Mecworks

Linus is always so strait to the point and honest. I have always liked the way he puts things. Anyways, despite the fact that Novell is pushing hard for Gnome on NLD (which I think is a perfect fit for it’s target audience), I have always been a proponent of KDE. I started using and really liking the flexibility and power of KDE while working at Caldera on the server and desktop engineering teams several years ago. Interestingly enough, many of the German engineers at Caldera now work at SuSE. I had a lot of respect for their skills then as I do now.

Linus Torvalds once again, states his opinion in a way that cannot be misinterpreted:

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> 
> Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
> listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
> listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
> than useful to the user.

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of 
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will 
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long 
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE. 

        Linus

The original thread can be found here. ;)

Now - let me just say this right now: I think Gnome is great at what it does. There are some things that it does very well and better than KDE. Also, the target of NLD with Gnome is the corporate desktop, call centers, mom and dad, the average computer user, etc. People who like simple interfaces like that on the Mac will most likely love NLD/Gnome (and for the record, when installing NLD, you can very easily choose KDE as your desktop). While there are some who think this is not true, I don’t think NLD/Gnome is the programmer’s desktop nor do I think it the desktop of the Linux power-user. It’s not meant for the person who wants to see all the options that a PPD has in it. It is meant to make computing easy and care-free. It does that very well.

KDE is like the cockpit of a 747 simulator. Lots of things to switch and buttons to push. There are a lot of options and some can confuse you. Gnome is like an old Atari game console - a single joy-stick with one button. Not confusing and it does what it does very well. (OK, maybe there’s a bit of exaggeration on both sides here :)