“For those of us who have been using Linux the last three years,
the desktop wars have been a constant factor. We all know the
history of how KDE got started and chose to use the Qt library. The
ensuing discussion that followed led to the start of the GNOME
project which began evolving the Gimp’s GTK+ toolkit into a full
fledged toolkit.KDE had a head start being almost a year older than
GNOME, yet GNOME got lot of support from many important Linux
groups like GNU, Red Hat and Debian. Of course KDE wasn’t
completely without commercial backing, due to choosing Qt they had
TrollTech doing all the basic toolkit work for them.”
“The stage was set and the two desktops have both evolved of
their own accord and in response to the other. Even if both
environments had a very common goal, they have taken somewhat
different paths, with the GNOME hackers focusing more on getting
their infrastructure perfect, while the KDE developers focused more
on getting a more fleshed out set of basic applications.”
“Of course since both desktops need to have both of these
elements the environments are starting to resemble each other
again, at least on the surface. GNOME has closed most of the gap
between the two desktops in regard to applications and tools with
their 1.2 release and KDE is getting a more advanced infrastructure
in place with their 2.0 release.”
“So as the two projects get ready to roll out their 2.0
releases it can seem that they stand shoulder to shoulder in the
battle for users. While it is hard to get good figures it seems
like the GNOME community have managed to close the gap in user mass
that KDE managed to establish as a result of being first to market
and as a part of that also having a maturity lead.“