On Wednesday 21 December 2005 14:13, jfweber@bellsouth.net wrote:
Perhaps we should phrase the question more like, Do you have any specific reasons for your preference/
I like both, and have flipped among them (and occasional brief forays into the non-integrated desktops) for years. However, I tend to land in KDE most often. This time (10.0 now with KDE 3.5 installed), I have not started GNOME since upgrading from SuSE 9.3. I considered it a few times, but saw all the posts about problems with GNOME. I guess I've been waiting to hear the "All Clear". Is there a YaST repository - similar to the one where I got KDE 3.5 - that has a nice, stable, complete GNOME (with all the usual toys), with any of the early problems all cleaned up? I did select to have "everything" installed when I installed SuSE 10.0, so I have whatever GNOME stuff came on the DVD, plus whatever updates YOU has been giving me, but I'm not sure whether the problems that people reported in October and November would be considered fixes (therefore included in YOU updates) or upgrades (therefore not handled by YOU). So I'm avoiding starting GNOME until I feel that I probably won't break anything.
After all if you are using a Suse distro, most (all?) the apps seem to work w/ both desktops.
They do, but at a cost. Much of the modularity of KDE is achieved by having the KDE apps [re]use functionality of the base KDE. So, if you are in GNOME and start a KDE app, it probably needs to start half of KDE in order to have all its necessary working components. Thus you have all of GNOME overhead and a big chunk of KDE overhead while trying to run one or two KDE apps under GNOME. I think it works the same in the other direction, but not all the GNOME stuff is as tightly integrated as KDE, so there's maybe slightly less overhead penalty from running a GNOME app under KDE. That's all hearsay, however. I've detected a noticeable slowing of the system when I'm in one and call an app from the other, and the above was the explanation that was given by somebody smarter than I, last year. Even if it was true then, a lot can change in a year. Non-KDE and non-GNOME-specific apps, of course, just work regardless of which desktop is running, with no particular overhead implications. Cheers, Kevin