Review: CentOS 5 (Page 4 of 6)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Jul 25, 2007 at 05:11pm
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KDE
KDE also loaded up very quickly, was very clean and good looking, and interestingly
enough, presented me with a customized taskbar that contained the same five quick launch
icons found under Gnome. The icon scheme used under KDE was also identical to the one used
under Gnome. Another thing is that the KDE theme is consistent with the Gnome theme, which
some might not care about, but it does show that the developers were striving for
consistency, so I give them props for that. The KDE menu was also interesting. I found it
relatively untouched and while slightly reordered for ease of use, it was for the most
part a true, untouched KDE menu. Well, except for the fact that the developers changed the
KDE menu icon to the CentOS logo and a few stray Gnome apps found their way in. One thing
that really impressed me was to find the control center almost totally untouched! If
there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s when a distro group goes in and
messes around with the control center. There’s a couple that do that. Kubuntu is one
that does that to the point of being rediculous. They so hack up the control center that
it becomes essentially useless in my opinion. The KDE developers did a splendid job
creating the control center in the first place and the CentOS developers did the right
thing by pretty much leaving it alone and not changing it.
Compared to Gnome, application loading was surprisingly snappy and even loading Open
Office was fast. Surprisingly fast really. Especially after the painful experience of
trying to load it under Gnome. And this isn’t because of my having first loaded it
under Gnome to give it a head start. If I rebooted and did things the opposite way by
loading KDE first, running the test apps, then going back to Gnome, I got the same
results. One complaint I do have about the KDE install however is the lack of an easily
identifiable or accessible package manager or method (aside from Yum in the console) to
install applications. I did eventually find the package manager (which, interestingly
enough, is the same program in both Gnome and KDE), but it took some hunting through the
menus to find it. So that is something the developers will need to fix in the future. New
users and people fresh to Linux need to have a package install icon out in front of them
on the desktop where it’s easy to see. Otherwise they’ll never know where to
look. If the more experienced users don’t like having that there, then it’s just
a simple case of right click and delete to get rid of the icon. But first and foremost,
installing, upgrading or removing software needs to be as simple as possible for users.
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Average vistor rating: 3.8 out of 5 (19 total votes) | |
