Who here has used Debian (stable) with KDE? I know Gnome is the default desktop but I also know one could install KDE if he wished.

I know Ubuntu (debian based) has Gnome as the default but one could install KDE if he wished. However, everything I have heard about Ubuntu + KDE is that it is not as good as Ubuntu + Gnome.

Is Debian (stable) + KDE as secure, stable and reliable as Debian (stable) + Gnome?

Thanks!

What have you heard?
Why not?

Just what I said: I have heard others say Ubuntu works better with Gnome than with KDE. So, I was wondering if the same applied to Debian.

Debian isn't Ubuntu. Whatever desktop/wm you choose in Debian works just fine.

Two questions:

1) Is it possible to have both Gnome and KDE installed and switch between them as I like? I am almost certain I could do so. More importantly, could doing so cause any unforeseen conflicts?

2) Unrelated - does debian come with a firewall?

You can switch between them in GDM or KDM (whichever you choose).

Iptables is part of the Linux kernel. You can use all sorts of configuration tools to make a firewall (just like on any other distro)

IBall, et al.

Does switching between gnome and kde cause any conflicts, or would that be rare?

no conflicts, you can install as many window managers as you want.

Only briefly, but
I don't think that technically debian does have a default desktop, it just has many available. OTOH it might be true that more debian users choose Gnome, but that's a different thing.
True enough, but that has no meaning for debian's 'preference' of desktop, and if I am being nit-picking (& I am ) it has no meaning for Ubuntu. In a confusing ,and IMHO wrong-headed, piece of terminology, Ubuntu is the Gnome Ubuntu and kubuntu is the kde Ubuntu.

What, officially, the thing is that you get if you install ubuntu and use synaptic to grab kde, I don't know. The beast with no name? An Ubuntu with a silent k at the start? Everybody calls it Ubuntu with kde, but then many call Kubuntu Ubuntu with kde. It seems to me that the Ubuntu folks just made life more difficult by going against established precedent in this.


I'll disagree with that wording! I don't like Gnome that much (if I try it for a month, I gradually get to dislike it more and more) but am happy with kde. I cannot therefore agree, but I would definitely have agreed had you said that the kde in kubuntu is less well done than the Gnome in Ubuntu. That may have been what you meant....

Of course, you can also use the kde apps (koffice, k3b, akregator...) under Gnome, and the gnome apps (ghex, gnumeric, brasero, evolution, ...) under kde. Sometimes they look a bit odd, but they should all work.

Today, if you do anything with kde 4.x, it isn't going to be as secure stable or reliable as anything else. 3.x is going to be, just won't have received much tlc from the kde team lately. I would say kde 4.3 has finally got to the point at which it could be considered to be good for those who don't mind being at the bleeding adge and suffering a few little nicks for it, 4.3.1 will be better, and I am expecting kde 4.4 to be brilliant... (but that's probably just me getting carried away).

I have a dozen different WMs on my laptop (a bit excessive, I know...this is a by-product of seeing kde4 and wanting it so much that I tried it before it was close to ready...and then I wasn't happy with kde4 due to bugs and unfinishedness and I wasn't happy with kde3 because kde4 made it look dull) and there aren't any real conflicts. You have to be a bit careful to install kde3 and kde4 side-by-side, because the default is that both expect to be called kde, and you have to be careful not to use the kde4 version of some app under kde3, but no real conflicts.

With kde4, you don't have the usual, debian, choice of 'just use a 'more mature' version....it won't be so up-to-date, but it will be rock solid stable'. Older versions of kde4 are not good, so that isn't an option. You can wait, of course. Or use kde 3 (but don't ever look at kde4....you'll fall under its evil spell....).

repo,

Thank you!

salasi,

"...but I would definitely have agreed had you said that the kde in kubuntu is less well done than the Gnome in Ubuntu. That may have been what you meant...."

Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks!

I never liked Gnome, probably because my first GUI experience was Windows 98, and I do not like the small range of configurable appearances available with Gnome compared to the freedom of KDE3. KDE4 is a different matter that seems to have followed the Windows philosophy of if you don't provide it they'll still have to use it anyway. I have Xfce and that is rather nice. At present it has no panel though there is a blank one. I can't remember whether it ever had a panel. What does annoy me is that even though I don't use Gnome, I have to install it because so much else links to parts of it. It's a good thing that disks come in gigabytes today, not megabytes!

Yes it has a panel, the new xfce4 installs quite nice! =)


As for those earlier questions of security. Most of the time it's the system that defigns security, the WM just makes the system easy to navigate. It doesn't really do any of the security stuff, and if it does it's just a interface (GUI) for something else.