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Fedora 19 (GNOME) vs. Kubuntu 13.04 (KDE)


I've been a long time Linux user after first being introduced to it in 1997 when I arrived at college. At that time Linux was pretty primitive. Users usually had to setup their own X windows modelines or they would be greeted with low resolution video.

Some of the big distributions at the time were RedHat, SuSE, Caldera, Stampede, Slackware, and Debian. Every couple of months I ended up messing something up and breaking the bootloader, kernel or some important libraries. I was mostly using the computer to learn and experiment with so I would re-install with a new distribution each time. I must have tried a more than a half dozen distributions over a few year period.

KDE on Debian/Ubuntu

Around 2004 or so I made the switch to Linux, with a virtual machine for Windows. Over the years since the switch I ended up running Debian for several years and most recently Ubuntu for four or five years now. Throughout this time I've preferred and used KDE, the K Desktop Environment.
KDE 4.3
At work we've been looking to move to a Linux platform for our embedded operating system. Having Linux on our desktops, even if it isn't the same distribution used on the embedded system, means that our development and deployment systems would be very similar. It means we can do a large portion of our software development on our desktop machines, skipping the whole build->install->test cycle for a good portion of development.

We looked at most of the popular and well supported distributions and selected Fedora for our desktop OS. Some of the reasons for selecting Fedora over Ubuntu were having newer and more capable system services like systemd (and journald), and a much faster development cycle. In addition, Ubuntu has been spending a lot of effort on producing a solution based distribution. They've gone out on their own with things like the Mir display server rather than work on the very similar Wayland display server. Ubuntu is also resisting the move to systemd and holding onto upstart even though it appears pretty clear that the dependency based systemd is a better model than the event based approach used by upstart.

After being on Debian and Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu for so many years I'm making the jump to Fedora. From now on its yum instead of apt and GNOME instead of KDE.

GNOME on Fedora 19

Gnome on Fedora 19
Switching from KDE to GNOME was a smooth transition. The screenshot above shows the activities screen with the search dialog and results, and the favorites list on the left hand side. Like on the Mac, the application with keyboard focus takes over the bar at the top of the screen to show application specific menus. Overall its been a pretty smooth transition. I was a pretty active user of the KDE search hot key via 'alt-f2', switching to using the 'windows' key wasn't a big deal.

The change I'm enjoying the most is unrelated to the desktop environment. The improved kernel in Fedora 19 that has made my laptop suspend/resume work flawlessly. With Kubuntu 13.04 my laptop would suspend/resume maybe a dozen times before it would hang on resume. A month into Fedora 19 and I've probably done a couple of dozen suspend/resume cycles without any issues.

GNOME Software updater
Yum appears to be quite a bit slower than apt, at least in terms of the time to update the package database. I've seen this both on the cli and with the software updater application. The initial package database update took several minutes, I even shut the software updater application down once because I had thought it had locked up. The software updater app doesn't really provide any kinds of feedback or estimated time of completion. i'm probably not the only one wondering if something is broken after waiting 10+ minutes for the application to get the list of packages. Maybe the delay is an Internet connection issue or the task of checking hundreds of thousands of packages is time consuming, there just isn't any feedback on what is going on to know where to look.

Conclusion

Overall I've been happy with the change from KDE to Gnome and from Ubuntu to Fedora. I've been using OS X at work and it's interesting to see the similarities between GNOME and OS X. There is a lot of opinion around desktop environments but both are pretty functional and I think its mostly personal preference. KDE seems to have more options to tweak, GNOME has the functional OS X like application bar at the top of the screen.

In most distributions it's pretty easy to switch between the two desktop environments. If you are interested in what the other side has to offer I'd recommend switching and trying it out. It can be a bit of a learning curve to get started but there are plenty of helpful videos on YouTube to get started.
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Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 28, 2013 at 10:37 PM

    Thanks for your insight

    BTW what do you do for a living?(Your job)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chris MorganNovember 30, 2013 at 5:31 PM

    Hello.

    I do embedded software development but I've done a fair amount of open source development as well. How about you?

    Chris

    ReplyDelete

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