Plugs and props for various distributions seem often to be tied to their default use of Gnome or KDE.

But - is there really a major distribution where you couldn't install and use whichever you prefer (or some other desktop environment, windows manager or shell)? Or go back and forth a few of them until you decide?

In other words, one should expect any distribution to be built so that both KDE & gnome are compatible with it, no? Are they really NOT made that way?

And if the distribution is capable of running either one, why would anyone see the distro's default choice of DE/WM/shell as a particularly fundamental or defining aspect of the distribution?

As always, thanks to all in advance!

Distros often do significant amounts of customisation on the GUIs to adapt them to other choices that they have made. So, yes, you could install pretty much any GUI on whatever Distro that you like, but you probably wouldn't get as comfortable environment as you would like, and if there is a significant amount building to do to get your choice of GUI to work, this would be a hard way to go. Doesn't make it impossible of course, and some people will make it a badge of honour to go down that path, but I want the computer to do work for me, and not vice versa.

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It's interesting.

How profoundly do they change the DE/WMs?
Largely graphically, or are there serious functional / sub-surface coding changes?

The most obvious changes are things like the wallpapers and themeing/branding with the relevant distro's logo, etc, etc, but there is some more underlying stuff, too.

So, for example SuSE (my usual poison) for KDE 3.x had a modified version of the menu system, which included the ability to search for apps. Under KDE 4, this is now part of the 'slab' (rather than 'columnar') menu system, and now I'd find it difficult to use without it...although I suppose I would soon adapt, but it does make it easier to jump from one box to another, if they have different apps set up.

OTOH, Fedora went through a phase (I don't know whether they still do this) of trying to theme KDE and Gnome have a unified look and feel. I'm not sure why this Gnome-is-like-KDE-and-KDE-is-like-Gnome would be a good idea, as both become some kind of middle way compromise, but its what they used to do.

And the distros that make great play of their admin tools (SUSE again and Mandriva, for example, but probably quite a few others as well) often adapt the GUI so that their admin tools are deeply integrated.

And back when automounting was still a controversial subject, there used to differences to do with which automounting system was used and some distros made more effort to adapt bits and pieces to work with their flavour of automounting.

So its probably mostly stuff that you can ignore in day-to-day use, but, if you are an admin (either a professional admin or an 'accidental admin', because there is no one else) it can be stuff that you have to take into account.

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I just want to check whether I understand what you mean here.

By admin tools, do we mean things like YAST?

And by 'deeply integrated,' do we mean more than 'comes up in various menus' and things similar to menus?

Yes. SuSE has probably gone as far down the road of having a 'one-tool-does-everything' route as anyone, but even smaller tools like a simple package manager can be integrated.

Yes, again. It might be trivial, but whether you rely on kpackage or use your your own package manager is one thing (and maybe eliminate kpackage), but if the distro does customise the layout of files, or how the start-up files work, making the tools work with what you've got, rather than what the default might be is a good thing. Nothing that can't be overcome, of course, but it does shorten the learning curve and it also shows attention to detail.

I can't think of really good recent examples of this (there is probably something in D-bus or similar that I don't know about...but the fact that I don't know about it because I haven't had to know about it tells its own story) but the change to the automounter did break a few bits of the system, and deeper changes were required to fix it again.

Some people won't like this; if you are forced to learn the underlying system, you'll know more, more quickly. And, you can argue that automating everything so that it just works 'for Dummies' never works completely, so you have to learn the underlying system eventually. You might not enjoy the initial, very curvy, part of the learning curve, though...

Thank you, Salasi. And if you look to the left at the 'distribution' entry from my profile, you'll guess (correctly) that I'm one of the people who agrees and likes it! If there's one thing I'm looking forward to in Linux, it's the return to an operating system one actually learns by using (as opposed to M$W, which worked to make the user actually know as little as possible).