GNOME Goodies

It used to be when you compiled a GNOME app, your chances of success were marginal on the first try. But it looks like the libraries have settled down quite a bit, and everything is getting increasingly stable. That's nice. My overall impression of GNOME 1.0.54 for Debian 2.1 is quite good. Most things are quite stable, although they put quite a drain on my little Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. I have a K6-2 350Mhz with 64MB that runs GNOME under FreeBSD, and it whips right along, so I guess it's just time to upgrade the old 133. In any event, I'll share my general impressions of GNOME.

KDE and GNOME. It's kind of a tough call choosing between KDE and GNOME. KDE is still a little more polished, since it's been in work longer, but the gap is getting pretty small. I'd even say on the surface you have to get rather nitpicky to discriminate between them on the basis of completeness.

Ultimately, you don't even have to choose between the two. You can use KDE applications with GNOME and vice versa. Or you can choose to not use either session manager but simply use a handfull of applications with Window Maker or whatever your favorite window manager is. The idea of a desktop environment under UNIX or UNIX-like systems is quite a bit more flexible than it is under a proprietary system like Windows. You can customize things a lot more with UNIX. Although, Stardock systems has ported their Object Desktop to Windows, and now you can customize your Windows desktop to a greater extent than you could before. The product is called something other than Object Desktop, now. I used it back when I used OS/2 religiously. But at least it's nice to know that you don't have to confine yourself to just one desktop environment or to any desktop environment under UNIX/UNIX-like systems.

Desktop Environments. At first, KDE/GNOME/X can all seem rather confusing. The terms display manager, window manager, desktop manager, X server, all seem to run together like so much alphabet soup. Let me try to make some sense out of them for you.

The time tested UNIX interface is the command line. In recent years, graphical interfaces have been popular because of omnipresent PCs and their pretty graphical interfaces. So UNIX workstations have followed suit to make users feel more at home. But there are several components that make all these graphical goodies work on UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

1. X server. This is the primary set of libraries that lets your video hardware talk to graphical application software. Several types of X servers exist, from commercial solutions like Metrolink and Xinside to the freeware XFree86. These are the underlying utilities that all other X applications use, including terminal emulators as well as desktop managers and window managers.

2. Window manager. This is the application that governs how the windows behave and what they look like on your desktop. Typically, your window manager is quite customizable, and you can make your windows and desktop resemble some other existing familiar environment or be completely original.

3. Display manager. This program only applies if you desire a graphical logon instead of a textual TTY type of logon prompt. Basically, a display manager allows a workstation to always run X, even when no one is logged on.

4. Desktop manager. This is a relatively new sort of idea for UNIX. Or at least desktop managers have become popular recently. Another term for them could be ``desktop environment'' or just plain ``desktop.'' GNOME and KDE are examples of a desktop manager. Basically, they are a collection of handy applications that help you do work on your desktop. They usually contain a program launch panel, clocks, handy tools for changing menus or wallpaper or desktop icons or system sounds and other multi-media applications. Often they'll integrate tools like contact managers, virtual desktops, and various system meters or guages. Desktop managers have been around a fairly long time for UNIX, such as CDE (Common Desktop Environment), but they haven't always been cross-platform or hardware independent, and they haven't always run on all types of UNIX.

GNOME and Me. Overall, I like it. It's fun, easy, and stable enough for most of my purposes, though it's annoyingly slow on my older hardware. I think GNOME is just young enough to have a memory leak or two under unusual conditions. Running Netscape Communicator and GNOME at the same time can really make time pass slowly on my old system at home.

Yes, I'll keep using it, and I think I like it better than KDE at this point. Mainly for aesthetic reasons rather than for technical reasons, and also because it's new and funky. I'll probably not use it on my older hardware though. Window Maker or AfterStep runs much better on slower PCs, and there are plenty of tools for those environments. However, on my faster hardware, GNOME with Enlightenment is a joy and an adventure.

If you have older hardware, I would recommend something smaller in the way of a window manager, like blackbox or icewm, or one of the GNUstep related window managers. They have enough flexibility to provide you with a pleasing display, yet they can be made to look very nice.

If you have newer hardware, I'd recommend GNOME with all the bells and whistles. It runs great with any window manager that is optimized to deal with its hints, such as icecwm, enlightenment, or even scwm. Even AfterStep and Window Maker recognize some GNOME hints now, but Enlightenment has the best GNOME support that I have found. If you have the hardware, that's the combination I would recommend.