Any DE is fine, as long as the terminal uses tabs and allows tab renaming. This helps me to take note on various tasks running simultaneously. I dislike having 8-10 xterm taking up space on the screen.

I switch between fluxbox, gnome, xfce and lxde. Xfce works well without much configuration and is average on resources.

I started with Gnome and found it too complex, un-ergonomic and slow for my "just get on with it" preferences (this on a system with dual core CPU and 4 GB memory) so changed to Xfce which is a lot snappier and has all the features I need -- some of which work better/easier than Gnome's equivalents which was surprising given that Xfce is regarded as minimal relative to Gnome.

EDIT: Xfce's terminal emulator didn't have some features I had got used to in Gnome's so I installed mrxvt for its tabs feature (which I never used) and then realised UTF-8 was important so changed to urxvt which turned out to have tabs anyway (which I still don't use ) and which has some features Gnome's terminal didn't and which I use regularly.

Any tiling window manager fans here? I've never used one before, but I'm getting ready to try Xmonad.

I use and love Xmonad. Once I went to a tiling WM I don't think I could comfortably go back. That being said, I really don't know Haskell so learning enough to configure Xmonad was annoying. If I lost my xmonad.hs file I might jump ship just because I wouldn't want to reconfigure it all. However, with my current config Xmonad does exactly what I want it to, no more, no less, and I can do almost anything using the keyboard alone while still maintaining the ability to use the mouse. And I have no window decorations wasting precious screen real estate.

Awesome WM is cool.

@Krystah: I use XFCE for my work, it is fast and has not all the (for me useless) features of the "bigger ones". But depending on your work it may be different for you. I see many programmers use WMs instead of fully fledged DEs. I tried Openbox, it rocks, as mentioned before you can be really fast with its fully configurable keyboard shortcuts. I also tried Awesome WM, a tiling WM. One have to get used to the concept, but then you can also concentrate on your work and be really fast.

Heavens, what good response, all of you Thanks for your time. I'll take these opinions into consideration and start playing around with something else than KDE - I, too, feel it is too similar to Window$. Thanks for all your feedback

Krys

I'll put my hand up for Xfce and I do believe it's low overhead makes a difference. I used KDE exclusively until last year when I put an Xfce version of Salix on a netbook. It wasn't long before I was using it on my desktop and shop boxes.

However, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "optimized for work". With most distros you choose what you want installed, what you want to use and in most cases what you want running in the background. After you decide on a desktop environment the rest is up to you.

I am a big fan of i3. If I've got a specific task(s) to do and don't want any distractions I use it. If I don't do anything particular I often switch to xfce.

I use KDE 4.4.3 with Slackware 13.1, and I agree, it's a buggy mess. I am perfectly happy with it as a shiny toy on top of my home desktop, I like fixing and working around things, but I would shoot myself if I had to deploy it and support it in a business. May be things are different with KDE 4.6, I don't know. They definitely improved dramatically since 4.0.

I also use Gnome 2.32.0 with Ubuntu 10.10, and it feels a lot more stable. For what it's worth, my school, Boston University, is also using Gnome as the default DE in BU Linux (customized CentOS). If it makes our CS department happy, it cannot be too bad.

Note that you may want to have some parts of a DE but not others. If you use a Window Manager at all, it is nice to be able to run every KDE and Gnome application. Regardless of where I am, I want to run Okular (KDE), I want to run Marble (KDE). But the only legitimate (IMHO) reason to run kwin is to have a DE experience that is reminiscent of Windows 7 or Apple's latest cat. If you want something that works, a minimalistic DE/WM is the way to go (see GazL above). It simply saves time. I can spend a good part of a day shuffling shortcuts, widgets, and backgrounds on top of four KDE workspaces, or debugging the desktop cube animation. Lightweight WMs, otoh, are rock-solid stable, fast, and will almost certainly result in higher productivity. And they are surprisingly feature-full. Try using WindowMaker for a few days, and then look at the size of windowmaker-20060427cvs-x86_64-3.txz . It's less than vim-7.2.416-x86_64-1.txz !

Blows my mind

@GazL

hey man, OK, I will talk longer then I need, but anyway

I tried to start to use Linux with thought on my mind that it has to replace all the functionality of Windows and that is why for few times I tried (and off course the easiest distros like Ubuntu) to use Linux and always returned to Windows, so continuing talk about fluxbox and file manager, I had already Gnome, so with fluxbox I used Nautilus

Now I guess I choosed the correct distribution for my evolving view of the world, I decided to learn Linux as it is! And really learn it, and appreciate things what it offers, and now I am just so excited about Slackware(started to use it by accident, person called Alvils Berzins translated Slackbook in latvian which is my native language and I just thought that it would be good possibility to start to learn linux, even thou translation is from 2005), I just try to learn as much as I can and already I am able to start to help to others even thou have a lot of questions myself, but I guess I am a bit from nature Slacker and now this community is sucking me in and I am becoming much more one

It is just like a tasty food, to get new knowledge, so I registered on linuxquestions with my first problem it was impossible to start Slackware - it froze during startup, so my installation was hard, spend half week to get it working.

But I love the knowledge and control over system that comes by using Slackware and in linuxquestions I saw how great is Slackware community.

And when I use KDE I feel that I start to use konsole with bash more than any other application I start to feel that through bash I can navigate faster than through any file manager

So NOW my answer would be NO FILE MANAGER

P.S. Sorry for the long post, but I hope that somebody will understand my passion

all the best guys!

Krystah, it would really help if we knew what you want to accomplish with this desktop. Are you intending to integrate it into a working environment? What specific tasks do you intend to achieve?

For regular use, especially for some heavy tasks I use XFCE. But sometimes I miss KDE so I just switch to KDE and play games or watch movies. Can't live without Konsole though.

It does come down to what you mean by 'work' at the end of the day.

I use fluxbox mostly because it gets out the way and allows me to run what I need. If I need to use a file manager for USB sticks etc. then I fire up dolphin (which isn't often). Or there is also ranger (on slackbuilds.org).

Since I spent most of my time working in a console ssh'd into other boxes I find a good terminal + screen is really more important than which DE I use. I can use KDE quite happily but prefer fluxbox.

*Edit: I just reread and you mentioned programming, so I reiterate my statement that a good console + screen is important (that's if you aren't using kdevelop for example anyway).

I tend to use urxvt (also on slackbuilds.org) + screen + vim for my programming needs. If you aren't afraid of the command line.

a tiling wm can work wonders when you need to look at several things at once (like in programming).
i am partial to i3, but there are others. ratpoison, awesome, wmii, and stump to name a few.

Ratpoison's foundational Usenet post is hilarious.