I’ve been a long time GNOME user pretty much since the start. I dabbled with GNOME and KDE when they were both in their early infancy (ie pre version 1) and finally settled on GNOME. KDE was (at the time) too slow, very klunky and loads of bugs. And it looked naff too!So, a long time using GNOME and yay life was good.
But recently, life has not been to good for me in GNOME land. Things changed, mostly for the better, but some for worse as well. The software got slower and more unreliable. Thankfully the 2.10 release solved most of the instability issues I had. So I thought why not take a look at KDE and see where it’s at?
So, after emerging the split and newly into portage 3.5.0 ebuilds with gcc-4 (and it killed my laptop with the kdeendablefinal USE flag as it really does need 512 meg memory- my laptop as 464 useable after graphics card nicks some - even X took too much!) I gave it a whirl. Very nice, very taseful. The default theme for KDE looked swish even if it resembled my Windows XP box a little ;) The first thing that made me go “Wow” was konsole - as it loads very fast compared to gnome-terminal (I use the console a lot). Plus it has a nicer shade of colours, more pastel compared to gnome-terminal boldness.
Konqueror is nice too - again it loads much much much faster than Firefox, which is important for use on this slow laptop. It may not render as well as Firefox and it’s a little slower and klunkier in use but it also compiles a lot lot faster whereas Firefox takes ages. Swings and roundabouts - I’ll give Konq a whirl for a while ;)
I’m not going to blather for ages about KDE vs GNOME- each has their merits, flaws (bug #114141) and target audience and there’s plently of room for each of them in the NIX world. But this GNOME user is going to try KDE for a while :)