[Panel-devel] Coherency issue

Dan Doel dan.doel at gmail.com
Tue Jun 20 04:35:36 CEST 2006


On 6/19/06, Zbigniew Braniecki <zbigniew.braniecki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, I never tried plain Gnome. I always tested modified version (first by
> RedHat, now by Ubuntu), but the Ubuntu one feels really awesome. I have much
> better experience with it, than I have with Kubuntu. (and I use Gentoo by
> default ;)). I don't know if it's thanks to Ubuntu guys, or Gnome did
> improve. It works, you see a desktop, not a set of apps.
> And last Monday there was a public meeting with Mark Shuttleworth and there
> was a question about Kubuntu. He said that he don't want to control it, he
> gives Kubuntu authors a lot of free space to do what they want to do, and he
> just hope that with time they'll achieve the same level of user experience
> Ubuntu gives.
>
> We can argue, we can say "he's wrong", but I simply share his (and Thom)
> point of view. KDE works like a set of bundled apps.

I must admit, I can't see what you're talking about here.

I installed Ubuntu fresh on this machine yesterday. I did so because I
really wanted to use it. I see gnome screenshots, and there is
something 'clean' about them that KDE doesn't quite have. Put that
together with Xgl and the new compiz stuff (which integrates with
gnome much better than with KDE), and the result is that gnome seems
to have become significantly more aesthetically appealing than KDE for
the time being (much as it pains me to say it).

However, this afternoon, I decided to reinstall Kubuntu, because I
missed the ways that KDE apps are integrated. Here are some of my
examples:

Kopete hooks into my address book. I have information about all my
friends in my address book (including pictures), and kopete pulls that
out and integrates it into the display of my buddy list. I can tell
who's on by looking at their faces. In Ubuntu, I got gaim and
evolution, which don't appear to have any connection to one another.
Gaim doesn't even appear to let you load custom icons for contacts
(maybe I didn't search hard enough?), so I was stuck in the position
of everyone looking identical to me. Gaim was a step down from kopete
for me, and the fact that I only have to specify the relevant
information once in KDE (rather than in both gaim and evolution, if
they even provide the same facilities) is a bonus.

I'm not a fan of Firefox's bookmark interface to RSS feeds. So I
scouted around and found myself a gnome RSS reader. However, since
Firefox handles RSS availability on its own, I had to manually put the
feeds into the external client. Meanwhile, when konqueror detects and
RSS feed for a website, it presents me with an icon to click to
automatically add the feed to akregator. Does epiphany integrate
better with blam or one of the other gnome RSS readers?

So, oddly enough, I was led back to KDE because while gnome seems to
have more visual consistency/appeal, KDE applications actually
cooperate with one another more than the gnome applications I was
presented with, and frankly, applications that share work together
provides me with more benefits than applications that look similar to
one another.

> I'd describe it as, in MacOS, I have a part of Desktop Environment which
> shows me text when I need it and allows me to read it and write.
> In KDE, I have a great application for reading text. KDE will even set it as
> a default one maybe. But it's still an external app.
>
> I really don't know how to explain it better :)

I'm not sure what you want here. Konqueror can embed kwrite if you
want (although I'm not quite sure whether it allows editing or not in
that mode). Do you want full kate syntax hilighting in the middle of a
web text area?

Or is your point that you can make something besides kwrite the
default text editor if you want? I don't see how that's a bad thing,
though.

Anyhow, I don't really don't understand the "KDE feels like just a
bunch of bundled apps" complaint. Gnome feels much more like that when
it comes to actual functionality, at least to me. Of course, I've only
played around with gnome for a couple days at any given time, so
perhaps I was missing something.


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