Sunday, May 8, 2011

KDE or Gnome ? ?

The two most Popular desktop Environments in GNU/Linux OS are the KDE and the GNOME . Both are intuitive in there own ways . Recently I had the opportunity to attend KDE India Conference held at RVCE, Bangalore and GNOME Asia Summit held at Dayanand Sagar College, Bangalore . At, these conferences I had the privilege to meet the developers of both the desktop environments and exchange some ideas about the features of these desktop environments and their future.

KDE or GNOME ? You ask me Which is the Best ?
I say , Both are great to work and play around with. These two desktop environments have there own advantages as well as disadvantages .




KDE is a recursive acronym for KDE Desktop Environment .


Features Include :


  • KDE Comes with Dolphin as the default file manager which is integrated with nepomuk , a music player and lots of cool services.
  • KDE is written in C++ with Qt as the application development framework from Nokia . You ask me , I think Qt provides some of the best libraries for development of desktop applications.
  • KDE is loaded with hell lot of features which seems kind of messy. 
  • KDE Comes with Nepomuk  ( The Social Semantic desktop) and strigi (The file indexer ). These are the features which drives me towards KDE .These projects are just awesome.
  •  And here is my Favorite , Amarok Music Player , This is one of the most intuitive music players ever developed. It has got all the features you ever imagined.
  • KDE comes with Plasma Desktop which is clutterless with lot of features for Desktop configuration. It has something called activities which is one of my favorite feature where you can create activities which means different desktop configurations in each activity and can switch around those.
  • Comes with cooler transition graphics and hell lot of widgets for organizing your desktop.
  • Is the 2nd Largest Open source community. 



GNOME stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment 


Features Include :


  • GNOME is simple with little features and clutter less.
  • GNOME is developed  in C ( Objective C) with GTK (Gnome Tool kit) as the application development framework.
  • GNOME comes with Nautilus as the Default File manager which has won the best Desktop Application for the year 2008.
  • With GNOME 3.0 , The graphics and the transitions are a lot smoother and cool.
  • Themes are written in Javascript and CSS , so one can develop their own themes and deploy on their system.
  • Comes with Totem Media Player which is good and usable.
  • Has got the best Network Manager which is simple to use and configure.
  • Is user Friendly with completely customizable desktop environment.

So, Instead of choosing between KDE and GNOME, I prefer you try Both and enjoy the Desktop experiences of both the desktops which is Ultimate .

For any problems related to desktop environments join #kde for kde IRC and #gnome for GNOME IRC at  freenode . Here , developers are kind enough to answer to your queries.

Contribute to these projects and derive extreme happiness and pleasure.



For queries mail me at rajeevrvis@gmail.com

1 comment:

mosarrof said...

great post!. About GPL operating systems. Now i know something about KDE & GNOME.