Comments on: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Desktop Environment

By: enthy

enthy — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:58 +0000

lxde and fvwm-crystal are more minimalistic
and doing the same thing as KDE and Gnome

By: Whorehay

Whorehay — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:39:51 +0000

No love for LXDE?

By: matt

matt — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:04:00 +0000

fluxbox is my personal favorite, it’s lightwheight and really easy to configure

By: flacvest

flacvest — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:30:04 +0000

Xfce is a wonderful environment with wonderful people involved providing a ‘Dare-I-Say-It-?’ Wonderful experience.

Bar none it is cleaner, cuter, and more functional than GNOME. It can run any GNOME, GTK+, GTK+Ruby, pyGTK+, Desktop-Agnostic-GTK+, or Xfce applications.

As one of those “found it by themselves” folks I can reccomend personally personal experiences with the Xfce Desktop Environment (which I might add is Very freedesktop.org standards compliant)

To get the most out of Xfce you could try a Zenwalk, Wolvix, or Xubuntu LiveCD/DVD… Decide if you like it, then bite the bullet and install one of the distros listed below:

I would reccomend trying:

Zenwalk, or Wolvix, (very Xfce oriented distributions),

Xubuntu (for an easier Xfce-oriented, slightly GNOMEish 64-bit installation from binaries),

Gentoo (for great 64-bit installations, if you don’t mind learning real, from source, Linux-in-a-Metadistribution),

or try a source-based distribution many of the developers of Xfce live on, as do the Xfce Servers: Lunar Linux)

I can say that my resonably large-ram, big-disk, fast dualcore system screams along doing daily things like having 80+ tabs open in a browser, doing a CD burn while browsing, and in the background transcoding audio for instance. Xfce allows low-overhead for a full-featured Desktop Environment, and plenty of left-over horsepower for a heavy A/V tasks. I absolutely luvz that lil mouse.

By: 5 Cool Firefox Alternatives for GNU/Linux (with Screenshots) » Linux, open source and me at Internetling dot com

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:05:57 +0000

[...] a few small differences, KHTML vs Webkit) as Apple’s Safari. The new version of Konqueror for KDE 4 still makes it a valuable part of the KDE desktop. The rendering engine is pretty slick – I had no [...]

By: nolava

nolava — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:34:23 +0000

When people start calling you a KDE fan in one comment and a GNOME fan in another you’ve pretty much succeeded in an objective article. Congractulations! (Nice article too, thanks.)

By: butz

butz — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:06:52 +0000

You might want to check out Equinox Desktop Environment at http://equinox-project.org/ . It’s lightweight and very fast.

By: The Big X Window Manager Guide (with Screenshots) » Linux, open source and me at Internetling dot com

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:31:51 +0000

[...] As promised, today we’ll take a look at the various interesting window managers for the X Window System which aren’t (necessarily) a part of a certain desktop environment (that means Enlightenment DR 17 doesn’t count here people, sorry, please take a look at the desktop environment guide). [...]

By: A different Greg

A different Greg — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:38:45 +0000

My quick thoughts on what to choose – start off with GNOME, and get used to what it’s like and also the broad range of forum support available. Most people use GNOME, so best to learn there. After a while (weeks or months), switch over to another DE if you want.

Personally, I switched over to Xfce (Xubuntu), and I absolutely love it. It’s sleeker, more ‘basic’, and snappier. My PC is no slouch (Ahtlon 64 x2 4000 with 2G RAM), so it’s not like Xfce made it run N times faster, but I frankly prefer the function-over-form approach that Xfce provides.

Only downside I see is that overall forum support for Xfce-specific issues is quite a bit smaller – but then again, that’s why it’s better to learn the basics on GNOME.

By: John Wilson

John Wilson — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:06:52 +0000

Perhaps one of these days I’ll be able to accept GNOME’s “the user is an idiot” paradigm. And don’t say it’s configurable when you’ll spend entire days looking for just what sub menu of what SDI window might just provide the configuration option you just might, perhaps, be looking for. So sue me for agreeing with Linus Torvalds about GNOME.

It’s also pug ugly with a colour scheme that reminds me of nothing so much as Windows 3.0.

KDE 4.0.x was never intended as a desktop replacement so why you’re repeating that it’s one is beyond me. SUSE’s 4.0.x implementation was good though I’d argue that it’s far from stable. And it has a beta feel to it because that’s what it really is/was.

4.1 looks and works better though I’ll hold off on whether or not it can be used daily till the final comes out in late July.

KDE 3.5.10 is due out in the fall so KDE 3.5.x fans can breathe easier that it it still being worked on, updated and improved.

Not to mention easily and, if you’re obsessive, easily and nearly endlessly configured.

It’s not hard to guess that I’m a KDE user, 3.5.9 for daily use and 4.1 as experimental.

And one of these days I really do have to look in on E17 or is it E18 now?

All in all a fairly complete roundup even though it’s not hard to tell you’re a GNOME fan

You left out IceWM which is the only option for really old boxes or, in my experience, seriously borked ones.

I’m looking forward to your followup.

Consider yourself bookmarked!