I'm using kde on slackware 13.1 on a puny intel atom netbook and am v impressed with it.

Yes, there is the odd, harmless appearance of the kde crash handler dialog, but it's less than once a day and never slows me down.

I did jump from the kde ship at slackware 13.0 because it was too buggy back then - the taskbar froze and the clock did too and almost made me late picking up my son from school. I went with fluxbox for a few months and liked it, but was pleased to return to a more stable kde under 13.1.

Curiously, i found that minecraft runs more smoothly in kde than fluxbox on my other laptop running slackware current.

For my Acer Aspire One, I currently use Gnome, which I prefer over KDE. Gnome is for when the wife uses the netbook. I also have Fluxbox installed, this is to keep my resources light. I also use LXDE and use it on my desktop and Gnome.

I haven't used Slackware in quite awhile, but if I did, I would use either Fluxbox or LXDE on the AAO.

Fred,
My apologies for straying off the thread but do you have the poulsbo video chip on your aspire one and if so are you able to watch videos without dropping frames?

FVWM, as far as the window manager portion of it goes. Of course, you can use it instead of kwin without much effort.

I like GNOME, and I use it on Slackware for my work desktop. I find it less buggy than KDE, more customisable, and far more responsive. Fluxbox/openbox are good minimal systems, but I find GNOME the best lightweight "DE" (Fluxbox/openbox are really just window managers).

Of course, I might be biased. ;-)

you might be able to make a case for less buggy and more responsive (although I kind of doubt it with the last couple of KDE releases), but more cusomizable? Uh-uh. You can't even change the default file manager without jumping through hoops, and even after you've jumped through those hoops anything saved to the desktop is going to open in nautilus... WTF? Gnome is a lot of things, but customizable is not one them. I'd go as far as to say that it tries to dictate your computing habits.

That's a bit hard phrased, but the message is backed by what current press reviews say. As I already mentioned, a recent headline referring to Gnome 3 was "Gnome knows better". That's their approach to DE philosophy: Hide complexity.

But sometimes Gnome goes one step beyond what is usefule and reasonable, it seems. I haven't taken a look at recent versions, but a few years ago I decided to go with KDE, because I was able to customize according to my preferences much more easily.

This is not say, Gnome is bad. I am pretty sure that Gnome can be customized as flexible as KDE. But it's obviously a bit harder for a typical end-user to do so. BTW, this might be one reason, why enterprises sometimes prefer Gnome over KDE: Typical end-users leave the default settings untouched, because they are unable to find out, how to change them, which makes life of the helpdesk people a lot easier...

But in the end it's a question of personal preferences. The good thing is, that you can use KDE programs in Gnome and vice versa, and that you switch your DE or WM at any time. There's no lock-in.

gargamel

Good point about DE vs WM. I use KDE but, to be honest, I don't use many of the integration features that make it a DE rather than just WM. What I like most about it is that I can tweak and configure things, even if the options to tweak are buried in non-obvious locations or hard to find because you can tweak so many things.

Also, for my purposes - mainly google apps run in chrome browser (I know, I'm too googled) with a bit of libre office now and again - I find it runs quite smoothly on low end hardware. KDE is accused of resource hoggery, but, other than one issue with strigi, which I turn off, I've found KDE to be pretty good on an Intel Atom machine with 1 Gb.

hmmmm - are you sure about that? Not even FVWM? Konqueror better than Krusader? EmelFM2? How about heavy multi-taskers who produce professional output with tmux, vim, tex, ssh, openvpn, rsync, tar, dd, fdisk, mutt, slrn, elinks, newsbeuter, mpd+ncmpc, without a single click, never mind four or five?

I can safely say that I have never, ever used KDE without some application crashing on me. Whenever I want a desktop environment/window manager I happily use FVWM and XFCE on different ttys. Otherwise I have found that I am at my most productive in a terminal, with the classic Unix software listed above, each of which vastly surpasses anything the Vista-wannabe KDE has to offer in configurability and productiveness.

No, not even FVWM. Not unless they've come up with some equivalent to KDE's widgets, or added configurable screen edge actions.

Konqueror and Krusader both have features that would benefit the other. I prefer Konqueror, but Krusader is my second choice.

As for the console-based stuff, it's all very good but these days there are just too many things that you simply cannot do without a graphical session. Besides, a console doesn't let me tile so that I can see several things at once. I make extensive use of this kind of functionality.

I use KDE every day, and I rarely have applications crash. It really hasn't been an issue since 4.4 came out. As for Xfce, it has the same basic problems Gnome does. There's no such thing as too much configurability. The file manager thing really irks me; if I want to change my default file manager it should be the easiest thing in the world! It realy torques me off that Gnome and Xfce have inextricably tied the desktop to the default file manager... and in both cases we're talking about half-functional file managers at best.

Okay, here it goes.

I do not like KDE. Yes, it looks and feels attractive, if you're into the Vista look. But if you're looking for a desktop that is optimized for work, you want a DE that is out of the way. And KDE does everything in its power to put itself in your way. In fact every piece of software developed for KDE starts with a K. Yes, I know I'm using KDE, thank you. Throw in the desktop widgets and you've got one cluttered, distracting DE.

Furthermore, KDE eats RAM. A desktop environment (or window manager) is simply the portal through which a user interacts with the OS. Do you want hundreds of megabytes of RAM to be wasted just because you logged in? Even if you're sitting on a few GB's of RAM, waste is waste.

That aside, I use openbox. I've tried fluxbox and found it to be enjoyable as well. The *boxes stay out of your way and give you a lean, efficient system. One right click and there's a list of applications, wherever your mouse cursor happens to be.

LXDE is the heaviest DE I will allow myself to use these days. If you want to customize it, you will need to edit some config files, but if you know your way around the *boxes you will be right at home.

XFCE is a good alternative to GNOME, and I've found it to be more intuitive, though GNOME's three default menu options is as simple as it gets. Still, GNOME is too much of a RAM-hog for my tastes.

I find tiling window managers to be most productive environments. No more nonsense window placing and resizing, no redundant borders, panels, background icons etc. Maximizing of screen area for the applications you are working in, fast & full keyboard navigation, minimal CPU and memory requirements so most is left once again for your applications.

Most of tiling window managers are based on an universal programming language (Python, Haskell, Lua, Ruby, C ...) so you can infinitely tweak it to your needs while the KISS principle remains kept.

The most mature and corresponding to my needs are Xmonad and wmii. As I did learned haskell a lot in the last time so I'm now using Xmonad almost exclusively. I'd recommend it to more advanced users who also work in terminal frequently.

Xmonad & Xmonad-contrib & xmobar & dmenu

The widgets are not clutter. Using a widget I can create multiple profiles for Konqueror for different tasks, and access them with one click. Same for the Kate text editor. My folder view widget displys the contents of the directory of my choice and I can have a different folder view on each virtual desktop. The latter is especially powerful; if I use different virtual desktops for different tasks I want a different widget set on each desktop. I don't want the desktop I use for web development cluttered up with a system monitoring tool that eats a third of the screen; that's on my maintenance desktop and my web development desktop has konqueror profiles, kate profiles, the dictionary, the spellchecker, and a folder view set to display the contents of my "websites" directory. No other environment can touch this functionality.

Then you have screen edge actions. I don't like panels that are always visible because I do a lot of window tiling and want the entire screen available for apps (things would probably be different if I had a modern widescreen monitor, but I don't). So my panels are set to autohide and I don't use a clunky, old-fashioned Windows-style task manager. Top left corner of the screen displays apps open on the current desktop, top right on all desktops, bottom right shows the desktop, and bottom left displays the desktop cube. Once again, where else can you get this kind of functionality?

The point is that this desktop is not in your way; it streamlines your workflow. I'm usually working on four or five things at once, and KDE is a multi-taskers paradise. And it doesn't look at all like Vista.

KDE and Gnome do indeed eat a fair amount of system, but far less than Windows or Mac do. I'm running a 3.2Ghz processor and 6GB of RAM; I'll take the extra resource usage in exchange for a more functional desktop that doesn't try to tell me what I want. I have a friend who uses Gnome, and every time a new gnome version comes out he tries to get me to try it and I always have one question for him: "does Nautilus still draw the desktop"? Don't try to tell me what file manager (or anything else) I have to use.

Don't stress about things. Just use whatever desktop environment or window manager you like the most, whether it's KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Windowmaker, Enlightenment, FluxBox or RatPoison

Wrong. The only thing you can't do better or at all in a shell is viewing pictures and playing videos. Otherwise the shell surpasses the GUI hands-down. If a person can't do things in the shell then that is most certainly not down to deficiencies in the shell. Try this in KDE:
How many clicks did it take in KDE to extract the audio from that video? My typed command took 5 seconds. Or try composing a letter and positioning sender and addressee fields in Kword. How many steps? How many clicks of the mouse? How much adjusting and readjusting of margins and tab stops? Now try it in Vim with Latex. I create a new file in Vim with the .tex extension, set syntax on and document type to letter and just start typing. When finished I output the tex file to PDF with another simple command. Not once have I touched the mouse and yet I have a professional-looking letter ready for printing. I really don't see how you can say any GUI never mind KDE with all its bells and whistles is more efficient than that.

Again, you are mistaken. You can multiplex many console applications into multiple panes in one or more windows with tmux. Here's a tmux session I posted some time last year. Ignore the sickly colours; I was experimenting. Clockwise, from top-left: slrn, mutt, htop, alsamixer (mpd+ncmpc), wget, and elinks. I switch between panes with Ctrl+b+o. How difficult is that?

I seem to remember the OP stating her intention to do some programming in Linux. I very much doubt that a desktop with widgets is what she needs for efficient programming. I imagine such a person should be comfortable using the keyboard and should be setting up a terminal to minimize eye strain, unless of course she's just a hobbyist programmer and does not intend to spend prolonged periods at it.

I started using KDE in 2001 and I can assure you the only thing that happens with this desktop environment is that bugs are solved and others created. The default colour schemes are hideous. All that grey? WTF!! The button widgets look as though they've been tacked on at the last minute and the arrangement of the widgets in dialog boxes is completely haphazard and inconsistent. And it's not as though KDE is a newcomer. They're around for 15 years. There is no excuse for pushing on with their pet Vista-wannabe project while leaving bugs in major applications like Kmail unresolved for years.

But let the OP decide herself. I am just taking issue with your assertion that nothing comes close to KDE. As far as I'm concerned that's not what the Linux-BSD philosophy is about. Develop one program and do it right. And if you put all those well-developed programs together then you have a good working environment. With KDE you have a massive effort to create a dumbed-down, good-looking environment with half-arsed, shoddy constituent programs. To me that is not an environment a professional programmer or power user can work efficiently in.