I was re-reading the article now and strikes me as unprofessional (but all this gnome/kde discussions are, anyway). Reduced battery life? I can’t take that as serious, maybe because it relates that you weren’t able to decrease the brightness of your laptop. Well, if you wanted comments and like to write in the internet, i’ll tell you something: Don’t complain if you’re flamed when you’re providing so little insight in your article. No one will take you seriously if you didn’t take the effort to write a good article, because the article is little more than a excuse to start a flame war.

I am a KDE user (since 4 years ago); and i write in a fresh installation of Kubuntu (before i had opensuse). And brightness keys work, but they also work in text mode! Aren’t this keys ACPI related? I don’t get how switching from gnome to kde changed that. Ditto for suspending to disk. Are you really comparing gnome and kde on the same distribution? All this seems distro related to me.

Fonts can be a quirky issue. In opensuse i haven’t had any problem, but now in kubuntu, i see gnome applications bad integrated; but again, the distro didn’t make the effort of integrating everything right.

Actually, i think that both desktop environments are so customizable, that choosing one or the other comes down to the details. KDE 4 has been a bit unstable for some time, but now it looks very good; it is what i am used to, and i’ll probably stick to it for some time.

Again, thanks for your comments guys, but please try to be respectful to the poster.

Bit much to be demanding respect when the poster is not giving any. You get what you give after all. The flamebait title and post are clearly meant to cause offence and get people riled up. It would have been perfectly possible to express his opinion in strong terms without descending into the gutter. I’m sorry, but juvenile rantings like this mark this website down as one I will never visit again.

KDE has an awesome font manager.. System Settings > Appearance > Fonts. Then change the font sizes or whatever as desired. If that doesn’t make your menus smaller you might also want to go to System Settings > Appearance > Icons > Advanced and change the icon size, as this might be keeping things massive. Also under System Settings > Appearance > Style > Fine Tuning you can configure how text/icons behave in toolbars etc…..

I promise you that KDE does not universally suck at Suspend/ sleep. These actions are out of the scope of KDE. I’d strongly recommend installing any KDE distro before calling it KDE’s fault. Its more likely a packaging problem where some “vital” thing didn’t get set properly.

If your touch pad doesn’t do scrolling etc, its most likely an xorg config problem. Again its not up to KDE to to interact directly with your hardware.

As for special laptop keyboard buttons not working, i’d be interested to know if it worked no config required on Gnome, and if so whether the two are being used with exactly the same Kernel? These special keys are handled within the kernel, KDE just listens for the events.

In summery i think the audio thing was rather harsh, as its pretty easy to configure. The menu and fonts thing sounds like KDES fault, if for nothing else because you couldn’t work out how to configure it yourself. The touchpad/non functional laptop keys / non working suspend are not ‘KDE problems’ as these events aren’t handled by KDE, and again would recommend not installing kde onto a gnome based distro.

@Ian – Thank you for your reasonable comment, we appreciate you taking the time to leave us a message.

@ch – While you are correct in saying that we should be working to increase the penetration of Linux in the consumer marketplace, that doesn’t mean that we should simply ignore and gloss over legitimate problems with the software. As a software developer, I reject the idea that we should not talk about the problems that a system does have. Dissent gives developers an idea of where improvements are needed.

@Barnabyh – I have been using XFCE on top of Debian Testing recently, and do appreciate it’s speed and stability. It also seems to be extremely configurable, although the default configuration was not nearly as easy to use as the default GNOME setup.

Again, thanks for your comments guys, but please try to be respectful to the poster.

What the experiment is all about.

What the rules of the experiment are.

And maybe even Dana’s old posts.