21. KDE vs. GNOME

Go to any Linux forum or mailing list and you will be able to start a "KDE vs. GNOME" flamewar without the slightest effort.

When KDE was founded in 1996, the cross-platform Qt toolkit was chosen for its richness of features. Qt is still believed today to be the best toolkit available, although it's worth mentioning that GIMP, the open-source rival of Adobe Photoshop, is using the GTK+ toolkit, which constitutes the foundation for "the other major desktop environment", GNOME.

Due to some concerns expressed by the Free Software Foundation with regards to the then non-free Qt license, GNOME was launched in 1997 by the GNU project, to provide with a really free desktop environment. In the meantime, Qt has changed its licensing model, and starting with 4.0, a GPL edition is available for Windows too, yet "a friendly competition" is still opposing KDE and GNOME.

GNOME was born for "uncompromising freedom" for the code, as opposed to the queer initial Qt license. The funny contradiction is that this does not apply to the trademarks, but only to the code. The current GNOME Foundation Trademark Usage Guidelines is a long and complex legal babble, which includes the obnoxious: «Do not use GNOME logos unless you have explicit written permission to do so.» In contrast, the KDE Logo Trademark Licence is a short notice that merely states: «The KDE logo can be used freely as long as it is not used to refer to products other than KDE itself. There is no formal procedure to use it.» What better example could have been chosen to illustrate the differences between the American and the European mentalities?

Miguel de Icaza, the initial GNOME project leader and the creator of the popular Midnight Commander clone of Norton Commander, is now more interested in the development of Mono, which explains in part the contamination of GNOME with Mono.

While KDE has decided to only provide the stable 3.5 branch (currently, 3.56) with minor bug-fixes and improvements, as the upcoming KDE4 will be a major breakthrough, GNOME makes slow but steady advancements. Nobody knows what an illusory GNOME 3.0 might bring (there are no plans for 3.0), but the traditionally under-featured GNOME seems to have reversed the trend: at least for the time being, it shows visible changes from a stable version to the next one.

Red Hat was originally "GNOME and proud to be so", whereas the European distros focused on KDE. It has been said that GNOME is business-oriented, and KDE is aimed at cutting-edge technology, but things have gradually changed in the last 2-3 years.

As a consequence, two traditionally KDE-centric Linux distributions that used to consider GNOME as "just an attachment" have decided to grant it a higher role, almost unbalancing themselves.

SUSE was the first to change its focus to GNOME, after having been acquired by Novell (GNOME is more popular in the United States, whereas KDE is the most popular in Europe). At some point, panicked users thought that Novell decided to support only GNOME as its official desktop. It was later clarified that both desktops are important to Novell, but in the meantime Hubert Mantel, co-founder of SuSE, had already left the company. He returned to Novell after the controversial Novell-Microsoft deal.

As a buyer of Ximian, the added know-how allowed Novell to have an active role in the development of GNOME too. Evolution, now the default personal information manager and workgroup information management tool in GNOME, is an important asset of Novell too.

Mandriva was also tempted by GNOME, and they have managed to provide a well-polished GNOME desktop, at pair with the KDE one.

The less positive part of the never ending competition between KDE and GNOME is that it is not like the competition between other window managers or desktop environments (XFCE includes enough tools to be considered a desktop environment, and its latest file manager Thunar is excellent; yet, it is unable to draw transparent icon labels on the desktop, which is surprisingly anachronistic nowadays). You will never see passionate quarrels on whether Fluxbox or WindowMaker "rulz", but almost every KDE-GNOME dispute gets flaming and political.

It's even easier now that GNOME has Mono.

As I have personally switched from FVWM and WindowMaker to GNOME, then to KDE two years later, I can tell it's not that easy to make the switch.

Basic differences include the reversed order of the OK and Cancel buttons, or the immediate effectiveness of the changes in GNOME, versus the need to Apply them in KDE, all idiosyncrasies inherited from the widgets or from the philosophy of the respective desktop. As for the look and feel...

The default graphical theme in KDE looks more frivolous than in GNOME, and this is one of the reasons I rejected it for a long time. On the other hand, GNOME only started to matter since version 2.0, because the previous GTK+ 1.2 had some of the ugliest possible widgets.

An annoying issue that appears when in a desktop environment you're running an application that uses the widget library of the other desktop is the lack of consistence: if you run KDE and use Evolution, it can look very plain, and won't theme with the rest of the OS. Telling KDE to theme GTK+ applications to mimic the style used in KDE is however giving better results than configuring Qt to have an acceptable look under GNOME.

Seven years ago, Richard Stallman declared on Qt, the GPL, KDE, and GNOME: «GNOME and KDE will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged in some way.» FreeDesktop.org was then formed to encourage the cooperation among open source desktops for the X Window System. So far, feasible projects such as XDG menu or D-BUS were practically adopted by the mainstream, whereas the illusory Portland initiative has failed to set "common interfaces for GNOME and KDE" other than menus, MIME types and other small items. Important, but unimpressive from a distance.

Another salutary initiative, the Tango Desktop Project, was more successful in unifying the look of the individual icon sets as a first step to create a common look and feel.

A unified desktop might be a factor of influence for a better mass adoption of Linux, and it would also cut the rivalry that exists between the fans of each of the two desktops. Once KDE 4.0 is released, I am afraid the "KDE vs. GNOME" flamewars will get revived nevertheless.