Why I Switched from GNOME to KDE

May 14, 2009
By

Bruce Byfield

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Making the switch

Although I had used the KDE 4 series periodically, when I moved to it full time, I understood why some new users have described switching desktops as almost like changing operating systems. I had an entire series of habits to unlearn.

I no longer had a top-level system menu for configuration. If I wanted to add a widget to the panel, or reposition an icon, I had to remember to unlock the widgets first. At times, the feeling of newness, added to my constant use of applications with names like Kontact and Konsole, left me feeling that I was using a desktop that was imperfectly translated from German.

However, these changes were far less unsettling than the fact that, simultaneously with the switch, I decided to make greater user of virtual desktops. While the sense of novelty persisted for a couple of weeks, I was functional almost immediately. My largest problem was not KDE so much as my tendency to forget which desktop each commonly used app was on.

I soon figured out why the switch was so untraumatic. As a long-time free desktop user, I have been regularly exposed to endless varieties of basic applications: not just OpenOffice.org for office productivity, but also KOffice and the Abiword word process and the Gnumeric spreadsheet; not just Firefox for web browsing, but also Epiphany and Konqueror. Unlike a proprietary software user, I could decide to use these alternatives at a whim.

The side-effect of having these alternatives is that I have not just learned word processing in OpenOffice.org or web browsing in Firefox. Instead, I learned word processing or web browsing in general. Unknown to myself, I had accumulated a sense of what feature each category of application should have, and, because of the free desktop standards that prevail these days, an expectation of where I would find each feature as well. With this sense, I did not have to learn each program so much as search for the features I expected.

Moreover, because of the free desktop standards that prevail these days, in many cases, I found these features in the menu I expected, sometimes under a different name, but there all the same.

Under these circumstances, using -- for instance -- Kontact instead of Evolution was a minimal adjustment. Although I found that transferring my mail and addresses was an unnecessarily involved process, the actual features were much the same. Just like Evolution, Kontact had support for multiple accounts, message filters, and signatures. I found minor differences, such as the storage of addresses outside the mail browser, but nothing that puzzled me for long. Because I knew that the features I wanted were bound to exist, I only needed to explore until I found them.

I did encounter some real differences. In my experience, KDE applications are likely to offer configuration choices for intermediate and advanced users. For example, KMail offers configuration dialogs for POP filters and Sieve Scripts, neither of which Evolution offers. Many KDE apps, too, routinely give users more control over notifications than their GNOME counterparts.

In general, KDE seems more hands-on than GNOME, whose Human Interface Guidelines, while generally sound, seem more focused on making everything obvious for newbies than on offering advanced choices.

Next Page: The "big deal" about the GNOME to KDE switch