This is a writeup about a video game. The original version of this writeup was deleted as collateral damage in a "getting to know you" node clean-up. The survivors of said clean-up can be found at KDE vs. GNOME.

Title: GNOME vs KDE: Battle of the Desktops
Developer: Damian Yerrick
Publisher: Pin Eight Software
Year: 2000
Platform(s): NES
Description:

G vs K is a partial clone of Panel Action Bingo. A GNOME mascot and a KDE mascot (a Mega Man-like character that was apparently KDE's mascot before the KDE dragon) are running around on a 5x5 square board chasing a red square to claim it and trying to get Bingo with claimed squares. There's no CPU opponent; it's two-player only.

Why "GNOME vs KDE"? Easy. Initial prototypes of the game had players leaving colored footprints on claimed squares. However, trying to play the game on a black-and-white display was quite confusing; to fix this, the developers added different footprints for the two players. Player 1's marker remained a footprint; player 2's marker turned into something that looked like a landmine. But then one of the developers remarked "A footprint and a landmine? Why not just go with a footprint and a sprocket with a big K on it?" And so NES Bingo became GNOME vs KDE.

The first public milestone wasn't even meant to be released; a ROM site picked up a private release of the game, but because the game is GPL'd, they were able to do a public release, after which Pin Eight made an official milestone release. You can find the latest version at http://www.pineight.com/nes/ or a recent version at http://nesdev.parodius.com/ or http://nesdev.icequake.net/; it's an NROM so it should work on most development hardware.

A final version was never released because the project was put on hold when the lead developer had to return to university.

My Opinion:

A developer contributed to this review. To avoid a conflict of interest, he'll shut up.

Related nodes:

• NES programming

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© 1999-2002 Damian Yerrick. Verbatim copying and redistribution are permitted.
This writeup fits Computer And Video Games : Noding convention for entries.

A more serious comparison. I've tried to be objective, but I flick wildly between the two DEs so please forgive any bias...

Aesthetics
GNOME has a very, very slick look, no doubt about it, yet KDE has many beautiful styles available on the internet (say, at KDE-Look.org or APPS.KDE.COM). KDE apps tend to look slightly more uniform, as they all share the same interface guidelines. Compare the GIMP and, say, AbiWord...not much convention there, although they do tend to look slightly similar due to the toolkit.

Speed/Features
GNOME always tends to be slightly faster than KDE (you can test this by timing how long a new kernel takes to compile under each one-GNOME is virtually always slightly quicker), but KDE compensates for that with kickass features that GNOME doesn't have yet, such as desktop blends and multiple wallpapers.

Applications
I'd say that the two environments tend to be equal. Both have an office suite (Koffice/The GNOME Office), both have an iTunes esque program (JuK/Zinf), both have a giFT client (Apollon/giFToxic)...you'll probably be able to find what you need on both.

Ease of compilation
If you get QT binaries, compilation of KDE is ridiculously easy, with simple tarball options available (office, base, libs, games...). GNOME is very hard to compile...or should I say download, as the GNOME distribution is spread over around 50 tarballs, each of which are interdependent. And they wonder why I use the RPMs...

Which should I choose?

• If you like everything to be infinitely customisable through a great GUI, and like uniformity in your applications, choose KDE.
• If you like your desktop to be slicker than an eel covered with Vaseline, like it nice and fast and don't particularly care for infinite customisation at the expense of speed, grab GNOME.