Re: KDE vs. Gnome?

[Robert Kosinski <whelkman eden rutgers edu>]

This is a very, very difficult question to answer without starting a
flame war.  I will attempt not to start one.

First, it's all about what you feel more comfortable with.  Like GNOME? 
Use it.  Like KDE?  Use it.  Like GNOME most of the time and KDE
sometimes?  Use them both.  With this out of the way, let's delve into
deeper issues.

KDE is considered by many to be more consistent, more stable, and more
usable in general.  Since you're asking for an opinion, I find both to
be equally usable, but I agree that KDE 1.x is more stable (and maybe
more usable) than GNOME 1.0.  I can't comment on GNOME 1.2 since I
cannot compile control-center.

However, GNOME seems to be developed much faster and is resolving the
problems very quickly.  GNOME also seems to have more avocation than
KDE, which leads me to the licensing issues of KDE.

Because of the incompatibilities between the licenses of the QT widget
set (QPL) KDE relies on and the GNU GPL which KDE is distributed under,
it is technically illegal to distribute KDE.  The KDE developers are at
fault with this one (they admit it "off the books") but will never
publicly profess so.  This fact only matters on how much stock you hold
in licenses, and the incompatibility is somewhat minor if you ask me. 
The fiasco between QPL and GPL has turned off many people to KDE, if you
can believe it.  This paragraph alone will probably start a flame war.

All in all, you'll probably find features and applications you like in
both KDE and GNOME: GNOME will have Evolution, and KDE will have
Konqueror.  I really hate the word "versus" here because the GNOME and
KDE developing folks aren't trying to beat each other and don't fling
the same animosity the users do.

Also, some Window Managers have support for both KDE and GNOME widgets,
so you can get the best of both worlds, which makes this question kind
of useless.

Hope this helped.