A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Janne Ojaniemi]

You might have seen already (or maybe not):

http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/

Anyway, here are my comments:

I'm VERY impressed! Of course I'm not talking about actual functionality (that 
would require actually using the software ;)), but they seem to have worked 
very hard on this release! 

And if we look at the look 'n feel of the UI, I think GNOME handidly beats KDE 
here. I don't know how they do it (I do have few ideas, read on), but somehow 
they manage to make their UI look so smooth and uncluttered, whereas KDE 
looks very busy. And take a look at the Windecs. While Plastik looks OK, the 
GNOME-windec looks even better. I don't know how they did it, but it looks 
VERY smooth and easy on the eyes!

I think the clutterness and unclutterness of the UI is due to small things. 
KDE-apps tend to have borders, lines, UI-elements and such that are not 
really needed in the end. GNOME does not have those. This is a pet-peeve of 
mine, but it's worth repeating. To illustrate my point: Take a look at 
Nautilus:

http://alblinux.homelinux.org/albums/GNOME212/Nautilus_01.png

Then take a look at Konqueror:

http://kde.org/screenshots/images/3.4/snapshot06.png

If you don't see the difference in UI-clutter, pay attention to following:

- Konqueror has 4 borders separating the icons from each other. Nautilus has 
one

- For some weird reason, the content-area in Konqueror is framed (notice the 
two dark-gray lines surrounding the content-area). Nautilus does not have 
this framing.

- Notice the lines and borders that separate the sidebar from the content-area 
in Konqueror. Again, Nautilus does not have these.

- Notice the multitude of lines and borders underneath the content-area in 
Konqueror. Again, Nautilus does not have these.

- Notice the KDE-icon in the top-right corner on Konqueror. Again, it has 
lines and borders around it. Similar icon in Nautilus has no such lines.

- Does the Location-bar in Konqueror REALLY need that border around it? No it 
does not.

Seriously, I have no idea why KDE insist that all UI-elements must be framed 
inside lines and borders. It makes the UI look very unsmooth and cluttered, 
while it serves no real purpose. And you can see these differences everywhere 
in GNOME and KDE, so it's not only these two apps.

Other things to notice:

- Konqueror has nine top-level menu's, Nautilus has six

- Konqueror has 12 icons cramped closely together, Nautilus has 7 (9 if you 
include the zoom/unzoom-icons) icons with lots of space between them.

- Notice the six icons in the sidebar in Konqueror. Nautilus does not have 
them, but they seem to be using a drop-menu instead (the "Informacione"). 
Konqueror's implementation presents several UI-elements and makes the UI look 
busy, whereas Nautilus's implementation has only one UI-element visible, 
making the UI less cluttered.

KDE has a lot of work ahead of it. A lot. I'm really looking forward to KDE4, 
and I really, really hope that it delivers on this front. I would guess that 
UI-changes like this are relatively easy to do, but for some reason I feel 
that changes like these are the ones that would face the most opposition...