A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Max Howell]

Janne Ojaniemi wrote:
> 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!

I tried out the GNOME live CD for the previous release, and was very 
impressed at the time. I can't remember all my thoughts, but I think it 
was mostly the polish they applied to the overall.

Anyway, with regard to the over-framing of KDE, I find this is mostly a 
fault in Qt. It's not easy to do nice framing over multiple widgets, and 
most widgets seem to come with frames, and often the frame is ugly, 
rather than a pretty style like QStyledPanel.

Also spacings and margins often don't go together great. I spent about a 
week on amaroK 1.2 polishing spacings, margins and adjusting frame 
boundries. I think it shows, but still I think KDE lacks something 
better wrt frames and widget seperation graphics, and GNOME doesn't.

I think it's possible to make KDE as pretty as GNOME, but there may be 
limitations with the Qt style engine. I'd like to hear the opinion of 
the KPDF guy (he did great mods) and the Plasma team.

Max