Im going to install Xubuntu now… bye bye.

BTW I use GNOME primarily.

I will never use KDE4 even if they fix all their bugs.

I’l try again next year. Always happy to test and give backups,
but this is way too loosy, and i hate this vista like general
philosophy…

I’m staying with KDE 3.5 on my Kubuntu system and going with WindowMaker on Fedora. Both are much more usable than KDE 4.0 – or 4.1 – which many distributions have pushed out although the KDE team says that 4.2 is only ready for beta testing.

I’m with Linus.

What’s good about widgets? With conky, I get time/date, networking, graphed up/download speeds, top cpu/ram lists, listed partitions/percent full graphs – and it’s very very light on resources too.

I didnt see any interesting widgets – after playing with the clock in Vista for ten minutes, it just got covered by windows, and then deleted because it’s not really useful anyway.

It’s because when you start a KDE app, it loads a bunch of libraries and underlying framework. The app itself is small and fast. If you were to use KDE and then start the KDE app, you’ll see the difference. The reverse is true as well. If I start a Gnome (not just GTK) app, it takes a long time to load and depends on a bunch of libs. So, chose one DE and try to find apps for it. That way you save memory. Mixing DE is IMHO, a bad idea. Many newcomers will flame me for that statement.

Anybody who read the KDE4 websites years before the release will remember.

KDE4.2 is great. The BETAs and RC were great too. I’m sure the official release is great. I’ll have to update my boxes now. Maybe by the time 4.3 comes out I’ll actually use it on my notebook that I use everyday. Right now I don’t trust my data to it. What’s with the mysql databases? Crap, I don’t want to run a mysql server.

XFCE is a great compromise, and Xubuntu is one of the slickest distros.

Oh and, Gnome is really a lot of polish. Some of the underlying stuff is… Well I’ll stop here for now before the gnomes get me.

If you don’t like something you don’t go to something else that you don’t like. This is Linux and not Windows so there are hundreds of alternatives to Gnome and KDE. I for one will most likely never use Gnome, KDE or XFCE again… and I use Linux desktops with X every day. There are so very many options that are better than any of the three most common alternatives.

Of the mainstream desktops, I dislike GNOME largely for its anti-user attitudes (well, anti-power-user), documented by Googling “Jeff Waugh in his own words, an agony in seven fits”, turning up a linux-elitists discussion of issues, dissembling, and a great deal of abuse from Mr. Waugh and a few others.

KDE 3.5 very nearly met my needs for a desktop. It’s largely configurable with hot-keys for launching applications and window actions possible. Truthfully the appeals of WindowMaker are: it’s fast, light, stable, changes very little (an advantage of a near-moribund project), is asthetically minimally distracting, offers dock apps, pinnable window lists and menus, and allows hotkeys to define my most needed functions: launching rxvt, mutt, root (sudo) sessions, and w3m, and performing window and workspace actions: vertical and maximal maximization, restor, minimization, close, and switching workspaces. No mouse required. Damned convenient.

KDE lacks the pinnable window menus, which, when dealing with several score open apps and windows gets annoying as one must repeatedly open the window list, navigate to the appropriate selection, deal with the window in question (at which point the window list disappears), then re-open the windowlist and re-navigate to a selection. Small gripe but enough to render the environment much less pleasant than WindowMaker.