Five Points for KDE

By Eduardo Sánchez | Jul 31, 2004 at 13:39:10

I think that Tim Butler's article, "Why GNOME's Got it Right," raises some serious points worthy of
consideration by every KDE user and advocate. However, I would like to
add the following points that should also be considered.

1. KDE needs to address the reorganization of the Control Center as soon
as possible and not wait until KDE 4 for it. And such reorganization
needs to be done in the context of an equilibrium between usability and
flexibility.

2. It should be noted that KDE has made serious progress in the last months, and proof of it is
KDE 3.2 and the upcoming 3.3, which offer significant speed
improvements and space reduction.

3. KDE is an excellent desktop platform but needs too much tweaking and
configuring from a default state to bring it to the desired level of
usability. The First Time Wizard helps a lot, but it is not enough.

4. GNOME, while it is an excellent desktop and worthy of extensive use
and deployment, has gone too far in restricting the user at some
points. The most ironic example would be the MetaCity window manager,
which does not allow for dragging the window over the upper limit of
the screen. Now, we have equipment (especially laptops) which are able
to run GNOME adequately, but are confined to 800×600, or even
640×480, resolution. Some GNOME/GTK apps have made their dialog boxes too
big to fit in those screens, and therefore they are unusable
under GNOME (e.g., bluefish, gaim). Using these apps under KDE or
another window manager usually solves the problem.

5. I continue thinking that while GNOME is a great desktop, KDE is the
platform best suited for home, business, and enterprise deployment,
when properly configured. As my Stealth Desktop series (part 1, part 2) is showing, KDE
provides ease of use and simplicity to a supposedly complex UNIX
desktop, and this is not by chance.

I confess that I have a bias, since I am part of the KDE-ES Spanish
translation team; but this bias is for a reason. As long as I think it
fit, I will continue to advocate the deployment and adoption of KDE on
top of a Free Software operating system as the desktop platform of
choice.