KDE Software Compilation 4.4 Beta 2 Released

[BlackStar]

That's what I thought as well and used Gnome straight from 1999, but as curious by nature I decided to give KDE a try. The result? KDE is ahead in functionality and beauty from Gnome/OSX and windows7 and even much faster that the rest. But still Gnome is my first love, so I'll wait till 3.0 is out and then I'll give it a try. My major concern though, as a performance junkie, is the mono slowdown. I can not stand slowdowns at all.

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder... I make a point of trying different DEs and I've used KDE 3.5, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 at some length. While each had some very nice parts I found the whole experience was rather inconsistent (for example, I felt the plasmoids looked awesome, but dolphin didn't live up to their standard).

I haven't had any significant performance issues on either DE myself. KDE seems to take a little more time to load and shutdown but feels slightly faster when browsing files. However, I couldn't detect any appreciable speed difference on the applications I use regularly (mainly Opera, Firefox, OpenOffice and a couple of IDEs).

No significant difference in core functionality, either. I was able to listen to music, browse the web, write code, burn cds and generally do what I wanted to do without issue. Both DEs pretty much offer the same set of operations with slightly different looks and details - there's no "paradigm shift" to speak of, when moving from KDE to Gnome or vice versa. (Unlike, for example, when moving from KDE to Mac OS X, which entails a shift from a window-centric environment to a document-centric environment).

In any case, I consider both KDE 4.3 and Gnome 2.28 as decent choices for a DE. As far as I'm concerned, there's no clear winner, there's no terribly compelling reason to switch from one to the other - at least not right now (you can never know what the future holds).

[deanjo]

(Unlike, for example, when moving from KDE to Mac OS X, which entails a shift from a window-centric environment to a document-centric environment).

Document-centric environment? OS X? Not quite how you see that.

[BlackStar]

I think a word is missing...

Document-centric environment? OS X? Not quite how you see that.

I will that once I get some sleep.

[kraftman]

No significant difference in core functionality, either. I was able to listen to music, browse the web, write code, burn cds and generally do what I wanted to do without issue. Both DEs pretty much offer the same set of operations with slightly different looks and details - there's no "paradigm shift" to speak of, when moving from KDE to Gnome or vice versa.

Following to what you wrote there are no significant differences in any DE when comes to core functionality. However, there are "not core" (or maybe even core sometimes) differences that matters. There are huge differences between KDE and Gnome applications.

[Apopas]

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

I agree. I should have said polished. KDE is in general more polished with it's default effects, plasmoids nd preview abilities.

I make a point of trying different DEs and I've used KDE 3.5, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 at some length. While each had some very nice parts I found the whole experience was rather inconsistent (for example, I felt the plasmoids looked awesome, but dolphin didn't live up to their standard).

Come on. Dolphin rocks and it's even faster than Nautilus. It opens folders with thousands of files faster and preview files faster as well. The only problem is that it doesn't show details of the media files. I found a plugin for that but it isn't as good as Nautilus' default one.

I haven't had any significant performance issues on either DE myself. KDE seems to take a little more time to load and shutdown but feels slightly faster when browsing files. However, I couldn't detect any appreciable speed difference on the applications I use regularly (mainly Opera, Firefox, OpenOffice and a couple of IDEs).

For me KDE loads faster than Gnome (I had some delay issues but I removed a specific plasmoid and the problem fixed), but the logout is irritating since it needs almost 20 secs to logout But I suppose this is not the rule. Something is wrong with my configuration.
Now about performance. KDE tends to use more RAM than Gnome but it's applications run soother and faster than Gnome. Even Firefox and OpenOffice runs instantly, thing that wasn't the rule with Gnome and I can't figure out why
Ofcourse the matter of RAM happens because applications like Gimp and Audacious I use a lot, run a good amount of GTK libs and such. I'm sure if they had a native port of KDE, then it would use the same amount of RAM as Gnome or even less.

In any case, I consider both KDE 4.3 and Gnome 2.28 as decent choices for a DE. As far as I'm concerned, there's no clear winner, there's no terribly compelling reason to switch from one to the other - at least not right now (you can never know what the future holds).

Gnome, OSX and windows7 are all decent options for DE. KDE is ahead of all these because it offers great configuration (as gnome does too) options and thus you can make it as beautiful as you want, unlike windows7 and osx, but it's even faster as I mentioned and more innovative than Gnome.

[kraftman]

@Apopas

For me KDE loads faster than Gnome (I had some delay issues but I removed a specific plasmoid and the problem fixed), but the logout is irritating since it needs almost 20 secs to logout But I suppose this is not the rule. Something is wrong with my configuration.

It takes about one second to logout here It can be something with configuration or you triggered some bug like the one with plasmoid which you mentioned.

[aavci]

@Apopas

Your problem may be about the log out sound. KDE waits for the sound to finish to logout. If you turn it off you can log off much more quickly.

[Apopas]

I have removed sounds totally
The matter is that it happens to all four users of my PC. Maybe something I enabled during compilation, but what?

[BlackStar]

Come on. Dolphin rocks and it's even faster than Nautilus. It opens folders with thousands of files faster and preview files faster as well. The only problem is that it doesn't show details of the media files. I found a plugin for that but it isn't as good as Nautilus' default one.

I specifically said I felt the looks didn't live up to the rest of the desktop (the plasmoids, actually). I acknowledged that it seems to have the advantage in browsing speed (Nautilus tends to have some strange delays when copying/deleting files that are not present in Dolphin).

Gnome, OSX and windows7 are all decent options for DE. KDE is ahead of all these because it offers great configuration (as gnome does too) options and thus you can make it as beautiful as you want, unlike windows7 and osx, but it's even faster as I mentioned and more innovative than Gnome.

Having used all four, I have to agree that both KDE and Gnome are ahead of the competition as far as configuration is concerned. However, I don't think their default configurations can match Win7 in usability - the new taskbar really makes things easier when multitasking. Fortunately the free spirit doesn't disappoint here: we have no less than three projects that are posed to surpass the Win7 taskbar in usability (docky2, AWN 0.4 and cairo-dock) and the default KDE taskbar is no slacker either (although I do find its usability inferior in a couple of points).

As far as window management is concerned, both KDE and Gnome (with Compiz) outperform either windows or osx (with osx coming last here due to the lack of maximization and unwieldy resize behavior).

Finally, all DEs are roughly equal as far as file browsing is concerned. Their default configurations are pretty similar and there's only so much you can do when browsing files anyway.

I haven't done any real speed testing (controlled conditions on the same hardware for all DEs), so I can't really comment on that. However, I haven't really had any problems with any of the four. They all perform roughly the same and they all fail at roughly the same parts (browsing shared folders for example is slow on all 4 DEs).

[dashcloud]

Like you would ever even consider dumping Gnome for the KDE SC Even if it had full mono, exchange and MS Office support

Funny you should mention Exchange & MS Office- check out the OpenChange project, and the KOffice-dev list- Nokia's been contributing patches for better 03 and some 07 Office support (If you're wondering why, it's because KOffice is being used on their Maemo devices, specifically the N900.)

Also, not a Mono program, but if you like to program in Mono, there's bindings (Qyoto) to C#.