The Best Desktop Environment
Sunday, March 5. 2006
What is the best desktop environment? This surely depends on your very personal preferences, but what makes you sure that the desktop environment you are currently using is really the best? Are you really sure?
I used a lot of desktop environments and window managers in the past: The Windows Explorer, which I still have to use, because on my rare Windows sessions there is no real alternative, Window Maker, Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE...
Enlightenment is cool - very cool. And it looks very, very great in its screenshots. DR16 has a lot of advanced features, like different decorations (e.g. title on the side), grouping of windows (you can move and shade all windows in a group with one action), nice effects and very customizable. But you have to put quite some effort into customizing it, when you want to look all apps similar. My biggest concern about Enlightenment is that they use their own toolkits and themes for their configuration dialogs and themes, so standard GTK and KDE applications often do not really fit into the environment. Check out the screenshots - 99% of them show some simple applications programmed with the enlightenment libraries or terminals. Almost none shows real-life applications like file managers, web browsers or text processors. This is OK, if you are a l337 h4x0r and use mutt and vi all the time. Also it is just a window manager. A very powerful window manager if not even the most powerful. But it worked well with Gnome 1.x (2.x wasn't released that days and KDE just released their 2.x series), so I tried Gnome. But Gnome then is a GTK application and once again the whole desktop did not fit with the Window Manager. KDE did not play well with Enlightenment, so I tried using KDE 2.x but soon missed a lot of essential features of Enlightenment and on the other hand found no real advantages that made me switch to KDE 2.x. For example Kwin included in KDE 2.x wasn't able to put windows above or below other windows and it was not possible to save window behaviours. But KDE 3.x changed that. Although Kwin as of today (KDE 3.5.2) is still not as powerful as Enlightenment DR16 (and DR17 is still a construction site with the same mistake as DR16: it's own widget styles) I don't want to miss stuff like the kicker and most of all a consistent look and feel. Using a cross toolkit style like QtCurve, almost everyhting looks similar and it's easily customizable, while in Enlightenment I often had to fiddle with configuration files and the complex theme definitions. So currently I am using KDE and I am stuck to it. I tried DR16 once again and it wasn't able to hold me for longer than 4 hours. I tried DR17 and once again I was impressed by its initial coolness, which is gone soon, after starting other apps than an eterm. Screenshots of Gnome look great... maybe I should give it a try, but I am used to a lot of KDE applications like amaroK and Konqueror that are nicely integrated into my desktop that I don't dare to try it out. And when I read user stories like that of a user switching from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (also read the subsequent articles about akregator and amarok) I am convinced that KDE is indeed the best desktop environment out there (hey, anybody got some Gnome-to-KDE-switcher stories? Please post them). It's correct that KDE looks somewhat lame out of the box. But this is the style that is intended for newbies and people that switch from Windows. So, if you are still using Gnome, give KDE a try and check out the endless configuration possibilities of KDE. You hardly will find something that you cannot tweak to match your need without the need to edit plain text configuration files - that's what I call real user friendliness. As Linus himself said:
Enlightenment is cool - very cool. And it looks very, very great in its screenshots. DR16 has a lot of advanced features, like different decorations (e.g. title on the side), grouping of windows (you can move and shade all windows in a group with one action), nice effects and very customizable. But you have to put quite some effort into customizing it, when you want to look all apps similar. My biggest concern about Enlightenment is that they use their own toolkits and themes for their configuration dialogs and themes, so standard GTK and KDE applications often do not really fit into the environment. Check out the screenshots - 99% of them show some simple applications programmed with the enlightenment libraries or terminals. Almost none shows real-life applications like file managers, web browsers or text processors. This is OK, if you are a l337 h4x0r and use mutt and vi all the time. Also it is just a window manager. A very powerful window manager if not even the most powerful. But it worked well with Gnome 1.x (2.x wasn't released that days and KDE just released their 2.x series), so I tried Gnome. But Gnome then is a GTK application and once again the whole desktop did not fit with the Window Manager. KDE did not play well with Enlightenment, so I tried using KDE 2.x but soon missed a lot of essential features of Enlightenment and on the other hand found no real advantages that made me switch to KDE 2.x. For example Kwin included in KDE 2.x wasn't able to put windows above or below other windows and it was not possible to save window behaviours. But KDE 3.x changed that. Although Kwin as of today (KDE 3.5.2) is still not as powerful as Enlightenment DR16 (and DR17 is still a construction site with the same mistake as DR16: it's own widget styles) I don't want to miss stuff like the kicker and most of all a consistent look and feel. Using a cross toolkit style like QtCurve, almost everyhting looks similar and it's easily customizable, while in Enlightenment I often had to fiddle with configuration files and the complex theme definitions. So currently I am using KDE and I am stuck to it. I tried DR16 once again and it wasn't able to hold me for longer than 4 hours. I tried DR17 and once again I was impressed by its initial coolness, which is gone soon, after starting other apps than an eterm. Screenshots of Gnome look great... maybe I should give it a try, but I am used to a lot of KDE applications like amaroK and Konqueror that are nicely integrated into my desktop that I don't dare to try it out. And when I read user stories like that of a user switching from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (also read the subsequent articles about akregator and amarok) I am convinced that KDE is indeed the best desktop environment out there (hey, anybody got some Gnome-to-KDE-switcher stories? Please post them). It's correct that KDE looks somewhat lame out of the box. But this is the style that is intended for newbies and people that switch from Windows. So, if you are still using Gnome, give KDE a try and check out the endless configuration possibilities of KDE. You hardly will find something that you cannot tweak to match your need without the need to edit plain text configuration files - that's what I call real user friendliness. As Linus himself said:
I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
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Comments
So in a nutshell, if anybody is holding out on another window manager / desktop environment, give KDE 3.4.x an honest try, you may be pleasantly surprised.
-Andy
San Antonio, TX
Slackware 10.2
The great thing about KDE is that almost everything is configurable, the bad thing about KDE is, that almost everything is configurable. Tha said, it's nice to be able to tweak a lot of things, but sometimes it's hard to find the option you would like to tweak right then.
Thus my bottom line is: Try KDE (e.g. with kubuntu) and enjoy it.