Just read on /. that Novell is standardising everything it touches on Gnome over KDE. Redhat obviously has favoured Gnome for a number of years too. Meanwhile KDE's market share has always been substantially higher than Gnome. Personally i'd say Gnome is a much more professional looking UI that suits business, compared to the probably more featureful KDE. To *ME* KDE seems to be what every l33t skiddie on XP makes their desktop look like before they find out about Linux. Either way, with the largest two enterprise level Linux vendors in the western world, surely the Gnome userbase is going to skyrocket in the next few years, possibly over taking KDE. Anyone want to suggest why this isn't inevitable?

I'm actually quite happy about this anouncement!
Have always liked Gnome more than any other DE.
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"Where is the any key" -Homer
Addendum to "acid_kewpie" 's collection

KDE is too overloaded with features, but then I find the GNOME can not have enough.

Personally I try and use the bash shell when I can, as it runs quicker, and you dont have to waste time wading through menus, and sub-bars etc...

One thing that I find annoying, and some I have spoke to recently is that Linux has began to become slow at start-up when using something like KDE.

Its when XP boots quicker than KDE you begin to think "what's going on?".

And before anyone replies "but XP is still starting up when you're logged in", I have timed both and Win Xp runs quicker at start up, which I find a shame...

I, OTOH, really like using KDE. I find Gnome is too limited. Whilst I applaud the aims of the Gnome project - to be more human friendly - I like all the KDE options and customisations.

The KDE team are well aware of the differences between the 2 and where KDE is falling down and I would hope that the next few releases concentrate more on that than on adding more features.

Also, the whole Linux "choice" thing will quickly rear it's head - if you post an article that Gnome will be the standard desktop, I practically guarantee that, as well as the holy wars starting off again - KDE's download share will rocket.

That's what we Linux users do, I'm afraid - swim against the flow when we think it's in our best interest. Or you tell us not to

I personally don't think that Novell standardising on GNOME will make any difference to the number of GNOME or KDE users. This is because most people who are purchasing enterprise class distros are using them on servers and not desktops, so they are probably not even using KDE or GNOME. From what I read, KDE will still be available on Suse Linux which is probably the Linux product from Novell that most people purchase or download.

I also think that introducing a GNOME only option on SLES or NLD can actually lose Novell a lot of current and potential customers (although I understand that standardising on one desktop can cut costs). The reason why I say this is because [list=1][*]When Novell took over Suse and released SLES 9, they promised to continue providing both desktops because a lot Suse/SLES customers were worried about the future of KDE and wanted to make sure that it would be provided as an option. After making such a promise, backtracking on it would prove that Novell are not a reliable or trustworthy company to do business with.[*]KDE has some features lacking in GNOME which are good for certain environments. A good example of this is the kiosk tool which locks down the desktop and prevents users from changing certain aspects of the desktop. Users who need these features will be forced to look elsewhere if SLES or NLD does not provide these features. Redhat probably realises the risk of shipping GNOME only, so they provide both (although their KDE desktop is not as good as their version of GNOME).[*]There are some organisations that use qt apps (which maybe commercial apps or in house) that integrate well with KDE. Is Novell really going to abandon these current and potential clients?[/list=1]

The best solution in my personal opinion is to let them coexist because people pick either GNOME or KDE for various reasons and imposing a single one, may lose Novell current and potential business.

I thought the Novell announcement was only for SLES - (Open)Suse will still default to KDE? Anyway there is no reason for KDE to die, it probably has more users than GNOME right now and there's no sign that KDE development will fall off. GNOME has had support from Redhat and other commercial companies for a long time but its still behind KDE in many areas - eg. no menu editor. At the end of the day most slightly knowledgeable Linux users will make their own choice regardless of what their distro defaults to and even less knowledgeable users will fiddle with the 'Session Type' option on their DM once in a while and many will end up hooked on KDE this way.

KDE is too damn good and it's very widely used. There's no one that will take over the another and this "war" is the most healthy of all. Almost all live-cd distributions ship with KDE and they run smooth. The ones that run Gnome: Gnoppix and Pentoo (Slax too?) are good too. I like KOffice over OO. Perhaps we'll see one day approaching each other so all apps run on both. KDE is very customizable and it boots quickly on Gentoo & FreeBSD in my box. I didn't install Gnome because I haven't felt the need. There's a minimum of setuid files on the KDE packages, I don't know if this is the same on Gnome.

Choice is great isn't it?

How do you mean? If you have KDE and GNOME installed you can run any application no matter which desktop env or even which Window Manager you're running.

You don't need the whole desktop env installed to run its apps, just some libs.

I'm quite biased as I strongly prefer kde over gnome, but gnome is just too weird to my taste, and that's all there is to it, taste! We all have our own and no desktop/wm is going to win over another one as long as people have different tastes and needs.
If everyone trying out ubuntu for example liked gnome, there wouldn't have been any point making kubuntu. So why did they make it? To cater for a demand (or just for the hell of it of course).

Gnome is weird? gnome can be many things, but weird surely isn't one of them.

How does Linux take over the home desktops? it's used on business servers, and redhat and suse's server offerings also run as desktops, so if they want linux desktops for their business users, they already have a solution there. Then you have the potential to creep from an employees work computer to their home computer. There's a few leaps of faith there, but I see that as the only way it's gonna happen. And so that process takes Gnome along with it and not KDE.

As far as integration goes, while a QT app doesn't need KDE to run per se, there's still a lot more integration that could be done, e.g. a common panel interface and so on...

The topic itself is one of those ones that just induces arguments between people. Its the Microsoft vs Linux, the GUI vs the Command, which distro is the best? etc...

The best thing to do is to not ask the question, and to just accept that person x may perfer KDE, person y loves Gnome, and person z loves something else.

And yes, choice is brilliant, be thankful that we can discuss our favourite Desktop manager, as there are so many to choose from.

We should just set up a poll to see, which one on this forum, is the king of the Desktops. Although that might lead to more arguments :-)

no we shouldn't KDE always always wins. it's been done to death, and that's not what i'm talking about really. people can choose whatever they want, as long as i don't have to use it. But will the increasing preference for GNOME in the enterprise sector start edging out the more popular DE?

So, to sum it up, Gnome will be a big hit in the land of suits-and-ties. Big Whoop. :-)

Real users use Fluxbox. :-D

Maybe Gnome will take over the world?
Maybe Microsoft will one day implement a Gnome-like DE and then no-one would use it :-)

Command line all the way I say. There is nothing like the black on white terminal style to make you happy :-)