I hope this question will not irritate folks around here, but I have been recently inspired to to play with and experiment more with linux and other cool stuff. I have been pretty much using Ubuntu 10.04LTS exclusively on my laptop, and then only with mentacity as I don't really like compiz effects at all. I saw a screenshot for gnome 3 that fedora 15 is using, and I have seen some of the new stuff Ubuntu plans to roll out for 11.04LTS as well. I am thinking now might be a good time to broaden my horizons a bit. Anyway, if someone could point me to some good distros and interesting software packages I would really appreciate it. In particular I would like to know how the development of KDE is going, because last time I tried it I liked it a lot but switched to gnome because of how buggy and bloated many of the effects were.


Also, XFCE is something I have never really tried before, what is the newest release version and what distro/package would be good to try it out?

Thanks for any help and direction.

That's a lot of questions, but first step could be http://distrowatch.com/. Read reviews, packages included in the distro etc.

Latest stable KDE (http://www.kde.org/) is more stable and faster than before. Xfce (http://www.xfce.org/), after two years of development have a new stable version 4.8. It's simple and fast. GNOME has released GNOME 3 (http://gnome3.org/) and that's a new direction for it. A lot different than GNOME 2.

Few distros that I would recommend to you to check out, based on what you said are;

1. http://linuxmint.com/
2. http://www.mepis.org/
3. http://www.xubuntu.org/

As far as I know Fedora is the only distro at the moment, released with GNOME 3 as default desktop environment. It also have spins with newest KDE and Xfce environments. It's a bleeding edge distro, after all.

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Thank you very much alan .

You're welcome!