J_K9 @ Linux

Torvalds Chooses KDE Over Gnome

December 22, 2005 on 7:50 pm | In Desktop Environments & Window Managers |

As you may already have heard, Linus Torvalds (see Wikipedia), the creator of the Linux kernel and still the most contributing developer towards it, has sided with KDE in the sempiternal conflict between Gnome and KDE aficionados. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, KDE and Gnome are the two most popular Open Source desktop environments, and you will find that a huge number of Linux distributions run one of these as default. In his usual ‘cut the bull-talk and get down to business’ fashion, he told a developer on the Gnome mailing list:

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

And his reasons behind his decision are not feeble: he claims that the Gnome developers will excuse themselves from adding extra features by saying that ‘it would confuse users’ rather than ‘it’s too complicated’, whereas KDE has far more options and the developers work diligently to show their flare in this desktop environment.

In my opinion, Gnome is far less bloated than KDE, but I can see why Linus has said this - because KDE is much more configurable than Gnome, and it shows this in every menu and application.

Read the article on OSNews.