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Aug 10, 2008 1:27 AM
#1
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May 2007
670
Might as well ask the question. What window manager/desktop environment do you prefer?
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Sep 10, 2008 12:33 PM
#2

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Jul 2008
139
Good old gnome. KDE is just too much for me, Awsome/Ion/Fluxbox are too ugly for me. XFCE's interface hasn't been propperly translated to Hungarian, so it's GNOME.
Sep 30, 2008 7:35 PM
#3

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May 2008
50
KDE, of couse. I don't intend to use an amateurish desktop environment :P KDE4 is still to experimental for me, who has spent long years with 3 series --i still have many stuff i have in KDE3 and not -yet- available in KDE4.
Sep 30, 2008 7:56 PM
#4
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I use KDE 3 myself, however when KDE 4.2 is released at the end of January next year I'll be switching over. If I spend hundreds of hours coding stuff I might as well use it myself in real-world usage. =)

salviati, what kind of features do you use that have not been added yet to KDE 4?
Sep 30, 2008 10:38 PM
#5

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KDE3 ftw.

Zarin, KDE4 suxs big time.
Oct 2, 2008 1:25 AM
#6

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Zarin said:
salviati, what kind of features do you use that have not been added yet to KDE 4?


I remember making a list out of them, who knows where it is. The ones i can recall are complete migration of old goody kde apps, setting konqueror as default file manager (yes, i want konqueror use dolphin), somewhat flexible "kicker", different wallpapers on different desktops, custom bg image for dolphin, and most importantly fewer bugs.

Dolphin thing really bugs me. I don't want to see Dolphin. I didn't like it's behavior at all. Who ordered that??? Gotta keep posting feature requests...

Brand new infrastructure, performance gains, better looks, better interface. KDE 4 really rocks. Really. Well, after bug fixes ---KDE 4 will be rocking. Ehem.
Oct 2, 2008 7:43 AM
#7
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Apr 2008
92
Gnome as the main window manager/desktop environment. Got KDE as the sub manager though, I tend to test KDE applications now and then.

If I don't remember wrong, the last time I used KDE as my main window manager/desktop environment, was with the limited edition 2005 of Mandriva, but I didn't use it for more then a week...

I might as well test out a KDE based OS again, any good suggestions?
Oct 3, 2008 11:23 AM
#8

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Kisho said:
I might as well test out a KDE based OS again, any good suggestions?


KDE based OS? Well anyway, a fair distro will let you choose what DE you'd like to install, so most will do. You can try Fedora for instance. I suggest you to stay away from non-free/limited bullshit: they really expect you to pay off plus there's always a better free distro available. If you really think highy of them, you should give Gentoo a try --which is released under GPL-- for instance.
Oct 4, 2008 2:26 AM
#9

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salviati said:
Kisho said:
I might as well test out a KDE based OS again, any good suggestions?
give Gentoo a try.


Gentoo is a terrific distro! :) Though, it's quite special. Building (aka installing) KDE takes ages :(. When I was using Gentoo on my laptop I gave up installing KDE after 2 days of building. However, I still use Gentoo on my desktop server and I'm very happy with it, since I don't need to update there any mammoths like KDE. ;)
Oct 6, 2008 4:49 PM
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salviati said:
KDE based OS? Well anyway, a fair distro will let you choose what DE you'd like to install, so most will do.


Thought I would ask, since there are some developers who represent one DE better then others.. For instance, the Ubuntu team focus more at Gnome (kinda logical though), and therefor represent Gnome better, then the other DE's. (I might be wrong though)...

Anyways, thanks for the tips, guess I'll give Gentoo a try.
Oct 7, 2008 9:20 AM

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Indeed it is :)

Well, some distros indeed somewhat force their users into various DE. The "original" work users actually notice is usually eyecandy & default profile. But all major distros contribute to these projects back with fixes & patches. The more they require a package, the more priority they give. They try to "straighten up" these packages. This's why a bug that exists in some distro may not exists in other even though the package version appear to be the same (patches are usually merged in the following release.) So, some distros indeed represent some packages better than some others.
And some distros don't have various DE in their package list at all. In that sense, Slackware doesn't represent Gnome at all!

Well, that's one way looking at it :D

Unlike al_bat, i love Gentoo and has been using it for about 7 years by now. I have never intended to switch to another distro.

al_bat, if KDE is a real mammoth for you, you can always use bindist packages. Gentoo is all about choice, and binaries instead of sources is yet one other option you have. Though you'd confined to use packages compiled with someone else's USE flags by doing so. Well, even that is much more flexibility than any other distro would give you ---USE flags are still there, you can always try other bindist packages.
Oct 8, 2008 1:55 AM

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salviati said:

Unlike al_bat, i love Gentoo

:D I did't say that I don't love Gentoo! I do love it. But it's not a blind love. It's like loving your sister, who can be mean sometimes... :D What I was trying to say is that I don't think that Gentoo is a good choise in every possible case. But it's, for sure, a good choise in general.

salviati said:

you can always use bindist packages
Though you'd confined to use packages compiled with someone else's USE flags by doing so.

It's true! In theory.
However, a standard situation for me is when either I can't find the package I need as a binary, or/and the USE flags of the build package are incompatible with my current configuration. Really, I've never managed to use binaries for Gentoo, apart from Sabayon, which is compiled from the beginning.

Besides, there is one important point: if you use prebuilt packages, you can't have the latest versions of everything, which is, imho, one of the best features of Gentoo. If I used prebuilt packages, I'd lose my motivation for Gentoo.
Oct 8, 2008 2:15 AM
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al_bat said:
Besides, there is one important point: if you use prebuilt packages, you can't have the latest versions of everything, which is, imho, one of the best features of Gentoo. If I used prebuilt packages, I'd lose my motivation for Gentoo.


Arch Linux is mostly binary and usually no more than 48 hours behind on all major software releases. I guess that makes it a major contender as an alternative for people that don't want to compile absolutely anything and everything but still want to sometimes.

Arch Linux also has a dedicated KDE team that work on some unofficial KDE packages for Arch called KDEmod (Mod stands for "modular", not "modified". Then again the old KDE3 packages do have some [good] modifications added). So if you want a "KDE distro" feel free to check it out as well. ;-)
Oct 16, 2008 4:34 AM

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Openbox
life is a fairytale, told by an idiot
Nov 23, 2008 11:16 PM

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Sep 2007
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Gnome, KDE, and Fluxbox - although KDE has been refusing to load since I forced my color depth to 24 bits (although there was some other weird behaviour concerning the color even before I forced the change - for instance, the 16 bit distortion was present on the wallpaper in KDE and Fluxbox, and in gsetroot, but not in Gwenview or Eye of Gnome).

EDIT: Ok, I figured out what it was. Just had to turn off compositing (why I didn't automatically shut that off when I installed KDE I have no idea - my hardware doesn't support compositing). Once I did that 24 worked fine.

I used to use Fluxbox as my default a couple years ago, but lately I've just been using Gnome as main while I get the other two just the way I like them.
qyot27Nov 25, 2008 1:44 PM
Dec 24, 2008 4:06 AM

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Dec 2008
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I tried KDE and Gnome, but they are too big. Now Xfce is my choice.
Jan 3, 2009 8:04 PM

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My current WM is GNOME. I like it. Does the work and has some nice interfaces for Python too.

Somehow I don't like KDE, but it is also more than 5 years now that I last used it.
Was playing around with XFCE, Ion2 and Ratpoison too. XFCE is nice for low-end hardware. The last two were just for fun.

'al_bat' said:
give Gentoo a try.


I was using Gentoo for about 2 years myself and always liked it. It is a really good distro to learn how things work and also for customizing and experimenting. I remember I was doing stage one builds of it when it was still officially supported. The update routine was a bit fragile at times, but think it got better by now.

Then I was going into Debian for a while and ended up on Ubuntu for desktop and Debian for server. Yea, unfortunately I don't have that much time to play around anymore.
skriticosJan 3, 2009 8:08 PM
Jan 15, 2009 6:43 AM

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Dec 2008
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Gnome

Jan 15, 2009 10:38 AM

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KDE 3.5.10
Jan 25, 2009 4:03 AM

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To add a bit to the WM war: there is an article running on Slashdot detailing that Linus Torwalds switched to the GNOME side of the force because of KDE 4: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1842218. Good boy ^^
Jan 25, 2009 7:57 AM
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He switched to GNOME because Fedora forced the developer preview KDE 4.0 on to him when it was not ready for daily usage. He said that it was a temporary switch and he is willing to continuously retry KDE every time he reinstalls his desktop as he was aware of the reasoning behind 4.0--he has done the exact same thing with the Linux kernel, it was just never all-at-once like what happened with KDE.

If I was force to choose between GNOME and either KDE 4.0 or 4.1 I too would go with GNOME as it has the same amount of user configuration as the earlier KDE releases and is more stable. Come KDE 4.2+ the amount of configurable features is once again going into KDE's favour and so is becoming a viable option for daily use for those that prefer to have that power.

It has been one year since the release of KDE 4.0; one year in the free software world is a very long time and comes with it a very large amount of stabilization and feature development.
Jul 4, 2010 1:17 AM

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Dec 2008
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I'm using a tiling window manager : wmii.
Since I use Linux all day long at work, having a minimalistic - maximum keyboard control window manager is very important, productivity-wise.

As I got used to it (muscle memory), I begin using it on my old personal laptop too. Now the touchpad is working 50% of the time but I don't use it much so it's ok :)

Aug 27, 2010 12:13 AM

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I'm using Lxde (Openbox window manager )
Sep 25, 2010 11:17 PM

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Both KDE and GNOME.
| dA | blog |

He asked us; "Be you angels?" And we said, "NAY! We are but MEN!"
Apr 10, 2011 9:47 AM
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KDE and openbox. I switch between them from kdm login.
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