My views on KDE and Gnome

I am a Gnome guy I have always been but I have to say I recently started being annoyed by a few little things. I looked at KDE the one in the karmic repo I dont have a clue what version they are on now and im quite surprised. I had tried out KDE back in ubuntu 8.04 and I was very disappointed but everything that I hated has been changed since then more or less. The fact of the matter is that KDE has what Gnome doesnt which is good applications all around and a good looking UI. Gnome-panel looks bad but they are doing something about it.

There is no excuse for the bad choice of media players Rhythmbox and Totem are ugly and dont hold a candle to any other program that competes with them. Banshee, Songbird, Amarok, etc and the proprietary ones in other operating systems Windows media player and itunes all put Rhythmbox and Totem to shame. The one thing that Totem has is the browser plugin but that will be not needed when the tag comes into Firefox (3.5 which is going to be included in ubuntu 9.10 I hear). Evolution is also very bad too.

Then for Ubuntu and Debian related nonsense you have two ways to install programs add/remove and synaptic, as well as an update manager and software sources managers couldnt we integrate all them into one big program? KDE has this cool thing also that notifies of tasks to do and suggests installing of packages etc which is very nice. The KDE desktop is very tidy and has nice applications (Widgets) running for your convenience that are very flexible so they can be used by a wide array of people in different ways Gnome doesnt have anything to this effect and thats a real shame. Of course KDE looks better than Gnome but again with Gnome 3.0 that will be about even.

It weird because gnome is the default for many distros probably more than KDE but still it seems like many UI problems and inconsistencies are still in Gnome. We need to be creative and collaborative and revamp the lot. Some days the Free software community seems to be too big for its own good, too much talk (or too little in a lot of cases) not enough definitive decisions. Gnome needs a direction, KDE has one and they have the strength to push towards that and that is the main difference between KDE and Gnome in my opinion. Canonical, Red Hat, Novell etc anyone who has an interest in Gnome seems to have a direction that they want it to go and thats good but it seems like they are all going in different directions (and interestingly all use different programming languages). Its good to see such interesting developments but each cook makes his or her chicken soup differently and that is a problem that leads to inconsistency.

So in short KDE is number 1 I think at the moment in terms of UI and consistency, but I am still exited about the future of Gnome as long as they make a consistent user experience and put in the best applications for the users sake.