[wplug] Window Managers, Desktop Environments ect.

[Zach Paine]

> I posed the question on the list about a year ago,
> which do you use KDE or GNOME?  A lot of you were kind
> enough to respond, but now I'm curious if any new
> developments have changed things.

Haha!! I use both!  Things certainly have changed in a year.  A year ago I
was using windowmaker, because gnome and kde weren't what I wanted. 
Helixcode changed that.  It was pretty and easy to update.  Helixcode, now
Ximian basically is gnome repackaged and more easily updated.  However, I'm
beginning to wonder if it's more trouble than it's worh on my Debian
system.  I constantly have to fight apt about ximian gnome debs vs. debian
gnome debs.  I like gnome a lot though.  It's highly customizable, stable,
and has a large application base.  There are some very nifty programs that
are gnome/gtk based.

Kde is also sweet.  I just installed it (apt-get install task-kde baby!)
because of one thing: Anti-Aliased fonts.  They're are so pretty :)  If you
don't know what they are, take a look at this screenshot:
http://katra.dyndns.org/~zman/kde.png.  Good god!  Kde seems a little less
stable right now... it segfaults a lot on my system, but I've heard that is
because of a bug in libfreetype6.  It also has a large app base, although
it seems a little smaller than gnome's.  It is as evand puts it, more
'polished' than gnome.  The best part of KDE is Konqueror.  Their file
manager/web browser.  It is extremely fast (compared to mozilla, galeon,
and netscape) and pretty standards compliant.  It has some very nice
features including web links or something like that.  This allows you to
type gg:linux r00lz and it will search google for 'linux r00lz'.  Very
cool.  You can also define your own weblinks. Note: I definately have the
term wrong.

Right now, I'm using gnome w/ konqueror.  I'll never be able to browse the
web w/o AA fonts again :)

Because of my windows background, I've pretty much grown up on the desktop
environment thing, which is why I use kde/gnome rather than wmaker and
enlightenment.

Hope that helps somewhat :)

-- 
Zach Paine
http://www.wplug.org/~zman/zman.key
Key available from pgp.ai.mit.edu ID: 87746D3D 
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