It's not too inaccurate to say that KDE acts like Windows and Gnome acts like Mac. KDE has millions and millions of little tweaks that you can make, allowing you to customize your interface to a very high degree. Gnome has more of an "it just works" attitude, with less customization possible.
In my experience, for all of KDE's tweaks, it's often impossible to change the thing you actually want to change. And themes require actual installation (at least in versions I've used), rather than just drag-and-drop, and tweaking themes is quite difficult. In Gnome, it's fairly easy to go into a theme and edit whatever you want to change and then drag-and-drop the tweaked theme in. But KDE has a better menu editing app, and some people like that level of tweakability.
I've actually been using Xfce (Xubuntu) for a while, though, because my Gnome panels got screwed up somehow and were getting slow anyway. Xfce is much quicker, and has some nice additions that I like (a better basic file browsing menu, a way to edit system menus that actually works, better default right-click choices, better way of dealing with drawers).
If you want maximum niftiness, check out Beryl, Emerald, Compiz, etc. There are lots of videos of them in action on YouTube. I recently tried experimenting with Beryl+Emerald again, but it slowed my computer down too much.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 06:26 pm (UTC)In my experience, for all of KDE's tweaks, it's often impossible to change the thing you actually want to change. And themes require actual installation (at least in versions I've used), rather than just drag-and-drop, and tweaking themes is quite difficult. In Gnome, it's fairly easy to go into a theme and edit whatever you want to change and then drag-and-drop the tweaked theme in. But KDE has a better menu editing app, and some people like that level of tweakability.
I've actually been using Xfce (Xubuntu) for a while, though, because my Gnome panels got screwed up somehow and were getting slow anyway. Xfce is much quicker, and has some nice additions that I like (a better basic file browsing menu, a way to edit system menus that actually works, better default right-click choices, better way of dealing with drawers).
If you want maximum niftiness, check out Beryl, Emerald, Compiz, etc. There are lots of videos of them in action on YouTube. I recently tried experimenting with Beryl+Emerald again, but it slowed my computer down too much.