What are the big differences in Gnome and KDE?

i was looking at wikipedia when i first started to look into windows, and saw that there are different types of linux using either gnome, or kde. what makes one special over the other? can you do more things in one, that you cant in the other?

 

Too much to talk about - read these articles

http://www.psychocats.net/essays/kdevsgnome

 

You can run all the programs of one in the other. Gnome is built on the GTK (Gimp Toolkit) a set of libraries that the majority of its programs run on. KDE runs on the the qt toolkit. You can install the libraries from one on the other, so program compatibility is fine.

Other than that, it's pretty much just looks.

 

which one perform faster? i used to use mandrake, i think KDE is slower than Gnome, but i maybe wrong

 

KDE used to be slower than Gnome. With every release, it's gotten faster. And I hate how Gnome has moved to a "You don't need configuration options, we'll just pick stupid defaults and leave you stuck with them" design pattern. Any system in which the default file browser doesn't actually allow me to browse the filesystem tree is a bad system in my book.

 

I really dont get your argument there. Nautilus lets you see everything fine. And as for configuration, it's almost as customisable as KDE.

 

Is this what you're referring to? Nautilus allows you several browsing options, including filesystem trees if I understand your claim correctly...

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The only big difference to me is that I couldn't find most of the customization options that I wanted in Gnome, but I could find them in KDE.

 

Try the "File->Open" dialog in any GTK application and you'll see my issue, guys. The file selector dialog, not the browser Sorry for the terminology confusion.

 

Interesting. Never knew this. I always though that KDE was built "lighter" and was therefore "faster" than GNOME. Haven't toyed much with KDE yet.