Five Points for KDE

I think that Tim Butler’s article, “Why GNOME’s Got it Right,” raises some serious points worthy of consideration by every KDE user and advocate. However, I would like to add the following points that should also be considered.

1. KDE needs to address the reorganization of the Control Center as soon as possible and not wait until KDE 4 for it. And such reorganization needs to be done in the context of an equilibrium between usability and flexibility.

2. It should be noted that KDE has made serious progress in the last months, and proof of it is KDE 3.2 and the upcoming 3.3, which offer significant speed improvements and space reduction.

3. KDE is an excellent desktop platform but needs too much tweaking and configuring from a default state to bring it to the desired level of usability. The First Time Wizard helps a lot, but it is not enough.

4. GNOME, while it is an excellent desktop and worthy of extensive use and deployment, has gone too far in restricting the user at some points. The most ironic example would be the MetaCity window manager, which does not allow for dragging the window over the upper limit of the screen. Now, we have equipment (especially laptops) which are able to run GNOME adequately, but are confined to 800x600, or even 640x480, resolution. Some GNOME/GTK apps have made their dialog boxes too big to fit in those screens, and therefore they are unusable under GNOME (e.g., bluefish, gaim). Using these apps under KDE or another window manager usually solves the problem.

5. I continue thinking that while GNOME is a great desktop, KDE is the platform best suited for home, business, and enterprise deployment, when properly configured. As my Stealth Desktop series (part 1, part 2) is showing, KDE provides ease of use and simplicity to a supposedly complex UNIX desktop, and this is not by chance.

I confess that I have a bias, since I am part of the KDE-ES Spanish translation team; but this bias is for a reason. As long as I think it fit, I will continue to advocate the deployment and adoption of KDE on top of a Free Software operating system as the desktop platform of choice.

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Eduardo Sánchez is a Contributing Editor of Open for Business. He is married to Gloria, and lives with his wife in Asunción, Paraguay (South America), where he works as pastoral assistant of Villa Morra Baptist Church. You can reach him at esanchez@ofb.biz.