Which Has the Best Apps?: KDE vs. GNOME, Part 2

April 22, 2007
By

Bruce Byfield

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Otherwise, choosing which tool set to use for administration depends largely on what annoys you least. For some, scrolling through the KDE Control Center is nightmarish, while others dislike having to open each GNOME administrative tool separately from the menu.

Accessories and Utilities

Once you move away from the administrative tools, the desktop-specific software depends heavily on which distribution you install.

However, my impression is that GNOME tends to focus more on small utilities. Increasingly, these small utilities are presented as panel applets, but others such as the calculator, character map, and dictionary are included in the menu. GNOME also includes some tools whose usefulness seems questionable; I doubt, for instance, that anyone interested in viewing the system logs is going to use the GNOME System Log rather than a command line text editor.

In comparison, KDE's focus in accessory and utilities is in monitoring and information. Outstanding examples include the KInfoCenter, which summarizes hardware and system settings, and KDE System Guard, which monitors system performance. These tools are not by any means unique to KDE, but their organization of information makes them easy to scan.

Both KDE's Konsole and GNOME's GNOME Terminal are emulators that support multiple tabs and whose background and foreground colors and fonts can be heavily customized. Both, too, are convenient for copying and pasting from the command line to other programs on the desktop. However, Konsole offers more comprehensive menus, with items for printing the screen, opening Midnight Commander (a text-based file manager that resembles the old Norton Commander from DOS), moving back and forth in the command history, and for bookmarking directories.

A particularly useful feature of Konsole is the ability to monitor tabs for activity or silence, which can be useful when you are compiling or running lengthy commands such as a grep search on the entire system. Next to these conveniences, GNOME Terminal seems painfully basic -- or, to put a more positive spin on the difference, designed for users who are extremely comfortable with the command line.

The same is true for the default desktop text editors. Both Gedit and Kate can handle a variety of different types of text files, such as HTML, XML, or scripts in different standard programming languages, highlight syntax in different colors and check spelling. Yet, beyond the basics, KDE's Kate offers a wealth of extras.

They include export to a mail program and tools for changing the case or indentation of selected text. Moreover, at a button click, Kate opens a pane that can list open documents, present a tree of the filesystem, a find utility with a full range of regular expressions, or a terminal. Admittedly, some distributions install a stripped down version of Gedit that limits its functionality, but, even at its best, GNOME's text editor is limited compared to KDE's Kate.