Gnome or KDE?

[Psquared]

Ok, here's the "skinny" on Xfce.



Oveall, its bigger and slower than it used to be. I think all DEs go
through this and when they reach critical mass they start writing the
code to make them faster. It is faster than Gnome though on my laptop
it is not a lot faster. I can't compare KDE except what I had on FC2. I
hated it. The only thing I liked about KDE was that the icons on the
panel enlarged when you passed your mouse over them so you could read
what they said a bit easier. I don't think either Gnome or Xfce can do
that.



Xfce now has menus and a panel at the bottom which you can customize. I
don't know about desktop icons. I don't think there are any. It also has
a panel at the top. You can autohide both to have more desktop space.



Lots of customized features - windows, icons, wallpapers and
backgrounds -- pretty much what you want.



The main drawback for me is that the menu structure is poor. I have two
different submenus with OpenOffice programs, a Debian entry that does
nothing, and the desktop, window borders and icon theme sub-menu items
and names are poorly thought out. If I could figure out how to modify
the menu I would. 



All in all Xfce takes us further away from Windows and closer to MacOS
- at least in terms of looks. Functionally it is different.



Oh, and install it using the binary installer from os-cillation. You
get the latest version and you can install the "goodies" package
separately. The only problem I had was the the "panel" didn't show at
first, but once I started it manually from a terminal it was fine.
Music plays well as do DVDs.



I would love to see a gui for menu editing (very limited right now) and
arranging menus and submenus. I suppose this could be done manually
right now, but I don't know how.


-- 
Psquared