Eric Bergen

As you may know I have been a dedicated SuSE use for a few years. Most distributions support many desktop environments but have only one that they focus their development on. SuSE uses the ‘K’ Desktop Environment or KDE as their primary desktop environment. They maintain packages for several others but the default is always KDE and is the best supported. Gnome is second followed by several others. As I was researching for this entry I ran across some features screen shots for SuSE from Novell. From what I can see they are all Gnome based. This makes me think either somebody wasn’t paying attention or SuSE is switching to Gnome as their default desktop environment. However the current SuSE Live CD uses KDE as it’s default.

After a few weeks of using Gnome 2.6 both at work and at home from SuSE I have noticed a few things. Most important is that Gnome Terminal is horribly slow. Even on my snappy Athlon it devours resources like a football player at a free buffet. I do have a pimped out xterm config somewhere but this is about default installs and what I can get to from menus. The rest of Gnome seems to run very well. It’s theme support extends to more of my default applications such as Gaim and X-Chat. This is a big plus over KDE which left most GTK theme based applications wearing drab federal prison garb.

Both environments took only a few minutes to setup my default keyboard shortcuts and quick links. From SuSE Gnome wins for speed and KDE wins for Konsole and default applications. So far it’s almost even. An update article will come when I get both of my workstations up and running with Fedora Core 3.

If you have a better suggestion of a Gnome default distribution let me know!