My Gnome experience (from a KDE user)

[dopey]

Just to start with, I'm not trying to start a KDE/Gnome flame war. I just wanted to post my general thoughts on it based purely on my experiences with specific issues. I don't intend to attack the philosophies of either gnome/gtk or kde/qt. I just want to base this post on my experience of what doesn't work for me in gnome.

Every few years, I decide to give gnome a try. I use firefox, gimp, pidgin and thunderbird alot, so I tend to use applications that are built for gtk, and I've never been able to get them to match up look and feel wise with Qt environments. I can get them close, but things like the gtk-qt engine still have some goofy bugs. So in otherwords, I want to like gnome, but I always end up finding things that really piss me off with gnome (and or pieces of gnome).

Now, it's not that it's all necessarily gnome's fault, some of this appears to be problems with other applications, so for the purposes of my list of problems, gnome/gtk applications reflect on the environment as a whole, even if they aren't part of gnome.

The good news is, my list of gripes comparing gnome to KDE every few years has dropped from over a dozen items, to 3, and beyond the cosmetic behavior that seems to work well, I found a HUGE bonus for gnome that I'll get to at the end of the post.

Problems:
1) Lack of randomizing wallpaper handler. There is a third party wp_tray, but it's not part of gnome, and gentoo doesn't even have it as an ebuild (I made my own). With dual monitors, an additional problem is no tiled maxspect which effectively allows a single wallpaper of the same aspect ratio as the monitor to essentially be mirrored on both monitors. There is also no way of specifying different wallpaper on different monitors.
2) gnome torrent clients suck. transmission seems to have a problem where if I register it as a mime handler, it stops adding torrents after I add a handful of them. Even if I download the torrent and run it as an argument against the transmission command line, it doesn't add them. I have to use the transmission GUI to add the torrents. That's damn annoying. Additionally, ktorrent has the ability to limit the number of torrent streams active at a time, can limit the amount of upload/seeding activity if there are active unseeded torrents, and just in plain old KDE fashion, can be configured to do all sorts of stuff that transmission can't do.
3) totem without xine support sucks. it works fine with gstreamer support, but if i forward and go backwards a few times, totem goes into a temporary hang state, almost like it's trying to figure out where in the buffer it is. With kplayer, kmplayer, and kaffeine under KDE, I can drag and drop a disk icon to the playlist and it will automatically scan the disk and add the files to the playlist. totem and gxine can't do that. Totem handles draging and dropping folders fine, but not a nautilus disk object.

Now the thing that gnome fixes is the stupid gtk file picker window in firefox/thunderbird/whatever. Under KDE, when I use the file picker, it's automatically in autocomplete mode. So if I start typing in /directory/file and it is able to complete /directory after I type in /di (I type fast) I always end up getting /directoryrectory (the first rectory is populated by autocomplete). I type fast enough I don't need automatic filename completion, I can hit tab if I want that. Under gnome, I have not seen this problem. The gtk file picker will autocomplete, but it won't shift the input cursor to the end of the autocomplete string allowing me to overwrite it's autocompletion with my typing. I don't know what in gnome prevents the broken behavior, but that is really really nice.

Otherwise the totem hanging thing is the most annoying thing, but it's largely the fault of the gentoo developers for dropping xine support, as I know totem in the past with xine worked better. The other things are all just annoyances.
This bodes well for gnome. I wonder if in another couple of years when I try it again, I'll actually be able to stay there. For now though, I'm going back to KDE because cosmetic look/feel issues aside, it does what I want. And yes, I am aware that KDE/Qt apps run fine in Gnome, but the cosmetic differences are annoying, and I don't like having to load extra KDE processes when I can just run KDE as a whole and be perfectly happy.

[jabol]

What Gnome version did you use? If not 2.22 I suppose you should try it again .

Now, as to 1), I don't know.
2) Try deluge, you might like it better.
3) Try 2.22. Apart from that, gnome-mplayer is really a nice player lately. You could also try vlc.

[dopey]

I'm just running stable gnome ebuilds on amd64 so 2.20.3. Maybe I will give 2.22 a try when it goes stable. The last time I tried gnome was 2.16 or 2.14 I can't remember, so to go from over a dozen complaints to 3 is really good progress IMO.

I'll try deluge, see if it works better. I tried gnome-mplayer, and the inability to playlist a device icon drag and drop still exists and I had problems with general playlist management with gnome-mplayer that I didn't like. VLC playlist management was horrible if it ended up being a folder with lots of files in it. It took over a minute to scan a folder with about 200 files in it.

[arjay]

You made some valid points which I would tend to agree with. Each Gnome release seems a little better. I'm compiling Gnome-light now on a new install and I'm going to stay with it for awhile to see if I can make the switch.

Anyhow, nice review and fair comparison!

[SeaTiger]

I switch from KDE from gnome and I am quite happy with it, I think is more about look and feel more than functionality.

Regarding application I missed most are actually from MS windows environment, zoomplayer for video and foobar2000 for music.

I am using mplayer for video since it is more stable than totem, but it doesn't have screen wide scroll bar in full screen mode, that sux big time.

Music I use audaious which is very much like winamp, and it support multilingual which is a must for me. However foobar2000 has a very flexible UI that you can customize with scripting, and I miss the folder tree and artist tree.

For torrent I use Azureus, which is one of the two torrent client I used in MS windows, so I have no complaint about that. And actually I think it is the best torrent client regarding UI.

[dopey]

I gave deluge a try, and I really really like it. It works alot like ktorrent, and is nearly as configurable. It basically has all the features I'm looking for, so I'm quite happy with it.

I'm still hunting for a better gnome media player. I know I can use mplayer, gmplayer, or xine directly in gnome, but I want things to have the same look and feel, and I've yet to find a good gtk movie player. totem is decent except for the buffering bug that appears to be directly a result of gstreamer. Hell, I'm tempted to deal with the overhead of qt apps and keep using kaffeine or kplayer in gnome.

It also bothers me that most gtk applications seem to treat nautilus special objects (device icons/network locations) as an individual object instead of as a folder or whatever, so dragging and dropping device icons does not function anywhere near as seamlessly as doing the same in KDE.

But for now, I'm toughing out gnome a little longer, and not minding it. Maintaining my own wp_tray ebuild is annoying, and there is still no method of handling multi-headed backgrounds without doing silly things like using imagemagick to build a doublesize jpg file with two images, one for each head, but deluge solves my #2.

[ph03n1x]

Well i like gnome but not the fully bloated one. I use gnome-light and replace the stuff which I don't like with other apps

- Don't like the file manager --> use PCMan
- Archiver Programs are all not really good
- Audacious is an eyecandy winamp substitute
- xchat, skype, etc. are okay anyway

So imho all in all pretty usable. I think it's sometimes more the problem that linux is lacking an app which is really good in windows. Just to mention stuff like ultraedit, winzip, ... there are aequivalents but not really good ones imho.

All in all I think it's just a matter of taste and the "get used to it"

[dopey]

- Don't like the file manager --> use PCMan
- Archiver Programs are all not really good
- Audacious is an eyecandy winamp substitute
- xchat, skype, etc. are okay anyway

So imho all in all pretty usable. I think it's sometimes more the problem that linux is lacking an app which is really good in windows. Just to mention stuff like ultraedit, winzip, ... there are aequivalents but not really good ones imho.

Guess I'm old school.
Archiver = command prompt and appropriate commands
File manager = command prompt and appropiate commands
ultraedit = vim with appropriate settings.

[tatotato]

You should really use xine by itself. In my opinion, totem sucks.

To change the firefox file-picker to its own one instead of using the GTK one:

In firefox, type

Code: Select all

about:config

Find the config entry ui.allow_platform_file_picker and set it to false, and save.

If it doesn't exist for some reason, create it, and set it to false.

This gives a much better file-picker. You will have to restart firefox for the change to take effect.

Just some tips for a better gnome experience.


And even if you're using gnome, you should still be using amaroK as it is just simple the best

[wolfden]

Problems:
1) Lack of randomizing wallpaper handler. There is a third party wp_tray, but it's not part of gnome, and gentoo doesn't even have it as an ebuild (I made my own). With dual monitors, an additional problem is no tiled maxspect which effectively allows a single wallpaper of the same aspect ratio as the monitor to essentially be mirrored on both monitors. There is also no way of specifying different wallpaper on different monitors.

More info on this please. I was a long term KDE user and switched to gnome a year ago or so and haven't looked back. There are some KDE apps I do prefer still, but would like to get a background changing like KDE does.

[tatotato]

This may be what you're looking for.

http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=938

[dopey]

wp_tray is what I use :
http://planetearthworm.com/projects/wp_tray/

I rolled my own ebuild to manage it. It let's you do randomizing wallpaper. I used a shell script that uses the imagemagick command montage to combine two 1920x1440 (that's the resolution of each of my monitors) images into a single jpg file that basically correctly displays as a "mirrored" image on my two monitors. wp_tray allows me to randomize between my collection of backgrounds.

tatotato: i like amarok, but "when in rome ..."
ditto with xine

If I go back to KDE i'll have to remember for sure to disable the platform file picker. I had completely forgotten about that config hack. Thanks for reminding me .

[tatotato]

What do you use instead of amaroK on gnome?

I can't live without amaroK now. There's no better music player, full stop

[pizzach]

- Don't like the file manager --> use PCMan
- Archiver Programs are all not really good
- Audacious is an eyecandy winamp substitute
- xchat, skype, etc. are okay anyway

So imho all in all pretty usable. I think it's sometimes more the problem that linux is lacking an app which is really good in windows. Just to mention stuff like ultraedit, winzip, ... there are aequivalents but not really good ones imho.

Guess I'm old school.
Archiver = command prompt and appropriate commands
File manager = command prompt and appropiate commands
ultraedit = vim with appropriate settings.

Wha ha ha! That is exactly what I was thinking. I suppose that is alsy why a lot of Gnomes stuff doesn't bug me that bugs other people. I also use mplayer from the from the terminal as a totem replacement.

[gnot]

What do you use instead of amaroK on gnome?

I can't live without amaroK now. There's no better music player, full stop

you may try these
bmp
banshee

[tatotato]

Never actually seen banshee in action.

Looked at some screenshots, looks awesome!!

I will actually give it a try. Thats saying something, me straying from the path of my beloved amaroK.

[dopey]

I mostly use a media player for nothing more than searching and playing stuff from my mp3 library, so rhythmbox actually works fine for me. I use my mac's itunes to get podcasts onto my ipod and to sync to my ipod.

I have banshee emerged but never got around to trying it as rhythmbox does all I need, but my music playing needs are pretty primitive compared to alot.

[Wojtek_]

My setup:
VLC for videos
Rhythmbox for music
These two apps satisfy much more than I really need. Give them a try.
Cheers,

Wojtek

[gerard27]

Hi,
I am a kde user.
I read about banshee in this thead:
emerge -pv banshee -> 63 new files!!
Including Gnome desktop.
Why?
Gerard.

[dopey]

Hi,
I am a kde user.
I read about banshee in this thead:
emerge -pv banshee -> 63 new files!!
Including Gnome desktop.
Why?
Gerard.

because banshee is built heavily on top of gtk stuff and gstreamer. Depending on what your useflags are, there's alot to pull in. It's actually built on mono and gtk# and gtk# is of course built on gtk, and of course banshee has lots and lots of gnome hooks into it.

It could be that the gentoo ebuilds are also overly liberal in their dependency tree.

[timeBandit]

emerge -pv banshee -> 63 new files!!
Including Gnome desktop.
Why?

It could be that the gentoo ebuilds are also overly liberal in their dependency tree.

You can try USE="-gnome" emerge -pv banshee to see whether it reduces the weight a bit. As noted though, it's a Mono/GTK# application and in a KDE world, a lot of its underpinnings will be missing.

[gerard27]

I have -gnome in /etc/make.conf.
Gerard.

[timeBandit]

I thought you might but it was worth mentioning. Must be a hard dependency on the GNOME desktop or some major portion of it. Too bad and a little surprising, really.

FWIW, I'm your complement: I use GNOME and don't want a ton of KDE baggage just for Amarok. Even so, I've tried and abandoned Banshee at least three times to date. It's nice, just not for me.

[jabol]

Even so, I've tried and abandoned Banshee at least three times to date. It's nice, just not for me.

Well, I would said just the opposite. I was using Banshee for months untill gnome 2.22 when mm-keys stopped working . I really miss it's features. Rhythmbox is up to the task also, but it's just no that quality.