Is Gnome the right DE for students?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Bill Moseley wrote:

> I've been experiencing the "Nautilus using 100% CPU" problem -- along
> with issues where a user logs in and Gnome says something about not
> being able to load the theme, and various applets not starting.
> 
> Yesterday, I logged in an my top and bottom panels loaded, but the
> desktop background was black with no icons and going to any "Places"
> failed to open Nautilus.  That didn't resolve until after re-booting
> both the clients *and* the server.

I've seen some pretty odd behaviour from gnome lately myself.  In my case,
the gnome panels seem to freeze up on start-up.  This is on a regular
Ubuntu desktop.

> Do you think using, say, Xfce would solve many of these problems?

XFCE almost certainly wouldn't have this bug.  Neither did Gnome until
recently and hopefully it will be fixed soon.  XFCE almost certainly has
other bugs so I'd be wary of jumping around desktop environments over a
single bug.  That being said, if you see what I'm seeing I can understand
why you'd like to solve this quickly.

> Are there features of using the Gnome DE that Xfce doesn't offer that
> your students require?

Support from the edubuntu developers and community is probably the big one.

Gavin