A look at GNOME 2.14, comparison to KDE

[Henry Miller]

You summed my main point up (in a latter email): BIKESHED.  Some people like 
one look, some the other.   Many people like change for the sake of change, 
even when it makes no difference, other people resist change, even when if 
makes things better.   Right now the world is moving to a style of less 
lines, and you wish to see us move faster.  The world will move a different 
direction in 5 years, and KDE might or might not lead that movement.   

On Monday 20 February 2006 11:54, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:

> 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!

Agreed, they did do a good job of making it look nice.   However until/unless 
you take the time to use it your opinion is worthless.  By using it, I mean 
spend at least a week where Gnome your only desktop, looking for the Gnome 
way of doing things (as opposed to "KDE does it this way, Gnome that, 
therefore Gnome sucks).   Even paid magazine reviewers rarely do this.   What 
both Gnome and KDE need desperately is an objective comparison that doesn't 
start with someone who is already firmly in one camp or the other.   I don't 
know where you would find such a person.

> 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.

No, we are examining look only.   Feel requires spending some time to use it, 
so you know how it feels.

> 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
<snip>
> 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.

I happen to like those lines.   They show my eye where long divisions of 
functionality takes place.   Kicker (in 3.5) got rid of some lines, and the 
result is I now have a bunch of triangles sitting at the bottom of the screen 
that have no obvious meaning.  (As a veteran KDE user I know that clicking on 
it would show me a menu of all 5 Konqueror windows I now have open, but 
nothing visually connects that triangle to the label Konqueror which is 
several CM away on my screen.  (Mouse over will connect them, so this isn't 
completely unusable)

> - 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.

Useability.    Everytime you add or remove a menu, you are making a 
compromise.  Too many menus are hard to use, but too few make things look 
nice on the surface, but harder to use.   Particularly when your target user 
is experienced with general GUI manipulation (which we can take for granted 
now, anyone who can't use a mouse these days is unlikely to get access to a 
computer anyway), it is often better to make something look cluttered, but 
well organized.   It takes a little longer to read all 9 of KDE menus, but 
once you know the menus, you never read them, so KDE is easier to use.