Torvalds is right. Avoid GNOME use KDE!

As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.

First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don't serve any corporate needs.

From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn't possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.

As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it's the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.

When looking at this legendary example picture:

You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view - they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what's wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your "Menus & Toolbars" capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.

It's a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don't support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.

Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need one I know this too) share the same Toolbar object, if you change global settings then it automatically affect all applications (icons only, text under icons, drag handles etc.) the Toolbar object comes with an toolbar editor (to change icons, text under icons, draghandle, icon size etc.). This speaks about KDE's great architecture which is pretty well designed.

Again this is just a small example to not make the understanding overwhelming complex. There are many other issues (architectual nature) inside GNOME and it goes on in many areas such as gnome-vfs (which is quite broken, there is no progress information when copying files from FTP (deep directory structures with many files), aborting is nearly impossible and so on (not to speak about many other modules, but FTP is the one I know best) like copying 0 byte files over and so on.

Basic stuff still in stable GNOME that don't work reliable enough to get serious work done. People always come up with the same BS that GNOME is the light desktop, that it's so great, clean and so on, that it's the desktop to get work done. Evince crashing when selecting text, crashing on exit, gnome-print saving documents as *.ps files show other font or save corrupt data and and and.

But this is not the case to say the truth. As a former student of computer and economics science as well as I am now an IT-Project leader I depended on doing stuff for University such as drawing diagrams or UML stuff. I depended (since I was a hardcore GNOMER) on tools like DIA to try getting the work done. But DIA was a poor applications that gave bad results, felt really bad, saved corrupt data to disk (with lost hours of work). My university professor one day looked at me, and asked me whether I painted the use case diagram with a paint program. I told him that I was using DIA and I saw a smile on his face which he left uncommented afterwards.

Even printing doesn't work reliable in DIA, nor does it work reliable enough in other applications. I had to search for alternatives and landed on KDE using Kivio and Umbrello. These apps surely aren't the best apps existing, but they gave me more the feeling to get my work done. They worked, felt ok and the printout results was great. Not to mention that my learning curve was minimal since the apps reminded me quite a lot on commercial counterparts found on Microsoft Windows.

Like printing GIF images as black image (totally black paper printout), like not supporting printing more pages on one physical sheet (evince for example) and these things exists in gnome-print/ui and are an elementary thing of the stable gnome releases recently. I wanted to print a document with 120 pages in evince on 4 pages per 1 physical sheet, which should end up in 30 pages of paper. but after I came back from dinner I saw that evince printed it on 120 pages rather than 30 as I was assuming. These things can not be.

Same applies for Evolution which recently (before the 2.4.0 announce) started to trash all my sync files mf my local mailbox. It's quite frustrating and irritating to get dialogs all the time telling one that something is broken. same applies for the "get emails as soon as you start evolution" bug, specially if you use freemailers with timeout you keep stuck in getting dialogs all the time you start evolution telling one that it can not pop emails due to timeout of the mail isp.

Such things can not be in corporate desktops. If you really consider people and companies who spent a lot of money into their busiens to use GNOME then please make sure these issues don't exist anymore.

Continuing with my work. As I said I am an IT-Project leader now and need to deal with projects these days. Again using Planner as the only existing GNOME Project management software I ended up in frustrations since Planner is more like a toy than a mature application. Again I had to switch over to KDE to use Task Juggler for this kind of activity, simply for the fact that Task Juggler came quite close to MS Project, offered a lot of features and is free to use.

Same applies in many other areas comparing GNOME with KDE (Rhythmbox vs. amaroK) and so on. We see how quickly KDE applications progress and become mature. Now with better C++ support and more developers and users KDE becomes better and better. The applications are miles ahead of what GNOME has to offer and basic functions like sound, printing, good looks, consistency, integration and interoperability simply works. Sure KDE is far from perfect but chosing between these two desktops KDE simply wins in all areas.

And that's an important factor. Of course GNOME has the same choice to lead the desktops but sadly it hasn't and I am not willing to wait years over years only to see GNOME making less steps forward.

KDE is also not resource hungry or bloated as many people trying hard to make you believe. Who judges about resource hungry, who juges about bloat or too many objects on a toolbar ? What is the ones disadvantage is the others pet feature. Some people say that KDE is overengineered but I say that GNOME peoples lost focus. I recall when SUN started doing the usability studies some years ago. It didn't took long and the majority of people magically became all usability experts over night. And good applications became got turned nearly into a productivity barrier (if you ever happen to be productive with GNOME at all) I always find myself fiddlign around in things that simply don't work. And I keep spending more hours in fixing the issues rather than start using the Desktop to get anything done. Always when you quickly need something you end up being lost on GNOME and its tools.

Another big issues is trying to contribute to GNOME.

Look, when I started to help out GNOME around 1999 or so I defiantely didn't came and called the people "jerks". This has been grown out over the long time of six years. I have never been treated like a piece of s**t as I was when trying to help GNOME to help shape GNOME, to be part of it. But I had to deal with ignorants, hardheaded people, egoists and a lot of people who are incapable to work together with others.

Even if you as developer want to contribute to GNOME you are under permanent attack, you receive nothing else than huge diffamation, attacks, namecalling, slandering and so on. This drives people away from contributing to GNOME.

Most developers around GNOME are some sort of having found themselves in "groups" they usually block every contribution from outside and usually declare valid and good stuff as stupid, silly or as troll attempt. This is quite frustrating for people who want to contribute. The attempt to contribute something towards GNOME is a very stone way and usually leads to frustrations at the end.

The best thing for contributors is to do the dirt work. The leftovers which the GNOME developers don't want to work on. Like writing documentations, doing the translations and so on. But as soon as it goes to normal bugfixes for bugs that are known for years these bugreports stay in bgo without attention. If you happen to have some time please head over to bgo and have a look on your own and you see how many bugs have been left there without attention. No comments, not even a feedback why the bug has been rejected or what was wrong with it.

Totally impossible is it as soon as you want to contribute some sort of features (because you reject working on the dirty leftovers or the simple patches that no one gives a f--k for). Working on features is usually the fun part of contributing. You are then directed to put your patches on bgo with comments like "we will have a look at that later" and then it stays there without any feedback for years. They are not interested to get new people helping that project.

Now I hope you may imagine why I don't have very good words left for GNOME. Sure not everyone is guilty not everyone is an ass or behaves like that, but you need to take my apology that I stopped separating the good ones from the bad ones. I am seriously tired doing this.

Also really frustrating is the heavy abuse inside the GNOME community, those whom we as members have elected behave like patrons on their positions. A lot of my friends whom initially tried contributing to GNOME has been scared away due to bad practices and always repeated attacks (its like a dejavu now). Most normal people never heard about these kinds of practices or can't imagine that this can really be happening - but sadly from my perspective this is the case.

Normal ordinary people who want to contribute or come up with an idea are treatened with disrespect and kicked with the bare foots. One day a friend of mine also a valuable member of the GNOME community came up with an idea (together with his girlfriend) to shave "GNOME GIRLS" he brought up that idea on the mailinglists (iirc) but everyone told him to go away, and that his ideas aren't great. But then some months later some girls from Red Hat have shown up with a brilliant idea (guess what, yes) to create "GNOME GIRLS" and voila they have been getting mailinglist acces, cvs access, all permissions granted everywhere and everyone called it a great ide. Why ? We talked about that for quite a while and concluded that this is due to the Red Hat position they keep wearing. Same applies with other companies that have been founded around GNOME, they immediately been granted warm seats in the foundation, in the board, while others (no company related ones) have been left out and ignored for years. How comes and how can GNOME still be called a community project and why do people still defend their practices ? GNOME totally lost it's roots and focus for users and users needs.

Well trying to come to an end here. What I want to say is that there are a lot of issues inside GNOME, it starts from many small and bigger bits of GNOME as desktop itself. From broken architecture, as well as not getting people on one table to have the work together (HIG is an example here) or to have simply basic stuff working good enough to get at least the basic things done. Over to the problem with the acceptance of people inside the community as well as the abuse everywhere.

That's why I recommend everyone these days to go with KDE. Their entire community is by far more friendly, the people are great, the developers are totally differently compared to the ones working on GNOME (its like day and night). Bugs are fixed immediately, patches are accepted. The framework (once you deal with it a bit more) is so great, things simply work. Sure sometimes problems occour on KDE as well, nothing is perfect, but the amount of problems is by far minimal if we consider how big that project is.

KDE from rough guess is 3 times bigger than GNOME (also a lot of translations stuff, source code). It's easier to build, it's all based on C++, no need to deal with different languages or getting upset or split an entire community because someone is using C, other C++, Python, Perl, Mono, Java (this will cause a lot of problems in GNOME camp too once the transtion to GNOME III starts. Already now a lot of people aren't really happy about all this). KDE works, offers great tools, looks mature.

KDE isn't much bigger than GNOME actually, on my system a normal KDE installation consisting of these tools:

qt-copy arts kdelibs kdebase kdeutils kdenetwork kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdegames kdepim koffice kdesdk kdevelop kdewebdev kdeedu kdetoys kdeartwork

Requires around 650 mb including headers and stripped binaries. The same amount I get with GNOME installed + Firefox + Evolution + headers etc. But I get much more tools for KDE. Sure I don't need all of them, but maybe I will need one of them one day and I would be happy if it's there.

Also whenever I hear GNOME devs talking about integration (like the evolution-data-server integration in the calendar/clock applet) I need to start laughing. It's no real integration, just some "hack" which was rewarded with money. Real integration is shown on KDE for example. Share of addressbook data across all applications (and it works today already). Oh and there is so much more.

Well I gave you an idea Novell. I really wonder who set that itch in your head to make GNOME the default. Was it a politics decision or a rational technology one ?

I am quite unhappy that all this politics stuff is being done on the heads of users, customers and people. Linux is a great System, KDE is a great environment many times better than GNOME and the momentum damage you caused with the recent announcements will stay in peoples head for a long long time. I feel sorry for your decision on making GNOME default regardless if you steer back now. Please consider again and listen to your customers. These are who feed your children, clothe your family and make you pay your rent and car.

I have no issues with GNOME, I do like GNOME and it deserves its place. But what I don't like is the bad practices around GNOME, e.g. the bad marketing, lying to their customers and then the agressive marketing that GNOME is so much ready for the corporate desktop. I really hate this. I hate being lied as customer and I hate it as developer who spent years of his time in GNOME and being not asked whether I like that GNOME is being sold that way.

Corporate have needs, they rely on working things, they spent a lot of money, they want the things to simply work and not toy around in things first.

To say the truth, all this talk about evil Microsoft (yeah there are people who try making a competition out of it) is pure BS in my opinion. Windows isn't a bad Operating System (regardless of the practices of Microsoft). It offers a lot of tools and its still being used everywhere and it still leads the desktop. I really dislike seeing GNOME as the default desktop in the Linux world because I know that things will not change. If it hasn't been changed by now then it probably will never ever change at all. GNOME has a long way to go, a very long way, and that long way only to catch where KDE is today, not to speak about catching up with Windows or even MacOSX. So please don't decide about political stuff, decide of what works. KDE these days is used by 2/3 of all Open Source Desktop users and these values (as often seen everywhere in polls) are speaking for itself.