Funny you mention that now Tredegar; I was about to ask/wonder if/when the OP might ever return to see what he's created ;)

Sasha

Oh, as do I. After reading that post, I said to myself "holy cow, he's RIGHT!". I immediately deleted EVERYTHING to do with KDE, since Gnome is FAR superior. Forgetting that it's all a matter of preference anyway, I decided to go with whatever is suggested by the OP.

I don't know what any of you are wasting your time on . . .

. . . haven't you heard of twm? Now that is a desktop environment!


hehe

twm is like a miracle. Just using it ... it gives you the feeling that every country in the U.N. got together and worked on a desktop environment or something. It's mind-blowing! Truly the Ferrari or Lamborghini of desktop environments.
:D
Seriously though, twm isn't as bad as things could get. ;)

In all seriousness, I really like the simplicity of twm. For me it's KDE or twm. Of course, I only switch to twm when I really need my processor . . . or video card . . . or RAM . . . But when I want windows with variable translucency that wiggle just a little when you move 'em, super-cool see-through konsoles, and genie-bottle animations, it's all KDE.

All that stuff sounds silly when I type it, but I kinda enjoy having friends over and having them see that my desktop environment is better-looking and cooler than theirs. (Especially the uppity Mac fan-boy types.) When they ask what it is and I say, "Linux," they are totally perplexed. It's awesome.

I actually (finally) won the wife over to putting Linux on her workstation thanks to KDE 4.

I haven't really used twm. I just looked at it and moved things around basically, when I was installing Gentoo.
I like the simplicity of Fluxbox, and I think it's very quality.
I was just joking about twm. It's joked about in the Gentoo handbook, too. In the Gentoo handbook, it says (paraphrasing) "that ugly, deformed window manager is twm". :)

This is kinda part of what i ment.

since they made kde, now there is two ways to make programs, and nobody knows what to expect. With just GNOME, linux would be better.

this is gay. that's not what linux is all about.

All of it is free like money free . . . KDE is not GNU so it's not free like free speech free. You never know what it will do.

From KDE 4 source code:
Note: "free software . . . GNU General Public License"

:)

I would really enjoy finding out what you thought that Linux is all about.

Hello :)

I've only ever used Gnome and can't believe it's the Desktop best suited to my preference -- more dumbed down and complex than I like and presumably slower than something elegantly simple.

But where to go next? Installing and learning enough about something new, enough to evaluate it seriously, is a lot of work. I'd prefer to explore eyes-wide-open.

So I'm getting something out of this troll-initiated could-be flame war! :D Especially from the posters who have tried several alternatives and have posted a balanced appraisal of the relative merits of each.

Can someone explain the architecture of a desktop? I guess it goes something like this:

1. X at the bottom layer, interfacing with the hardware and providing the graphics primitives.
2. Maybe some widget (?) tool kit providing some consistent prettification.
3. A window manager, providing window control.
4. A desktop, providing key applications including a file manager, application launch at logon ... .
5. A range of applications that are more-or-less integrated with the desktop.

Is that somewhere near right? Where do toolkits like gtk fit in? To what extent are those components independent of each other, allowing say any window manager to be used? Where does filetype/application association (MIME?) fit in?

Are there any desktop-watch sites, equivalent to distro-watch, giving the low down and the factors to consider when choosing?

Best

Charles

In my opinion, Linux is a better operating system than Windows. *nix's in general. I know it's a personal opinion, but I think GNU/Linux is better than Windows. The actual operating system is better. When people game all day and say Windows is a good operating system, it makes no sense.
If it were ugly, I would still say it's a better operating system. What torfurden meant, I don't know. ;)

About KDE being nonfree:
Qt used to be nonfree software, but, as of Qt 2.2, Qt has been dual-licensed under the QPL and GPL, meaning that Qt is Free indeed, though I personally prefer GTK applications over Qt.

About KDE (and GNOME) in general:
I personally don't like the feature creep, don't like the "feel" of either environment, and am a bit uncomfortable with having all these default applications come with my OS that I'll never use (such as IM-clients, calendars, and fancy-schmancy terminal emulators (just give me an xterm any day)). This slew of unused and unwanted apps is the kind of thing I associate with Windows, and I don't want to start seeing it in my nice, clean, Linux installs.

In summation:
Use Fluxbox!

Wrong.

Linux is about Freedom. It is about the freedom to do what you want and the freedom to choose.

If you want wobbly windows in your desktop environment, then you are free do do that. If you want a hard core command line only system, then you can do that too.

The other great thing is that you can have both. You can have fully command line only when you want, and a pretty DE when you don't.

For those that like Fluxbox / TWM / <insert other WMs here>, thats cool too. You can even pick which one you want to use today when you login. How cool is that?

I'd much rather have a choice. I've been using KDE off and on for a while, to try to get used to it. KDE 4 is good, really. I said before that I preferred a lot of things about KDE 3.5 to KDE 4, and that if they had just improved on what KDE 3.5 was like more instead of changing it so much, I would like it better, but I guess not. The more I get used to it, the more I like it.

Your opinion. other opinions are also possible.


the kde 4.x series still isn't ready for non-techie use (IMNVHO), but, apart from the the kde 4 series I don't see anything in your argument; and you don't have to use kde 4 if you don't want to. kde 3 still exists and you can still use it.

Last time I tried it was version 3.2, and it was not all that bad, even though it was a total ripoff of GNOME...What is the point of having KDE and GNOME? Once GNOME was already out, there wasn't any need to replace it with KDE.[/QUOTE]

this part of the argument seems to depend on Gnome being out first and KDE being a derivative rip-off of that. To quote from wikkipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME

and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kde
So, if you are determined to say that one is a lame rip-off of the other and whichever is second, historically shouldn't exist because it splits the 'market', it would have to be Gnome that is the rip-off and shouldn't exist. But, as an expert, you would know that.

Well, you can read the code and see if it is doing something you don't like, just as you always have been able to do. Given that exactly the same thing applies to Gnome, exactly how much time do you spend reading the Gnome code to ensure that it isn't doing something that you don't like?

I'm a bit offended by the title of this topic. Why do people always seem to need to disparage things they personally don't like? Can't you just not use it and let those of us who do alone?

If you want my opinion (and I'm sure you don't), I've never really liked gnome. I tried, though. I really did. But everything is too simplified for my tastes. I was never able to configure it in exactly the way I wanted it. It's always felt kind of toyish to me, like it doesn't trust me enough to present me with anything too complex.

With kde I could always tweak the desktop to do whatever I want. I can configure just about anything about it in great detail. It also provides a lot of very useful services, and the applications generally seem more feature-rich (e.g. kaudiocreator, the only cd ripper I've found that lets you edit all the major tag fields before you rip them). Not that kde doesn't have its problems either, of course, but it's certainly far, far, far from being "crap".

I wish this were true. I've been trying to stay with kde3 until kde4 got to the point where I felt comfortable switching. But what's the use of staying in the kde3 environment when all the applications are moving to kde4? For the last 6 months I've been getting more and more programs that don't conform to my configured desktop. kde4 apps have a very different look and feel, and in many cases very different functionality from kde3 (a few examples: konsole longer provides the preset backgrounds I used, none of the programs play nice with scim, and I lost the klipper, kweather, and sound mixer panel applets entirely). And since I'm not running kde4 directly there's no easy way to configure them to look or behave the way I want.

And now the last straw, after my last update attempt two days ago my desktop refuses to load at all (X loads, but only to a black screen). I suspect a problem with kdm or something like that, but there's a lot of other strangeness going on also, so I'm not sure. So I spent yesterday backing up my data and organizing things so I can do a complete re-install today. And I'm planning to bite the bullet and switch completely over to kde4 in the process. I sure hope it doesn't disappoint me.

(Incidentally, I have two systems. And after the first one started showing too many changes after an update, I've deliberately held back on updating the second one. But I can't stay like this forever. I know that eventually I'm going to need to install something with dependency conflicts that will force me to update a lot of things before I'm ready.)

Oops, sorry. I guess this turned into a bit of a rant. But it feels good to get it off my chest. To get back to the main topic, all in all, I still like kde more than gnome, even considering the botched kde3-->4 migration.

In the end though, both desktops have their strong and weak points. Some people will gravitate towards the features of one, and some towards the other (or one of the other desktops out there, I'm not forgetting them ;)). That's what it means to have the freedom to choose.