A controversial (see all the comments)  article on tuxmachines.org caught my interest. It was another salvo in the never ending GNOME vs. KDE war. In the past I have tried out KDE and decided that, for me, it was okay but I preferred the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy behind the GNOME desktop. The desktop is the starting place to launch applications and I shouldn’t need to study a tutorial in order to use it. It should just work.

KDE made a major version upgrade in 2008 from 3.5 to 4.0. Many KDE users were upset and were quite vocal about it. Indeed, the initial 4.0 release was quite buggy. The current release is version 4.2 which supposedly fixes many of the bugs. The fact remains, however, that the new KDE introduces some very new concepts on how a desktop functions. I needed to download a livecd with version 4.2 to see what all the fuss was about. Following this link, I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.1 and burned a CD.

I booted the CD and waited, and waited and waited some more. It took seven minutes from GRUB to a working desktop! Yes, no CD will boot as fast as a hard disk but seven minutes??? Really! Strike ONE. I quickly found a connectoid for networking and was pleased that I had found another distribution that recognized my Atheros AR242x chipset. The KDE “kicker” gave access to all the typical KDE applications you would expect. I used Konqueror to access my blog site (the site you are now reading). It did not render correctly and I could not edit my blog. Strike TWO. A right-click on the desktop produced an invitation to install a widget. I did not want a widget, had no idea what widgets were available, and besides I wanted to a create a document. There is no option to do that. Some googling on the internet showed me some “workarounds” to this problem. One involved the command line and another, believe it or not, a widget. Strike THREE.

OpenSUSE currently holds the number 2 spot on distrowatch.com following Ubuntu. It does come in a GNOME version and perhaps I will take a look at that soon if only to compare boot times. Meanwhile, I will not be wasting any more CD’s on KDE versions of any distributions.