GNOME and KDE battle rages on
A debate sparked late last year by Linus Torvalds over the best Linux desktop environment is still continuing on blogs around the world.
In mid December, Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of its development kernel, said KDE was superior to its main alternative desktop environment, GNOME. He claimed that GNOME has lost too much functionality in its effort to be user-friendly, and recommended that people switch to KDE.
"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," said Torvalds in a posting to a mailing list. "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE."
In a later posting, Torvalds expanded on his comments, claiming that GNOME developers often remove functionality or refuse to add new functionality because of concerns about usability.
"Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'," said Torvalds in the posting. "GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'."
Over the last few weeks bloggers have been commenting on the pros and cons of both desktop environments. Some agreed with Torvald's comments, such as Efbee, who said he was frustrated that some actions in GNOME take longer than they used to because flexible shortcuts are no longer available.
"Finding this quote by Linus was really refreshing. Here's the father of the Linux kernel bashing GNOME and their severe dumbing down of the GUI... If that doesn't affect some change out of them nothing will," said Efbee.
Other bloggers sided with GNOME, claiming that it is easier to use than KDE. For example, a blogger known as Lucent Plum said the GNOME interface is more intuitive and is less complicated to pick up.
"Usability and human factors are important issues in software development and I think GNOME has done a better job than KDE at both," said Lucent Plum in the posting.
Other bloggers were neutral in their preference and claimed that KDE and GNOME are both good, but for different purposes.
"KDE is like the cockpit of a 747 simulator. Lots of things to switch and buttons to push. There are a lot of options and some can confuse you. Gnome is like an old Atari game console — a single joystick with one button. Not confusing and it does what it does very well," said a blogger, known as Mecworks.
One GNOME developer, Jeff Waugh, responded to Torvald's comments.
"We absolutely have a responsibility to design software that doesn't confuse users. The reality is that most software developers can't even get this right! So if we've rejected ideas, features or designs based on their inscrutability, I don't think I need to defend that," wrote Waugh on the mailing list.
ZDNet UK recently reviewed five leading desktop Linux distributions and concluded that Ubuntu, which uses the GNOME desktop environment, was the most suitable for small businesses.