Well, the funny hats and fishing rods have finally got to me, I'm going back to KDE. Seriously, I've found that 2.8 is a big improvement on 2.6, but it's still not as good as KDE. There were two main things that annoyed me. The first is relatively minor, and that's the difficulty of finding a good rss reader that compiles ok on my system. I eventually found a few by searching for "gnome panel news ticker", but many minutes were wasted because "gnome panel rss" just gave technology articles from sites with rss feeds, and even after finding the query it took a few attempts to find one that would compile cleanly. Gnome always has problems on this system with not knowing to use -liconv, probably because I have a few remnants of an old install in
/usr/local that I've never been able to entirely get rid of. Anyway, this problem surfaced in the configure script of the first program I tried, which meant there was no makefile editing solution. The second one failed with a "normal" compile error. Anyway, that was my own peeve. Surely it couldn't be that hard to include a ticker with the desktop like knewsticker, especially given that they include a stock ticker.
My second problem, however, was very simple and much more major. There seemed to be no way to get to non-gnome programs through the menus. KDE simply integrates the gnome menus; although it does lead to a few doubled entries with the wm-agnostic programs which are smart enough to add themselves to both, it is generally a very good thing. Even before this, it had a good menu editor which you could use to add your own menu entries. Now my apologies if I've missed anything obvious, but I could not for the life of me find such a tool under gnome. This is really a basic component of a modern desktop and I cannot believe it was not available, but I could not find it anywhere. I have no problem editing config files, I use fluxbox when I'm using OOo and/or blender, but the majority of users do. I'm afraid this latest foray only reinforced my belief that KDE is the only real choice for new users.
Finally, something which is probably personal taste but I found very annoying. No, it's not the "spatial" nautilus, having a minor love of AROS I can handle that, although I do think that the user should have the choice especially in Free software. I'm talking about the separation of all the control centre modules. That's fine for when just tweaking settings, but for initial setup I really don't want to be going applications-desktop settings-advanced-modulename over and over again. Far better to have the modules available both separately and grouped under a parent application - just like KDE does it, really.
Gnome is definitely improving. With a decent widget and icon theme (Surely I cannot be the only one to think the default icons are hideous. The widgets I can accept, but they look rather 1995 to me - I want mine to *glow*. But I can accept that a warm glow to me would be garish fluoresence to others) I can comfortably use it as my day-to-day desktop. But I constantly felt trapped by the lack of a menu editor and what seems a far less powerful panel. I am also worried by gnome's seeming tendency to limit the user's choice with regard to spatial nautilus, control centre and the aformentioned menu problem. In this way in particular, it feels like the gnome devs are getting clannish and retreating, to form a small devoted community of zealots that accepts no outsiders, and slowly withers away to nothing. I hope this is all just a mistake and there's a nice menu editor hidden away somewhere that could do with being accessible by a right click. Failing that I hope that the gnome community will open up more, work on a unified menu standard like the existing unified desktop standard, and gradually integrate, leading to a final blended ultimate linux newbie desktop combining the best bits of both kde and gnome (hey, I can dream, can't I?). I say newbie not as a disparagment, but because I suspect that the goals of ease of use and power are incompatiable. Certainly having both of them and being lightweight is impossible. So I suspect there will always be a place for a few alternatives, fluxbox, enlightenment, fvwm etc, although I hope they will try and use compatiable technologies like XFCE does with gnome. But anyway, I hope that gnome and kde will blend together, as I don't see how having to implement things twice does anything other than hurt the community. My fear is that the GNOME people will become fearful of KDE and everyone, and become another group of fanatics, like the people who still insist on running amigas for everything. (Yes, I like aros, but it's not useable as a modern system for day-to-day work). It may prolong the ultimate life of gnome as we know it, rather than being absorbed into kde, which is at least a possibility should they open up and integrate. But a kde including the best bits of gnome, or even the other way around, would be better, to my mind, than one "winning" and the other gradually fading into obscurity. The immortality of NeXT, whose legacy can be seen in more or less every modern gui, is to me preferable than immortality through zealotry.
As I write this, I read about how aRts is being abandoned. I think, although it is not yet decided, that this is a case where kde will move to gnome's solution (gstreamer) now that it has become stable, as they have done before with IPC (using DCOP, a "working well enough right now" solution, until D-BUS, a next generation and good in principle solution, became stable). I hope that the gnome people will have the courage to do the same when it becomes clear that some of their technologies are inferior to the kde counterparts.
Update: the lack of KDE apps in the menus was a config issue on my system which is fixed now. GNOME people have told me how to edit menus; although it is possible, it is still (IMO) incredibly nonintuitive and I wish they'd improve this.
