Comparison of Gnome vs XFCE on Ubuntu with some KDE stuff thrown in too.

Posted by Keith Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:17:00 GMT

xdesktop discussions are often heated and go long into the night. What’s best? KDE, Gnome, or XFCE? Well it depends, and wherever you look you’ll find people evangelizing one thing or the other.

What makes xdesktops different

Many things, but MANY of them are irrelevant. Linux is not like OS-X which gives you a choice of two look and feels ( which are both awesome btw ). Linux lets you change pretty much anything, so how an environment looks out of the box is totally irrelevant. If you see someone with a great XFCE setup that you like, you can just as easily create it with Gnome or KDE. That’s not the point.

Don’t Differentiate at all

Firstly, unless you are installing on an old laptop or something ( see later ) don’t feel you have to make this choice on day one. Personally, I install Ubuntu on a machine, then add xfce later ( google “installing Xubuntu on top of Ubuntu”. I DON’T install KDE, but do use some KDE applications ( e.g. Kopete for IM ) and the install of that seems to install the core of KDE at the same time.

What I’m trying to say is, you can’t get it “wrong”. You can install multiple xdesktops, and both:

Choose which one to startup into when you signin without any performance implications
Once in there, you can pick and choose which applications you like with little performance implications

The best thing is that going one way or the other only rarely has an impact on the steps you might read on a forum to install X or Y.. it’s all pretty much the same under the hood.

Differentiate by Applications

Each xdesktop comes out of the box with different applications, but this is irrelevant, as you can install any element of one in the other. You might love everything about KDE except the Konqueror browser

Differentiate by Weight

The only place this really makes a difference is if you are installing on older hardware. In the scenario the last thing you want to do is install everything then pick and choose. In fact, xfce is considered the de-facto standard for sluggish and old hardware so that is ONE definitive statement I feel I can make. While you’ll probably install your favorite browser on whatever xdesktop you choose, there is no denying that the core of XFCE, and foundational elements like the file browser are super fast. Nothing is thrown in there that is unnecessary, and to some, some things are left out ( like some networking services! ).

If you are like me, it doesn’t matter how gutsy your hardware is, you still like things as quick as possible, so no matter what xdesktop I’m using, I’ll use Thunar from XFCE for file managent. It’s a joy.

Differentiate by Bells & Whistles

Note - I don’t know enough about KDE to comment here. I also don’t know enough about how things run under the surface, I just know what I’ve found to work for me.

In my experience, XFCE vs Gnome is a choice between lightness and those little things that make working with an OS so much easier.

Two examples:

1) Drag and Drop from the Menu

In a nutshell, XFCE doesn’t do it and Gnome does. Where this becomes annoying is if you use Avant-Window-Manager to create an OSX like dock. Under pure XFCE you have to create a launcher on your desktop or somewhere else, then drag THAT to the dock ( and make sure there are no spaces in the fileame!). Under Gnome you can drag icons straight to the dock.

2)Multimedia Keyboard Support

To many this is minor, but with my Microsoft 4000 keyobard ( last remnant of MS! ) I don’t care about most of those extra buttons, but I want the Pause,Mute and volume buttons to work. I dicked with XFCE until I was blue in the face and even though the keyboard is a choice in the config, the don’t. Online tutorials suggest recompiling the kernel for this. er.. no thanks.

Others find that lack of Network support in the XFCE file browser is a deal killer for them. Personally, I find SMB such a clunky POS that I wouldn’t use it anyway, so that’s not a big deal. ( My permanent machines all have NFS mounts, and for temporary needs I use SSHFS ). You CAN get around these things ( google it ) but it’s not 100% elegant.

Pick ‘n Mix

The good news is you can pick ‘n mix the best of both worlds like I mentioned earlier. Here’s what I do, although not HOW TO do it - maybe later. The information is out there: