Hi guys,

So, which is the more stable option from your various experiences with the two? I enjoy the KDE look, and if i were to use it i prefer openSUSE. Does anyone also feel that KDE is as stable or better than GNOME?

Thanks,

Lloyd

I prefer KDE, but that's just what I like. The 3.x is more stable than the 4.1, in my opinion.

Asking people if KDE is better than Gnome is to ask something to which different people will give different answers and is at the end of the day entirely down to the preference of the individual. You may as well ask whether one distro is better than the other.

Personally I prefer KDE. I started off with Gnome, tried KDE about six years ago and haven't seen a reason to change since. Where I work every dept that runs Linux systems gives it's users KDE by default, even where they use distros that default to Gnome out of the box.

The 3.5 version of KDE is certainly more mature than 4.x because it's been around much longer. I'm still using 3.5 but might try switching to 4.1 soon.

I really like the look of KDE 4, but I've played with a couple of versions now and they haven't been stable.

If stability is of interest to you, I would say that kde 4 probably won't really be ready for prime time until at least 4.2. I would choose a kde 3.5, but many people would choose Gnome instead.

I personally like Gnome better than KDE. I started out Gnome, and loved the non-Windows feel of it. And I love the costumaizabiltiy of it. Though I will not say KDE is bad. They made a good looking desktop, but it just ain't my cup of tee. I personally don't like the menu (start button) style thing, but KDE 4 made some improvement with that by making it a really searchable menu. I just prefer Gnomes features. But hey, if you do end up using Kubuntu, there is a good side to having all your apps start with a K. In synaptic, search for K, and all of them show up, fun huh.

SUSE distros have long included a search feature in the KDE 3 menu but attempts to persuade the KDE devs to make it part of KDE so that it was available to all those people who don't use SUSE were unsuccessful. Which is a shame because it's a really good and useful feature. I'm not yet convinced by the new style KDE menu that you get by default in KDE 4, it seems to require too much clicking to use, but that's OK as it's very easy to change it back to the KDE 3 style.

I just finished setting up openSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4. My last distro was actually Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome. It may have been patched, but 8.04 for me was very buggy. I had two different boot issues with it. I fixed the first one, but after the file system became corrupted, I gave up. Before that, I used Ubuntu 7.10. The Gnome interface never seemed very buggy. It was mostly other things (graphics drivers in 7.10, for example). KDE 4 is a bit buggy, but if you're choosing between Ubuntu and openSUSE 11, I'd definitely go with openSUSE. The only issues I've noticed are mere annoyances. You can't paste files directly onto the desktop, for example. You can't draw marquees around groups of files to select more than one. Also, some of the windows crash occasionally, sometimes causing the screen to go grey. That's it, actually. I customized everything without any issues, and I really like the feel of the interface. You mentioned Kubuntu, as well, which I believe is the KDE version of Ubuntu. I hear that's even buggier than Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome.

Are you using 4.0 or 4.1? Only that sounds like a feature that isn't in 4.0 but is in 4.1. I could be wrong. But if you are using 4.0 then update it to 4.1 because by all accounts it's a big improvement.

Uh, thanks, but I did that just now and it made it a little worse. My custom keyboard shortcuts don't work now. I still can't draw marquees around icons on the Desktop and now I can't add anything at all to it, even if I paste a file into the Desktop from Dolphin ... I used the file from this site: http://news.opensuse.org/2008/07/29/...s-and-live-cd/. This really sucks. So I can't add anything to the Desktop, now?????? I can see the files I add inside of Dolphin, but they don't show up on the Desktop.

There is a widget that displays the content of any folder, IIRC it defaults to showing the contents of ~/Desktop.

ok. Thanks. That'll work. Sorry about panicking.

Guys, thank you all for your responses. I have also been looking at Fedora 9.