GNOME or KDE

How can i tell which im using..also...is GNOME preferred these days???

Taking your questions in reverse order, the "preference" for a user's desktop manager is almost always a matter of personal taste and political preferences. (The politics have to do with "Who's really FOSS. Research this issue if its important to you.) To find out which desktop manager you prefer, the simplest way would be to get a lot of Live CDs and try different ones. Many distributions offer Live CDs with different desktop manages.

To answer your first question, for most distributions using a desktop manager, when you are presented with a log-in prompt, you should find somewhere on the prompt screen an "Menu" (or similarly named) button. When you click on that button, s list of choices is normally displayed. One of those choices (usually the first one) will, when clicked, present a choice of display managers for you to use. The "Default" choice, if there is one, is the last manager you used. In any case, you desktop manager is one of the choices listed. (If there's only one choice, well, that's simple, eh? )

Originally Posted by sigint-ninja How can i tell which im using..also...is GNOME preferred these days???

Open up a file browser, select help then look for the about option. if it say about dolphin or about kde then you are running KDE.

If it says Nautilus, then you are running Gnome
If it says Tunar then you are running Xfce
if it says PCmanFM then you are running LXDE

There only one prefered theses days is the one you like the most. No body can tell you or make you like or use one of them in particular, Only you can decide which one is the best that works for you. And you shouldnt let anyone tell you what to do in your computer anyway

Hope that help, good luck to you

And if you're using Caja, then you've got Mate!

Gnome is preferred these days.

Originally Posted by neilcpp Gnome is preferred these days.

By whom? Definitely not by me or the many people that changed to XFCE, Mate or Cinnamon when Gnome Shell was released.

GNOME or KDE: KDE! good clues in /etc/X11/default-display-manager for me on Debian is > /usr/bin/kdm although it does not tell for sure (package-managers should know)

The politics have to do with "Who's really FOSS. Research this issue if its important to you.

Hm. I thought all the politics were over with the release of Qt 4 under GPL for every platform. If not then the release under LGPL must have stopped it :b

Just a bit of explaination in case that's needed. GNOME is based on GTK cross-platform library. It was from its start released under the terms of LGPL that meant it was a free software (both as beer and as speech). KDE is based on Qt library that's cross platform as well. Unlike GTK it was developed not by a community, but by a company called Trolltech. It was somewhat free to use, but its license was not GPL-compatible. That caused controvercy as KDE tended to be most popular DE for Linux. Everyone's concern was what if Trolltech suddenly decided to close Qt. Qt 2.something was released under a dual licence: an open source GPL for non-commercial use and only for Linux/proprietary license for commercial use and Windows. Qt 3 introduced Mac support, but it was commercial as well. With the release of Qt 4 the dual license was used for all of the supported platforms: GPL for non-commercial use/proprietary one for commercial use. After that Trolltech was bought by Nokia that released Qt under dual GPL and LGPL (with an exception that you can't incorporate a library into your code). It was somewhere in the middle of 4.X releases. Since then it was free for commercial use as well. That's what PTrenholme meant under Political preferences.

By whom? Definitely not by me or the many people that changed to XFCE, Mate or Cinnamon when Gnome Shell was released.

Exactly that I wanted to say.

Returning back to the original question, KDE's philosophy is to give you as much customizability as ther developers can. GNOME on the contrary tries to give its users minimum preferences from the GUI. All the rest are hidden under the hood. That's why there's an opinion (which I don't support) that KDE more Windows-users friendly or Windows oriented while GNOME is more Mac oriented.

All said above covers GNOME 2 (now Mate project). The newer GNOME 3 seems to be hated by everyone.

Finally there's no such thing as a default Linux Desktop. Everyone's free to use whatever they like. That's what Linux is about. It's both blessing and curse.

Cool bananas redfox2807 Thanks for the history, a few more I like

Originally Posted by redfox2807 Hm. I thought all the politics were over with the release of Qt 4 under GPL for every platform. If not then the release under LGPL must have stopped it :b

There are some people that still complain about the Contributor Agreement one has to sign to be able to contribute to Qt.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD There are some people that still complain about the Contributor Agreement one has to sign to be able to contribute to Qt.

I read that Qt Contributor Agreement, and it wasn't obvious to me why some people would complain about having to sign it. I'm not an open source software developer, so that may have something to do with my lack of understanding. Do you know why people complain about it?

Originally Posted by Z038 I read that Qt Contributor Agreement, and it wasn't obvious to me why some people would complain about having to sign it. I'm not an open source software developer, so that may have something to do with my lack of understanding. Do you know why people complain about it?

Because the CA gives a company the right to release a different licensed version, basically circumventing the LGPL license, which means that they can offer a version that has components that don't have to be opened to the LGPL licensed version, if I understand that correctly.

I thought the intent of the LGPL was to allow open source software licensed under it to be included in commercial, proprietary, closed-source software products. If the Contributor Agreement circumvents that in some way, wouldn't it be acting in favor of open-source software? If so, then I think the ones who complain would most likely be the developers or sponsors of commercial, proprietary, closed-source software. I honestly don't know if that would be a bad thing or not.

Probably there's more to it than I understand.

Originally Posted by TobiSGD There are some people that still complain about the Contributor Agreement one has to sign to be able to contribute to Qt.

Thanks for the link. Didn't know about the CA. I've read through Corporate Qt Contribution License Agreement. What I've understood not being a lawyer:
1. it obligates a contributor to use LGPL or GPL and the like
2. it forbids a contributor to change the license after the code has been submitted
3. it secures Digia from patent lawsuits
4. it grants Digia a right to release products based on the submitted code under any license (proprietary or open source) Digia wants even if the code itself is submitted under GPL that forbids to derive non-open source products from it.

The point 4 is the only one that can cause some concerns. Thought Digia's a company. It makes money on developing commercial add-ons to Qt and of course providing commercial support. From that prospect the point is absolutely understandable. The first two points plays into community's hand.

I thought the intent of the LGPL was to allow open source software licensed under it to be included in commercial, proprietary, closed-source software products. If the Contributor Agreement circumvents that in some way, wouldn't it be acting in favor of open-source software? If so, then I think the ones who complain would most likely be the developers or sponsors of commercial, proprietary, closed-source software. I honestly don't know if that would be a bad thing or not.

As I understand it you are not forced to license the code you submit under LGPL. For example you can use GPL.

KDE most of the time. But when my eyes hurt, I do use Gnome.