GNOME and KDE: Seven Attractions in Each: Page 2

Seven Attractions in KDE

The KDE 4 series of releases has taken more than its share of criticism since it began two years ago. Granted, the series was a radical re-design, but I've never understood the reaction. So far as I'm concerned, the desktop only became innovative and interesting with the KDE 4 series. Here are some of the features I especially appreciate:

• Folder View:

  Once jokingly referred to as the end of desktop icons, Folder View has proved the icon user's best friend. Essentially a divorce of desktop content from the desktop, Folder View gives users the power of maintaining different sets of icons for different tasks, and of switching quickly between sets. It's a powerful tool that, for some reason, many users still underestimate.

• Tabbed windows:

  New in the recent 4.4 release, tabbed windows allow the grouping of several windows into one. This ability not only reduces desktop clutter, but allows users to group related tasks together. In many ways, tabbed windows seem a natural extension of Activities and Folder View in giving users more organizational choices on the desktop.

• Edge Actions:

  Edge actions are eight hot spots along the edges of the desktop. Move the mouse to one of the hot spots, and a pre-defined action takes place, such as showing all open windows on a cube. My own favorite action is Present All Windows - Current Desktop, which temporarily shows all open windows at a small enough size that you can see them all at once.

  In the 4.4 release, edge actions have been joined by the ability to maximize a window by moving it against the top, or to tile it by moving it to one side. My only complaint is that the selection of programmable options is still relatively limited.

• Font Manager:

  When I was a GNOME user, the font manager was sometimes the only reason I kept KDE installed. The font manager remains an essential tool for me in my design work, both as a kind of dedicated file viewer for fonts, and because of the preview for each font in the general list.

• Translucency and Dim Inactive Windows Effects:

  Ordinarily, I care little about compositing effects, partly because I choose to use free video drivers that don't support them, and partly because I am not much for eye candy. But KDE has several genuinely useful ones. Translucency makes windows transparent as you are moving them, allowing you to see the other windows beneath them and making positioning easier. Dim Inactive Windows is similarly useful in navigating through a pile of open windows, because it displays only the active window as fully lit. While I have to remember to change the focus before I take screen shots, that's a small price to pay for the greater general convenience.

• Icon Management:

  Part of the settings for each Folder view are detailed configuration options for icons. For each Folder View, you can set the size of its icons, the text color and the number of lines that the text can occupy. Better yet, KDE has provided for those of us who like to arrange icons from left to right, instead of top to bottom, and includes options to align icons on a grid and to lock them in place.

• Completist Apps:

  In the 19th Century, people wrote books that were supposed to be the definitive word on their subjects -- the most notable, of course, was Origin of the Species. For some reason, KDE has attracted developers whose apparent goal is to be equally definitive in software categories, such as Amarok in music players and DigiKam in image management.

  The result is applications that have every feature you can think of and often several that you never expected, but rapidly come to appreciate all the same. You might accuse such applications of being bloated, but another way to look at them is as proof of the maturity of free software. Often, they far exceed anything found in proprietary software.

The Best of Times

I expected a list of what I appreciated to be much harder to generate than last week's list of KDE GNOME irritations. In fact, the hard part was confining the lists to manageable lengths.

For KDE, I might have expressed appreciation for the new Gwenview and Okular, respectively the image and document viewers, or for Marble, KDE's answer to Google Earth and Maps. Similarly, for GNOME, I might have mentioned the advanced accessibility in Orca (although I don't use it personally), or the Shutter screen capture utility.

Over the years, both GNOME and KDE have attracted a healthy ecosystem of related applets, widgets, and applications, offering a wealth of features that are either unavailable on proprietary desktops, or else only available at additional cost and under restrictive licenses.

That, really, is the point of listing some of the attractions of the two major free desktops. Both still need improvements, and will evolve along with users' needs. But despite such qualifications, there's never been a better time to be an open source software user.