, and added taskbar, pager, clock, show desktop, K-menu, and quick launcher apps. Perfect. As for the icon sizes, the quick launcher icons on mine did shrink down, but there's a preference in the applet config to set the size manually. Any other icons can probably be adjusted through the global settings in the main KDE control panel.

There are a few applets that only allow one instance on the panels at a time, such as the system tray and the command line runner. I doubt it's a big inconvenience for most people though, as you'd rarely need more than one of those.

I suggest you take some time and play around with KDE. Learn just what it's capable (and not capable of). If you still don't like it, feel free to go back to Gnome. Nobody's going to complain if you do. It's all about making Linux work for you, after all.

Well, I suppose it all starts with finding a good theme. The ones I've seen (installed) are rather crappy. Gnome is really sleek and clean and the squareness of KDE just hurts my eyes. Having said that there are many reasons why I'd like to get a better look at KDE. For starters, there are some apps that are simply much better or don't have (in my limited knowledge) a good alternative in Gnome. KPPP is the first in this list together with K3B.

Using any of these has a stupid drawback to me: error messages (like if they crash, which they occasionally do) always trigger artsd and this plays havoc with othar apps I like to use. arts and esd appear to conflict sometimes and I need to become root to close down artsd if I when I want to use audacity (which I do quite a lot).

Also, after starting a single session in KDE I now have a number of KDE icons on my Gnome desktop !? If I delete them in Gnome I also lose them in KDE (it's 'system' 'home' and 'trash'). This is as likely Gnome's fault as KDEs, but in any case quite annoying.

I also quite like the KDE control center (although there are so many options it sometimes simply is too much)

I'll try and ask questions before this becomes a random rant:


- Can anyone recommend a clean, rounded, easy on the eyes KDE theme?

- Is there a good alternative to Kate (I relly don't like it - especially compared to Gedit)

- ... more to follow.

In regards to an alternative to Kate(which I just fired up and immediatly disliked as a "basic" text editor) I would strongly reccomend Kwrite. Simple yet effective at color coding parens and suchlike. As far as theming goes, I'm using the developers build of Fedora Core 5 withe the new improved bluecurve theme with Keramic header bars. Looks nice and round to me at least. Hope this helps,
Cheers

You can always disable artsd. You don't need it for sound in non-KDE apps. And you can always set the auto-suspend if idle after X seconds to a low value in Sound & Multimedia->Sound System in the Control Center. I find that KDE rarely interferes with non-KDE apps for sound resources.

Kwrite.

There are thousands of themes for KDE. Why not check out www.kde-look.org and choose one yourself? Personally I always customize all the settings and don't use a pre-built theme. That way you get the look you want just right.

...If you want a good alternative to Kate, that is a full featured editor, May I suggest GVIM. It's basically vim, run through the GTK engine

It's platform independent, and really full featured.

It supports nice color coding of text, and is really a great tool. You just have to learn some of the VI commands, but, honestly, once you do, you'll never look back.

I used to use Kate, then ditched it for the faster, easier to use (once you learn it), GVIM/VI

If you use KDE, there is KVIM which is quite similar to GVIM.

Didn't know about kvim, and in that cause use it over gvim. if you're in kde.

No sense having qt AND gtk running all the time, eh?

Thanks for all your replies.

Reddazz said Fedoras KDE was crippled. Could anyone explain how it could be crippled? Have features been disabled or is it just the bad themnes?

Take a look at this article from Redhat regarding what they do to KDE. Its old so some of the stuff may not apply today. Basically they make extensive changes to KDE so that KDE and GNOME behave in a similar fashion. If you use Suse, Mandriva and any other KDE centirc distro, they enhance KDE instead of trying to make GNOME and KDE similar.

Just about what you said.
However, I don't see how this 'cripples' either. It simply means that the default configuration regarding behaviour and looks is similar in Gnome and KDE (although I don't see much similarity in Fedora).
Maybe you mean it'll take me longer to make it look like something attractive...(?) but in my first post I mentioned I tried to make KDE look like Gnome and do things the way Gnome does them (in a way - I don't need a clone, just something I can work with easily) and was having great difficulty to get that done.

@Harishankar: thanks for that pointer. I'll do so as soon as I get KDE updated (to 3.5.1. current version is 3.4.0)

Few things you should note. Since FC4, Fedora has not unified the look and feel of KDE and GNOME. In previous versions they made more than cosmetic changes to KDE so that it looked and behaved like GNOME. I am sure if you search a bit more you will find more articles about Redhats attitude towards KDE and the extensive changes they made. Their behaviour towards KDE resulted in a group of packagers called kde-redhat that develops KDE packages for Redhat and Fedora Core that have not been heavily modified. It should be noted that Redhat has never been too keen on KDE and this resulted in a fork of the one of the 5.x releases. This fork became the Mandrake distro which was essentially Redhat+KDE.