Sysadmin

(LinuxWorld) -- Before I get started on this week's topic, I want to request my readers to calm down about last week's column. I know the headline implied that the column itself was a newbie's guide to choosing a Linux distribution, but it was only meant to set the stage for such a guide by laying out my current opinion of the past versions of various distributions. That gives you a baseline against which you can compare my opinion of the latest versions.

I even came clean about the fact that I have hated all SuSE distributions up to version 7.0 in order to lay all my cards on the table. I want to give you the opportunity to write off whatever I say about the next version if I still hate it and you happen to disagree. Or, if I happen to love the next version, perhaps you will learn something about what was wrong with the prior versions that you didn't notice.

The only hard advice that I gave in last week's column is that anyone who is interested in learning Linux to get a job requiring Linux expertise should look at the de-facto standard first, which is Red Hat. I stand by that advice in spite of the fact that I haven't seen the latest version of Red Hat. It doesn't matter if Red Hat is the best choice, the worst, or anything in between. If Red Hat is what most companies are using, and it is, then you'd better cut your teeth on it first if you want to be prepared.

I'm not telling you to stop there. If you already have a job opening in your sights and you know the company uses some other distribution, then by all means learn that other distribution first. If you are determined to learn Linux and don't know today where you'll find your job tomorrow, then play the odds and learn Red Hat first, after which you can move on to other distributions. That's my advice. Take it or leave it.

More bias exposed

Among the e-mails and posts on various bulletin boards where my column was discussed I found accusations that I was a Red Hat shill or a Microsoft shill. Anyone who has followed my work for any length of time should find either allegation amusing. That's not to say I'm without bias if you define bias as one person's opinion.

Here's the problem. We writers often forget that readers don't necessarily take classes in journalism. (Actually, I never took any classes in journalism, either, but I did take some college courses that strayed into the field.) One of the first things you learn about writing is that a column is by definition an opinion piece. Some professors are even so adamant about this being a given that they teach writers never to say things like "I believe" or "I think" or "In my opinion" in any column, because to do so would be redundant.

If you, as a writer, think Windows stinks, then you should simply say "Windows stinks", not "I think Windows stinks", because the very fact that the statement is made within a column assumes that this is opinion that may be influenced by facts, but is not a statement of the facts themselves.

I'm not always diligent about this approach, but there have been times when I simply stated that KDE is superior to GNOME. No matter how I say it, you should read that as: "In my opinion, based on my own experience and data, I believe that KDE is superior to GNOME." If you want to call that a bias toward KDE, then you are not entirely incorrect. You are only incorrect if you also assume that I am not willing to change my views if I can be shown that GNOME is actually superior to KDE.

So show me.

GNOME v. KDE

Here's what I have against GNOME and GNOME applications as compared to KDE from a usability perspective. For one thing, I find it extremely easy to make KDE 2.2.1 look beautiful and work the way I want it to. I like the fact that I can install and configure new color themes, icon sets, window decorations, and user control styles (checkboxes, buttons, etc.) separately if I want to. I can optionally install or create a combination of the above as a single theme, but I don't have to.

In this one area, GNOME is similar in some ways but radically different in others. The differences are often a side-effect of GNOME's schizophrenic design. In some cases GNOME gives you a great deal of flexibility because it separates elements of the desktop environment into replaceable components. For example, you don't have to use the default window manager, Sawfish. There are a number of other GNOME-compliant or nearly-compliant window managers you can use. (This is also true of KDE but it isn't exposed to the user that way.) In other cases GNOME doesn't allow you to customize behavior even at the application level. It forces you to make a change in one place that affects how all GNOME applications behave. Even then sometimes the extent of customizations you can make have odd limitations.

For example, a color scheme in GNOME is dictated primarily by the GTK theme you choose. You may like the way user controls such as checkboxes look in a particular GTK theme, but you may not like the colors for that particular GTK theme. There is no convenient way to change only the colors. If you know what you're doing, you can edit your own custom file called .gtkrc.mine in your home directory in order to override the default colors. There may even be a utility out there to help make this process easier (I couldn't find one, but perhaps you can point me to one).

Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever you can find as far as GTK themes go. For some reason I do not fully understand, I used to be able to find hundreds of GTK themes on the Internet. Now I can only find a few. That's not even the point. It is so easy to set your own colors in KDE that I have to question why GNOME allows the process to be even the least bit difficult?

I solved the color problem in GNOME simply by downloading and installing a Mozilla theme for both the window manager (Sawfish) and GTK. It's not my favorite look and feel, but it makes the desktop look consistent and it's reasonably attractive.

After having spent entirely too much effort on colors, I don't want to dwell on something as insignificant as wallpaper, but I must say I was disappointed that GNOME and the file manager Nautilus fight with each other over how to handle wallpaper enough that I couldn't make it look the way I wanted it to.

Here's a pet peeve about something that is important to me, and may be to you as well. I like some of my applications to display text next to toolbar icons, and some of my applications to display only the icons themselves. KDE not only gives me this ability, but most of the applications I use let me customize this setting per toolbar. For example, KWord, the word processor I am using right now, lets me set the file toolbar to display text only, the edit toolbar to be icons only, the table toolbar to display both, and so on.

GNOME considers this to be a global configuration setting. You set it once in the GNOME control center, and that's how all applications should behave. There are three things wrong with this approach. First, it doesn't change the way the Nautilus desktop file manager behaves until you restart GNOME (or Nautilus). Second, I may not want all my applications to behave this way. Heck, I may not want all the toolbars in a single application to behave this way. Third, not all GTK or GNOME applications even respect this setting. Whether they respect the setting, defy it, or give the user additional options is something you can't predict or depend upon.

This is similar to the complaint I voiced in my column, The Outlook on Evolution and Aethera, about how I had to go to the GNOME control center in order to increase the size of the text in the text window of the e-mail and PIM application Evolution. What if I want the text to be larger in Evolution but smaller in some other application? Sorry, bud, that's just the way GNOME works.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the opposite of the open source philosophy that more choices are better than fewer choices.

There is certainly a case to be made for consistency across applications. The kind of consistency GNOME seems to be striving for makes no sense. The variety it provides is so trivial it hardly makes up for the brain-dead decisions about consistency. So what if the Sawfish window manager lets me set one application to use the Mozilla-style window title and frame, and set another application to use the WindowMaker style of title and frame? How useful is a choice like this compared to setting individual toolbars or the size of the text you have to read?

There's a lot more, but I'll stop here and jump right to the conclusion. The end result is that I'm much happier with the way my KDE desktop and KDE applications look and behave than the way my GNOME desktop and GNOME applications look and behave.

Call me biased if you like, but I do have an open mind, and I know I've only scratched the cosmetic surface of the two environments in this column. I'll go deeper if you like. In the meantime, if you can show me why I should prefer GNOME, then be my guest.