I like GNOME

Story: Grumpy Gnome-Hater Almost Changes MindTotal Replies: 9
Author Content
Steven_Rosenber

Sep 11, 2008
1:33 PM EDT
GNOME just happens to work for me. When it comes to the marginal hardware I run, GNOME seems to be quite a bit quicker than KDE.

But overall, it's damn nice to have so many choices. I'm probably going to set up a Slackware box soon, and I'll give KDE another go-round.
caitlyn

Sep 11, 2008
2:57 PM EDT
Yep, GNOME is faster than KDE. Xfce, which I prefer, is faster than GNOME. LXDE is faster still but is a bit too feature poor for my liking.
herzeleid

Sep 11, 2008
3:20 PM EDT
Quoting:Yep, GNOME is faster than KDE. Xfce, which I prefer, is faster than GNOME. LXDE is faster still but is a bit too feature poor for my liking.
How do you measure "faster"? Start up time perhaps? For me there are other more important criteria, such as how snappy the desktop performs. For instance, grab a terminal window and drag it around the desktop: is is smooth, or jerky? Start up a 3D fps shooter - does it run smoothly, or is the "desktop environment" sucking away resources behind the scenes?

On both of these counts, kde has beaten gnome pretty badly in the past on every machine I had access to, though very recently gnome has moved into the same ballpark performance-wise. It will be interesting to see how this develops as kde 4 comes into mainstream use.

When it comes to desktop start up time, that's a real low priority for me. I only start up my work desktop a few times a year, e.g. for a kernel update or office power failure. Otherwise I just lock the screen when I'm away from my desk.
Steven_Rosenber

Sep 11, 2008
4:05 PM EDT
In my tests, Xubuntu with Xfce didn't give me much of a speed boost over Ubuntu with GNOME. The differences were more pronounced in Debian, where Xfce and Fluxbox were a good bit faster than GNOME.

Curiously, Fluxbox didn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce.

In Slackware, Xfce provided a huge speed advantage over KDE. I didn't have GNOME installed in Slackware, so I couldn't carry out the comparison that far.

All these tests were done with 256 MB of RAM, and a VIA 1 GHz CPU.

Basically, GNOME was close enough to Xfce on my hardware that it comes down to personal preference.



caitlyn

Sep 11, 2008
5:31 PM EDT
@herzeleid: My main criteria for judging speed is how applications perform under a DE. What you referred to: how snappy is the desktop, is precisely what I'm looking at. Ubuntu (GNOME) is faster for me than Kubuntu (KDE). I've had similar experience with Vector Linux as well.
rijelkentaurus

Sep 11, 2008
6:16 PM EDT
KDE on Mepis, Mandriva and PCLOS is fast as lightning, and I've had good luck using it on CentOS and Red Hat also. Not a GNOME fan at all, although I don't hate it. Not real fond of XFCE either, but that's just me.
herzeleid

Sep 11, 2008
6:52 PM EDT
Quoting: caitlyn: Ubuntu (GNOME) is faster for me than Kubuntu (KDE). I've had similar experience with Vector Linux as well.
Ah, kubuntu - not my favorite kde distro, although I like ubuntu in general. I've run kde mostly on suse the past few years, and it may just be that suse+kde is highly optimized compared to kde on other distros. Likewise, gnome on suse may have been less well tuned than on other distros - gnome on suse was always sluggish for me up until suse 10.2 or so.
tracyanne

Sep 12, 2008
12:01 AM EDT
In my not very humble opinion, I think GNOME looks unfinished, dated and boring, and those are to good points.
Scott_Ruecker

Sep 12, 2008
12:58 AM EDT
I guess I am left asking, just how fast do you need your browser windows to come up and/or programs to load in order to be happy? I understand no one wants to sit there and wait and wait and wait, but unless you are using an old K6, P2 or P3, just how much of a difference is it and is it that big a deal?

I use PCLOS on my laptop and one of my desktops and I have booted into several different desktop environments that I have installed on them and I have yet to see any real "wow" speed difference. Obviously xfce and fluxbox load noticeably faster than KDE or Gnome but not so much faster that all of a sudden I am unhappy with them. I know I am ranting but unless you are stuck using severely old hardware, just how big a deal is it?

I mean, at least its not Vista right? If your going to compare the speeds of different desktop environments lets include them all and really see just how fast or slow they are to each other. Besides, who here hasn't gone in an turned off some of the things that auto start that they don't want or need to speed up their boot or program load times anyway?

I can make KDE or Gnome load up pretty fast if I want too, now Vista? That's another story..
tuxchick

Sep 12, 2008
1:16 AM EDT
For what it's worth, my enthralling rant compared Gnome 2.x to Gnome 1.4. Now that was a tragic transition, far more epic and horrible than KDE 3.5.x to 4.x.

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