GNOME done well?!

[Devari]

How can this be?

Ubuntu has a really nice, clean implementation of GNOME. Memory leak is not near as bad, and I'm actually finding things MORE responsive than KDE. I guess I became rather biased against GNOME because of the crappy job that Mandriva does of it...

It really is a pleasure to use. Amazing.

[Floppy_Drive]

hehe. See gnomes not all bad.

[Nohc]

What's GNOME?

[The Beatles]

There's a weird issue by the way which occurs with all GTK-based desktops. Sometimes, weirdly, you will find X eating all of your CPU. A simple kill and restart of all GTK apps fixes this. Occurs with XFCE too, sadly.

By the way -- yes, you can clean GNOME down very well. But I think you will find that if you took the same amount of effort with KDE, you could clean it up even better. Look at all the services KDE starts at login time... anyways, do give it a whirl, try to slim KDE down, and you may be surprised.

[Fresh Water Fighters]

Um Whats KED?
If it is a downloed please give a link. L-O-L

[Floppy_Drive]

KDE and gnome don't work on windows. You have to get something like linux. You can get a linux liveCD here if you want to try linux without installing it to your hard drive.

[Veranor]

hehe. See gnomes not all bad.

Yes, I am particularly fond of the garden variety.

KDE is pretty fast but after using XFCE for awhile everything else starts to feel clunky or slow. The start-up time for KDE vs. XFCE is a good example. Also the multi-desktop implementation on XFCE is much better than on KDE. Gnome... I can't even bring myself to touch.

[Devari]

GNOME and KDE actually both run quite well on my newer (but still old) box. XFCE's performance advantage is quite visible on the old PII - the Archie LiveCD is blazingly fast.

[The Beatles]

And there's also the obvious things like xterm instead of gnome-terminal, pico instead of gedit, and bash (or ROX-filer) instead of nautilus, etc.

[Devari]

But, of course, you do need to consider the fact that many people are afraid of the command-line.

[The Beatles]

Yes, but if you're not, there's no point being influenced by those who are. If you're fastest in shell, then there's no need to hide it from the user-friendly folks.

Still, more to the main point, gnome-terminal is an utter resource hog; I can't see why more people don't use xterm instead.

[Devari]

I like Konsole, personally. gnome-terminal isn't very good, comparatively.

I alternate between GUI and command-line. For batch copy/move (say, "mv *.mp3 Music"), I find command line best. But for other things, especially text editing, I can't stand Emacs or VI.]

Really, I just use whatever is best in a certain situation. That's why I have something like 6 browsers and 8 text editors on my computer, not to mention a number of media/music players and desktop environments.

[Devari]

It may be "wimpy", but I actually find ee (easy editor) to be nice for console text editing. It isn't "hardcore" - however, it is nice for config file editing if you need recovery (borking X comes to mind).

[The Beatles]

My personal favorite is pico: don't much like vi, but I've managed to use it on a few occasions for recovery. Pico (or its clone, nano) is really excellent.

Posting this from an Ubuntu LiveCD. It's the first to correctly set my monitor resolution at 1600x1200.

[Devari]

Hm.... I actually just installed nano on my Kubuntu install.

I rather like it. Very easy to use, which is a plus. Good for recovery, I guess.

Ubuntu is very good. The only thing I could ask for would be the ability to mix debian and ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu has a feature-freeze on packages after a certain point, so stuff like amaroK 1.3 won't make it in to the official 5.10 release. Ubuntu does have the community backports project, but that only goes so far. It would be nice to be able to use debian unstable packages properly.

But hey, you can't have everything.