Over the past few days, I've been trying to switch from KDE to Gnome. It's faster, Free-er and in many ways, prettier than KDE, so I thought that I'd give it a shot... but it's not going to happen and here's why:
- Nautilus doesn't support bookmark folders. It's pretty impressive really, but when your filesystem browser is expected to be able to connect to local drives, network drives and remote drives over SFTP, assuming that a user is only going to have 6 or 7 bookmarks is unreasonable.
- Terminal is lame. It may be more responsive than Konsole, but you can't move between tabs with the keys and wrap from the last to the first, and you can't paste from the highlight-copy clipboard with the keyboard while Konsole will let you use Ctrl+Shift+Ins for the highlight copy, and Shift+Ins for standard copy.
- No suitable replacement for Kwallet. Gnome stores some of your passwords with its keyring manager, Firefox stores its own (unencrypted) and Thunderbird stores its own (encrypted). In KDE, I login, give my master password and my encrypted password db is available to all programs for which I need it.
- No suitable replacement for Klipper. I got Glipper installed, but it's nowhere to be found.
- No decent text editors / IDEs. I tried Gvim, GPHPEdit, and Bluefish and they all suck in comparison to Kate, KDE's simple text editor and we're not even trying to compare KDevelop here. The big killer for me: no predictive text handling.
- Firefox may be more functional than Konqueror, it's still way ugly by comparison.
Frankly, I've found Gnome to be sorely lacking in what I would consider key areas. People want their passwords and things memorised and they want them accessible in one easy step. I have well over 100 filesystem bookmarks and I'm a programmer -- I need a good text editor. If I wanted a prettier Vim, I wouldn't be using a GUI.
Maybe I'll try again next year but until then, KDE, though it may be slow and bloated, at least does what I think a GUI should.