Re: gnome

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin@midway.uchicago.edu>]

On Sat, 14 Mar 1998, Richard Sevenich wrote:
> 
> I am looking for a window manager to go with long term. I recently
> installed kde and find it quite nice, but I'd like to look at other
> options also. I understand the reason why debian has given some
> support to gnome and would like to try it when it is reasonably
> functional.
> 
> So are there current users of gnome who find it already usable? If so
> I'll pull it in. I'd appreciate comments from those with gnome
> experience.
> 

Gnome isn't usable right now, basically. It may be useful reasonably soon
though (2 or 3 months? guessing, don't quote me).

As other have said, neither Gnome nor KDE are window managers, though KDE
includes one in their distribution (kwm). 

You could use KDE for now and later switch to Gnome if you want desktop
functionality (file manager, desktop properties, panel, etc). If stability
and continuity are more important to you, you could use a plain old
traditional window manager instead of kwm. I like icewm because it is
small, simple, stable, fast, and looks nice; twm is a traditional Unix wm,
but ugly as hell; fvwm and variants seem to be the traditional Linux wm -
they have a lot of features.  There are several others, such as Afterstep,
that many people like as well. 

If you plan to switch to Gnome later, I think the authors of icewm,
Enlightenment, and scwm have all announced their intention to be
"Gnome-compliant." Of the three only icewm is stable in my experience
(though none of them have reached 1.0 and all three are usable).

So in short I use icewm now, and like it a lot, the only drawback is that
the documentation isn't finished. I plan to use Gnome when it comes out.
But there are about a million window managers and each one has a large
following. :) Pick a week, and use a different one every day, and see what
you think. This is one of the great things about free software - you can
try everything for yourself and pick your favorite. 

HTH,
 Havoc Pennington
 http://pobox.com/~hp



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