I started using Linux in September 2005. I used GNOME 2.x from then until this month, when I decided to move to XFCE after hearing the news about GNOME 3.

In my opinion GNOME 2 was good, apart from various problems (jschiwal mentioned some of them). I didn't like how they seemed to be removing features and hiding configuration options away, and there were annoying features that couldn't be disabled. But mostly the interface was quite clean, and it was customisable enough for my needs at least.

GNOME 3 came out, and I read about it, saw screenshots and etc. Then I tried out a liveCD.

Here are my problems with it:

1. Animations and special effects. I don't like animations, they're distracting and slow you down since in some cases you have to wait for an animation to finish before you can perform an action. I want the computer to respond instantly, and I don't want any distracting visual noise. The animations and effects cannot be disabled.

2. Many configuration options which are quite basic and trivial aren't present in the settings menu. You can't change the theme, the colour scheme, the fonts, you can't disable animations or effects, etc etc.

3. The window manager changes are pretty silly and annoying. Of course, there aren't any configuration options that let you put the minimize/maximize buttons, and you can't change the location of the close button.

4. The whole thing is too 'web 2.0' for me to want to use. It's like they decided to copy all of the worst features of OS X - the ugly white colour scheme, the reduced freedom to customise, the complete lack of any options to change the theme/appearance/colour scheme/fonts/special effects or anything related to the appearance, there's no proper volume mixer but instead a rather limited thing that looks like it was copied out of OS X, and etc. You either do things the GNOME way, or you don't do them at all.

Apparently they'll keep the interface of GNOME2 around as a compatibility mode, but it won't be maintained and will eventually be removed.

I dislike KDE 4 for a few of the same reasons (ugly looking stuff that can't be disabled - specifically the taskbar, animations that can't be turned off, etc). I actually quite liked KDE 3.
So that's why I've switched from GNOME to XFCE.

I've played around with different DE's and gnome works, I almost know my way around it, so I use it.
xfce looks nice, it's different but have to learn and configure, something to checkout later.
kde?
gnome works.

I don't have nothing to moan about Gnome2, but about Gnome3, well, I like the way it looks but it's missing the taskbar and minimize & maximize buttons (I've no idea why they took away functionalities as basic as these).

What spec machine did you try the Live CD on? I've tried it on two machines, one with an Nvidia GeForce 6xxxx (I forget what card exactly) and 1GB ram and another machine with Nvidia 7950 and 4GB of ram. The whole interface kinda dragged on the lower spec machine but was fine on the higher spec machine. The Live CD uses the nouveau driver. I suspect better performance would be obtained using the propriety Nvidia driver. Better performance would certainly be obtained by running from a Live CD.


The new System Settings (formerly control panel) or whatever it is called really looks like someone has used the Mac OS X System Preferences and decided to recreate it for GNOME. Which isn't entirely a bad thing I don't think. There's other Mac OS X like features too like if you select the 'Help -> About' in Nautilus, you don't get a new window opening like you did in GNOME 2, you get a sort of overlay that drops down over the current window. I quite like that. It seems more logical than having a new 'real' window opening.

I have no problem with the lack of customisation available in Mac OS X, but then perhaps that's because I never had any expectation of there being any such customisation. The lack of an 'always on top' option drove me to install a third party solution, but apart from that I find the Mac OS X desktop environment perfectly usable. (I use it daily.) Perhaps it's also in part that I consider the defaults to be sensible. On Linux there's the expectation of fairly extensive. GNOME has always leaned towards less option is better but GNOME 3 seems to have gone too far and I'm not sure the defaults are sensible enough, if you see what I mean.

GNOME 3 has only just been released though. We should wait a little while see how it develops before writing it off entirely.

I ran it on my desktop computer, which has a 2GHz dual core Intel CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a GeForce 8600. It ran fast enough, so it wasn't the performance that concerned me. No matter how fast your computer is, animations still take time to complete, and I find any kind of unnecessary movement on the screen irritating.

I tried the Fedora based live CD http://gnome3.org/tryit.html and to sum it up in a few words, it does NOT suck. Now for some points.

1. I personally like how it looks compared to KDE 4.5 Fonts and icons are nice, a clean less cluttered look. But then I've always thought that about Gnome
2. I had to do more mouse clicks to get a program to start.
3. There are no popups to tell me what an icon does. I suppose this only effects those of us not familiar with Gnome
4. There seems to be no way to change anything. Maybe this was because the CD was just pure Gnome and not a complete distro.
5. I wasn't able to browse a network drive or any local drives on PC
6. My Broadcom wireless & webcam were not working, but that again may just be the result of the demo nature of the CD

In the end of this 2 hours exploration I saw nothing compeling to make me want to switch. Then if I was a Gnome 2 user I don't see anything that would keep me from upgrading.

With both, Gnome and KDE I usually have problems, X server crashing, wrong resolution (yes, affected by the DE no matter how much I touched the Xorg.conf), or even the engines (such as Qt or GTK) didn't worked. Fluxbox is fast but is not user-friendly, at least for the beginners. Right now I'm using XFCE, and I love it, but I also love LXDE, they're both pretty fast. I'd like to try IceWM and see how it works, I'll do it soon I guess.

Gnome is not bad (can't talk about Gnome 3, I haven't tried it) but it doesn't really fits my style. I was going to say something about similarities to Windows but I don't wanna create a flamewar xD, anyway, that's MY opinion (and I'm still kind of a newbie) so maybe someone won't agree with me

I started out with KDE 3 (then 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2), moved to LXDE (when I got a netbook) and now Gnome 2.32 on everything. The most easy to work with was LXDE, however it lacks some of the customization found in Gnome.

Am I the only person who hasnt had problems with KDE4.X being buggy? The earlier versions were, but once it got past 4.2-4.3 or so its been stable in my experience. I've only used KDE4.X for any length of time with debian/aptosid though, maybe different distros have had more problems...

Personally, I dont really moan about gnome. I dont like it, I dont use it, but hey, if gnome does it for you, use it (I have used gnome 2.X in the past, so its not just a kneejerk reaction to the 'look' or stock layout of gnome)

With that said, gnome 2.X going to be scrapped sooner or later and I recommend that new linux users avoid it. Gnome 2.X has never been my thing, so I'm probably a bit biased there, but there is logic behind my recommendation that newbies avoid gnome 2.X.

BTW, I'm a happy KDE 4.X and Xfce 4.X user, depending on system specs.

Well, all I can say is that from 4.x to 4.3 I had issues with KDE. I started out using Gnome many years ago. I was converted to KDE by their fabulous inherent customization options. I was very, very sad when I could not get 4.x to work for me. It works fine for others, though. That's cool. I'll be sticking with my little mouse pal (Xfce) for the foreseeable future.

For the most part I like Gnome. I don't really care about the eye candy. But I hate Alacarte! I have been looking for weeks on how I can change the system menu so every user on the machine gets the same menu and have not figured out how to do to do it.

So, I would same Gnome menu management leaves a lot to be desired.

It is disappointing Gnome 3, going back to Gnome 2

Wow. I've been using and customizing Gnome for years and I didn't know it used xml files, so how big a problem can it really be?

My 2 reasons for using KDE instead of Gnome:

1. Konsole - tabbed browsing and better emulation (in mc anyway ;-)
2. Every drill-down opens a separate window. You can't tell it to use the same window. If you drill-down a long tree, you have to close lots of windows,

Just my $0.02

GNOME Terminal has had tabs for a while now. Not sure how long, GNOME was at 2.24 when I noticed them, I think they arrived a couple versions before that though.

I'm guessing you're referring to Nautilus' spatial mode. This is something I have never actually encountered on account of how every distro I've used GNOME in has had it disabled by default. This is one of many places which describes how to disable it on a per-user basis http://geekyninja.com/archives/disab...-file-browser/