Hi folks,
I got three boxes here, all run Linux. Everything works, except Totem (it crashes as soon as I want to use it - never mind...)
Gnome runs smoothly. KDE is slow and buggggy - terminal shows, "not-found", "error", "missing", etc etc etc .
I wonder why Gnome is OK, and KDE is not. Do you have the same experience? Is KDE a good and reliable system? Simplicity, reliability and usability are the prioriites here.
Fluxbox is so far the best, but, Gnome is sort of nice when I can stick my USB-pencil in and an icon appears on the desktop - no need to mount anything etc. Its kind of nice to have the dog bark instead of you.
Thanks for your expert comments.

Dunno....

I have listened to a few gurus in my neighbourhood and they recommended KDE. I installed it, and stuck with it. Yes, it gives some errors, but I installed 2.x and upgraded later to 3.2 and I also did a few Stupid Things (tm)

On some other boxes I did a net install from the Debian Sarge installer, and installed KDE 3.2. No problem at all. One of the boxes I did a dist-upgrade (hey, this is Debian, man) and that installed KDE 3.3. Smooth and without any problems.

So I would say that KDE is just fine. If you choose Gnome, it is just for personal preference, but not for technical reasons.

jlinkels

I'm not a fan of KDE, Konqueror isn't bad but that's all the turns me on. Oh and it has nice Bluetooth support as well! I think Gtk draws much nicer looking stuff than Qt though so I use fluxbox with all Gtk apps, works for me

Maybe you could try having a look at Xfce 4.2, it's a lightweight desktop environment and it's actually not too bad these days.

Yeah, lightweght + terminal....
OK, I feel the trend.

What version of KDE are you running. Also you may have to note that your particular problems could be a result of Mandrake's version of KDE and not stock KDE itself. Mandrake tinkers around with GNOME and KDE so in the process they can cause problems that may not be present in other distros. Also if things are not being found etc by your KDE desktop, maybe there is something wrong with your KDE installation or configuration.

Dont remember Mandrake, but in Slackware 10 KDE 3.2 is very fast. So is Gnome.

That's so true. In FC2 KDE is awful and gome is nice and looks like KDE
In Slackware 10 KDE is extremely fast.

I agree with an earier poster who said that Konqueror is the best thing about KDE.

On my Mandrake 9.2 system, KDE 3.1 was slow, buggy, and extremely crashhappy (I realize there are newer versions; I haven't been interested). GNOME seemed to lack something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I found everything I wanted in XFce4 (http://xfce.org). Fast, powerful, highly configurable, and slanted toward GTK (thus faster and more stable, in my experience; though XFce runs KDE/Qt apps just fine for me).

XFce's native file manager is a very odd little construction, but everything else rocks. Give it a look.

(Yes, I know, I went way off-topic-- but why not, when there's something that might be better?