Michael M. wrote:
I prefer KDE, mainly because it works well for me. I dislike gnome because of it's oversimplification. A lightweight WM is nice, but I don't notice a lot of speed difference due to the heavy amount of caching that KDE does. This desktop is relatively new and has a gig of RAM, so I don't mind the heavy resource drain.On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 06:12 +0100, Joe Hart wrote:The fact that we have an opportunity to discuss the differences in our desktop environments is a good thing, because in the Windows world I had no choice. Now there's at least six, probably a more and I haven't heard of them. One that I really like is XFCE. Version 4.4 is quite impressive. I read EL17 is also quite good.Actually there are quite a few alternative shells available for Windows (at least for XP and prior, I've no idea how they'll run on Vista). I used a number of them back in Windows days -- in fact, I used Blackbox on Windows before I ever tried it on any Linux distro. Overall there aren't as many alternatives available as there are DE's and WM's for most Linux distros, but also keep in mind that many distros limit the number of options that are easily installable. Personally, I dislike distros that are KDE- or Gnome-centric, but many are. Did you install XFCE 4.4 from source? Because it's not available in Etch repositories, and won't ever be since Etch is frozen. Same goes for EL17.
On another machine I have Sarge installed and setup as a server, with no GUI so that I can practice my networking administration skills from a command line. One of the things I like so much about Linux is that I have a powerful command line again. I have been missing that for many years. I just wish I had made the switch to Linux years before I actually did. Reading about some of the old Red Hat stories sounds like they were fun times. Now that things have advanced to the point that Joe Sixpack could do an install, it's not quite the same.
I downloaded a copy of Xubuntu and ran it live just to check out. It is amazing how many different distros I have tried. I definitely had a case of bad case of distroitis. I hear it's common among newbies, and hits again when one reaches the noob stage.
Joe