I have two questions :

1.What are the pros and cons of Gnome and KDE? I can't decide which one to use.

2. I've made another thread for this :
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...77#post4069377

Please help me out, I'm a complete newbie.

Kubuntu is generally considered to not be a very good KDE distro. When got tired of Kubtutu a couple years ago I switched to openSUSE and found it to be a better experience, though I couldn't explain why now.

openSUSE defaults to KDE these days but I use it with GNOME. openSUSE is generally considered to give a good KDE and GNOME experience so I'd go with openSUSE. Maybe with openSUSE you'll find sleep works properly, maybe it won't. If you want help with sleep/hibernation you need to provide more information such as which chipsets your laptop has in it. This can be found in the output of


The GNOME or KDE discussion has been going on for as long as they have existed. Ultimately you try both and see which you like. I used KDE 3 for years, then they ripped it all up and started over for KDE 4 and I switched to GNOME because, well it took a while for KDE 4 to really become a decent replacement for KDE 3 and yet the distros all jumped to KDE 4 pretty quick.

GNOME is often accused of being too simplistic and that's why I used to use KDE 3. When the state of KDE 4 made me look at GNOME again I found it to be much improved. There are things about GNOME that irritate me but that would be the same which ever desktop environment I used and I feel no inclination to see what KDE 4 is like these days.



It's usually best to ask about one issue/question per thread otherwise a thread can quickly get difficult to follow.

1. IMHO both Gnome is overly-complex, bloated, too slow and dumbed-down; it is also horribly difficult to get under the covers of its GUI config dialogs so you are effectively limited to what the developers want you to do. I have not used KDE. If you are at the stage of choosing a desktop you could look at others; Xfce is simple and fast; for many people it is at least adequate; some do not like its lack of eye-candy; Xfce is available as Xubuntu if you feel the need to stay with ubuntus (that's a whole different discussion).

2. It gets confusing when two questions are discussed in one thread. You may like to start a new thread for the sleep question in which case you could edit the OP to remove part 2.

There is no file called "lscpi" in the /sbin directory.
Also, if I type $ /sbin/lscpi , it says "bash: /sbin/lscpi: No such file or directory"

Sorry. Like I said, I'm a total newbie.

Apart from Xubuntu, which is the most widely used Xfce distro?
Also, isn't Xfce primarily for old computers and netbooks?

P.S I'm from Pune

IDK. As someone beginning with Linux a better question would be "Which is the most widely used Xfce distro suitable for newcomers to Linux?"

Xfce's light weight does suit it to lower performance computers (there are lighter weight GUIs, arguably less suited for newcomers to Linux) but it is more a question of personal preference than computer performance. Wikipedia has a comparison of X-based desktops. Mostly people posting here advise simply trying different desktops but I prefer to do some research before leaping in the dark, especially as it takes a month or so to familiarise with a desktop.

Damn, that should have read lspci. Sorry.

I hardly dare ask, but how can something be overly-complex whilst also being dumbed-down?


I wouldn't say it's horribly difficult at all. It's that KDE tends to put all the configuration options in to the GUI where as GNOME applications tend to put the ones that most people will want/need in to the GUI and leave more advanced/niche options out. However such options are easily edited using gconf-editor, which is a GUI tool.


Unless you're willing to start changing the source code you are always limited by what the developers want you to do.


See, this is why asking which desktop environment is better, or for pros/cons is pretty much futile. Everyone has a different opinion. Someone will always say that either KDE or GNOME or both are 'bloated'. Someone will always say that GNOME is dumbed down.*Someone will always say something negative about KDE. You really do just have to try them and see which you like best.

One factor in my not feeling inclined to look at KDE recently is that Firefox and Thunderbird, both of which I use a lot, are GTK applications. GTK is the toolkit upon which GNOME is built and this means that in my experience Firefox and Thunderbird work nicer with GNOME than with KDE. E.g. Thunderbird will by default call whatever the default GNOME application is for an attachment rather than whatever the default KDE application is.

My advice is to pick a couple of live distros and test them, then decide yourself. Distrowatch.com can help you find live distros with both gnome and kde (or any other desktop for that matter). Ubuntu and fedora are famous distros that ship gnome by default, opensuse is a good bet for kde.

It's true that gnome offers a limited amount of customizability when compared with kde. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you. The rest of the kde vs. gnome stuff is not going to help the thread so we should really be avoiding it. There's already enough of that in the net for those that are interested.

A non-gnome example would be automounting a usb stick which involves hal, udev, policy-kit & session-kit versus running a mount command. The latter is easier for the user until it doesn't work. It is ironic but making things simpler to use increases a systems complexity. A non-computer example would be an automobile. Automatic transmissions are far more complex than manual transmissions.

I agree that using both and deciding for oneself is the way to go. Each person will have their own subjective opinions and preferences. KDE and Gnome are both excellent desktop environments.

Well....I'm really pissed now.
The best of the best went from "guru" to "moderator". As far as I'm concerned, that's a total disgrace, this "moderator" title impairs reality.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to reply

I had that problem too. When you aren't running a shell prompt as the "root" user then you don't have "sbin" in your PATH and privileged programs located in "sbin" can't be found.

The simplest way to fix the problem is using "sudo"

sudo /sbin/lspci

or to start a shell prompt as root

sudo su -

The error is confusing because it implies that the file isn't there, when in fact the file just isn't in the search PATH used to locate and run programs.

If you want to look at a KDE distro I recommend Slackware. Also read the "Slackbook" for a good tutorial about installing and using Slackware. Most of it applies to other distros too but the directory names may be slightly different for locating files.

I like XFCE pretty well but some of the KDE utilities are nice. I run KDE programs from the XFCE window manager and get the best of both.

Both Ubuntu and Fedora are good GNOME distros.

gnome(mac interface) kde(windows interface) xfce(cde interface) basically

Mmm, this has nothing to do with the current problem. The search $PATH is irrelevant when you provide the full path to the binary file, as in

Even a relative path would do, and the binary needn't be on a dir listed by $PATH in that case either.