A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Christian Loose]

Janne Ojaniemi schrieb:
> You might have seen already (or maybe not):
>
>   
<snip>
> 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
>   
Old version.

http://www.tuxmachines.org/gallery/kde35/metabar?full=1
(1280x1024)
> 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
>   
Well Konqueror also has more toolbar buttons. ;-)
IMHO the separator between home and reload could be removed.
> - 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.
>   

It's framed because you can have several frames in one Konqueror 
instance, but I agree that it could be less ugly.
> - Notice the lines and borders that separate the sidebar from the content-area 
> in Konqueror. Again, Nautilus does not have these.
>   
It's a splitter (qt:qsplitter). It allows you to change the size of the 
sidebar. It's pretty useful for deep directory trees.
Can you change the sidebar width in Nautilus?
> - Notice the multitude of lines and borders underneath the content-area in 
> Konqueror. Again, Nautilus does not have these.
>   
Part of the frame. See above.
> - 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.
>   
Old version. Gone in KDE 3.5
> - Does the Location-bar in Konqueror REALLY need that border around it? No it 
> does not.
>   
Sure. Every line edit and combobox has a frame around it. Even in GNOME:
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/images/nautilus-search.png

<snip>

> 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.
>   
Use "Text under Icons" and you will also have a lot of space between the 
icons.
> - 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...
>   

Bye, Christian