Infotaxis Blog

Linux is one of the most versatile operating systems, seeing as it almost entirely consists of free software and community support. This has provided innumerable programs to choose from. One thing I’ve always liked about Linux is it’s versatility of user interfaces. In Windows, the only solid interface you can use is Explorer. There are many custom shells available, but they all are unstable or feel “like an alpha version”, so to speak.

Note that this article only covers graphical environments, text-based ones (shells) will be covered in another in the future.

The two biggest players in the Linux desktop environment war are KDE and GNOME…

KDE really emulates the functionality of Windows’s task bar, with Win98-style cascading menus, and various other standard features. It provides for a desktop (as do most environments) and provides it’s own WM (window manager) to control the movement and location of your applications. For someone like me, having much more experience on Windows than Linux, KDE was a great environment. I loved the generalized widget feel (how buttons, scrollbars, loading bars, etc. look), it’s logos, and it was easy to navigate for someone so used to Windows. (Note that the leftmost button is almost always the “K” menu as I call it, it typically has a “K” with a gear for it’s icon, but it is often customized for the specific distribution of Linux, in this case I believe Mandriva)

One of my favorite things about KDE is that it comes with a rich software selection, covering almost every aspect of common desktop computing (and a few that are pretty abstract). They are mostly based on the Qt libraries, which are almost completely unique to KDE, providing it’s interface functionality. One of my favorite applications (which is heavily tied into KDE) is Konqueror, it’s file browser. Being both a web browser and file browser (like IE6 used to be), and being able to run almost any kind of file (documents, music, video, etc.), it really gives you the All-In-One application feel, which I enjoy.

Ironically, KDE 4 (the newest version, not in widespread use yet) has continued to wind up similarly to Windows with a “start search”-like box, and various other similarities (along with a flavor of it’s own, of course):

GNOME is much more similar to the MAC interface at first glance, with two bars present on screen (in most default setups). The bar on the top of the screen contains the menu(s), similar to the KDE ones in function. The tray/clock are in the top left, followed by a power button. This seems like a nonstandard layout for someone who is familiar with almost any other environment. The bottom is fairly normal, with a “Show Desktop” button and a mechanism to display and control running tasks. The biggest difference between GNOME and KDE (from a usability point of view) is that with KDE you only have to worry about one bar, and with GNOME two:

GNOME uses the GTK toolkit (insetad of Qt, like KDE) to draw it’s interface, which is not as heavily tied into the GNOME system as Qt is, being used in many projects that even run on Windows (like the GIMP).

GNOME’s file manager is known as Nautilus. It is capable of opening many protocols, but is totally unable to open a web page. If you attempt to navigate to Google, it complains that “http://www.google.com” isn’t a folder. It can, however, do things like FTP, just like Konqueror can.

All in all, both KDE and GNOME provide a good number of benefits and are fairly easy to get used to. There are more options, such as XFCE (a very lightweight desktop system), Enlightenment, etc., but most people will choose one of the two main players. I personally like both, but prefer the file browser of KDE, and the terminal emulator of KDE, called “Konsole”.

The key to all of this, however, is that you aren’t forced to just run KDE, or just run GNOME. Most people assume this, and are simply ignorant that they are not mutually exclusive. I’ve currently got both of them installed, and if I wanted to, I could run a gnome-panel (the panel in GNOME for the menu), kicker (the KDE panel), Konqueror, and Nautilus all at once. You can even drag files between Nautilus and Konqueror and things work seamlessly. You can even run both the GNOME and KDE desktops together, though it’s impossible to draw on the bottom layer simultaneously, so they don’t play friendly.

My point is that you don’t have to choose. If you like GNOME, but KDE’s panel, install both, and make your session use all of GNOME but gnome-panel, switching it out for kicker. There’s no good reason to restrict yourself. I’ll talk more about how to do this in my next article, which will cover Linux environment customization, including how to change your session like I’ve just described.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under articles, linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.