Screen capture of your desktop!

[mburt]

Here's mine (windows )
http://mburt.mb.funpic.org/images/screen.jpg

[Twey]

You people don't do nearly enough customisation. What are you, people with lives or something?

[mburt]

How do you customize with Windows?

[Twey]

See boxxertrumps' Blackbox setup

[BLiZZaRD]

Shouldn't it be:

<throat:clear>you nutter</throat>

So, honestly, Gnome, KDE.. is there really anything one can do that the other can't? I haven't found anything yet. But then again most of my programing is spent on WinXP cause of Flash...

[Twey]

Shouldn't it be:

<throat:clear>you nutter</throat>

No, throat is the namespace and clear the actual tagname. Note that the syntax is XML, not HTML.

So, honestly, Gnome, KDE.. is there really anything one can do that the other can't?

Rather a lot. For a start, GNOME is considerably less customisable than KDE. I believe this was a conscious attempt to simplify the desktop environment by the GNOME developers, but I don't like it anyway. GNOME also just includes a lot less features (composite support, window-specific settings, Mac-like application menu...). Another thing I hate is the file dialogue: there's no direct input box, so in order to find, for example, a helper application for Firefox, one has to navigate to /usr/bin then wait whilst it scans all the files there, freezing up the application completely, then scroll all the way down the list (2025 files on my machine) to find the correct one. Also, while it has less features and certainly has better performance than KDE, the performance increase isn't great enough to warrant calling it a light-weight desktop like Fluxbox or even XFCE, making it really rather useless.

[mburt]

Yes, GNOME is much less accessible for an user which is unfamiliar with it. Which is the reason most people get Windows, or a Mac.

[BLiZZaRD]

Less customizable? Really? I am really not a "defender" of Gnome over KDE, just curious. I really don't get into the whole customizing thing to the extremes that I have heard of, but I have changed a lot on the Gnome desktop.

There hasn't been anything I tried to change that I couldn't, and the "Linux for non-geeks" book I got went through 3 whole chapters of customizing the Gnome environment, and there was nary a thing left untouched. What can you customize on KDE that you can't on Gnome?

As for the features, are you positive that is not your distro? I am not arguing, cause I really don't know, but during my set up of Fedora I got to choose what got installed and what didn't, for both KDE and Gnome, and Gnome had a lot more options. Now, granted the KDE defaulted to having more options installed than Gnome, but I checked all the boxes for both.

Besides, it was my understanding that I could use any KDE application within Gnome, and vise versa. Also, for the direct file input box, maybe I miss understood you, but I did just that the other day to find my works network folder on the LAN.

Went to "Places" Find Folder and typed in the name of the network folder and the folder within the network folder (in this case /TGAADMIN/TGABlack/Agent Folders/ ) and it came up as found, and I made a short cut to it in the "Places" menu.

[Twey]

Yes, GNOME is much less accessible for an user which is unfamiliar with it.

I disagree: the whole point behind making GNOME "simpler" was to make it easier for new users.

we're focused on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don't talk about 'dumb users'), but just don't care about computing technology.

There hasn't been anything I tried to change that I couldn't, and the "Linux for non-geeks" book I got went through 3 whole chapters of customizing the Gnome environment, and there was nary a thing left untouched. What can you customize on KDE that you can't on Gnome?

I can't give a full list since I don't have GNOME installed on here at the moment, but I recall there being quite a lot. This was a couple of months ago, though; I suppose it might have changed, but as far as I know GNOME still has no built-in composite support. That's what I remember most since it's the reason I switched back to KDE

As for the features, are you positive that is not your distro? I am not arguing, cause I really don't know, but during my set up of Fedora I got to choose what got installed and what didn't, for both KDE and Gnome, and Gnome had a lot more options. Now, granted the KDE defaulted to having more options installed than Gnome, but I checked all the boxes for both.

I was talking about the actual environments themselves, not applications designed for them.

Besides, it was my understanding that I could use any KDE application within Gnome, and vise versa. Also, for the direct file input box, maybe I miss understood you, but I did just that the other day to find my works network folder on the LAN.

Went to "Places" Find Folder and typed in the name of the network folder and the folder within the network folder (in this case /TGAADMIN/TGABlack/Agent Folders/ ) and it came up as found, and I made a short cut to it in the "Places" menu.

That's the file manager, Nautilus, not the file selection dialogue. Go to Firefox and click File->Open Location... to see what I mean. Then try to navigate to a file in /usr/bin.

/EDIT: On my distribution, this has actually been fixed now (there's a Location textbox), but I'm running unstable, so you may still be able to see it. The auto-complete on the textbox is still rather slow (typing in /usr/bin causes Firefox to freeze for about half a minute on mine) but it's nothing like the old one, which took in excess of ten minutes at one point, although I did have other applications running at the same time.

[BLiZZaRD]

Oh, I gotcha. Those are all things I don't use, so I didn't know about them