I could not agree more with Christoph Haas.

I’ve tried KDE briefly during the last 6 months or so, but it never really stuck.

Some observations.⌗

1. I’ve bought an EeeBox (Dual Atom, with 1 GB of ram), boy, how slow is KDE. Do I really need a Vista capable machine to run KDE?

2. I like my current (XFCE) desktop. Why? Because it’s nice and clean. I have no use for desktop icons. I have no use for fancy clocks running on my desktop. I have no use for any fancy stuff running on my desktop. Why?

   Because I don’t see my desktop as I’m running lots of terminal sessions!

3. Basically any desktop environment should be able to display all it’s important information in a (top) panel no larger then 24 pixels. This is what I have now with XFCE and I love it. The first KDE4 version I used (4.1 I think it was), could only handle a bottom panel. Luckily this is now fixed.

4. Even if I would switch to KDE, I will probably still need Firefox. And Firefox is a GTK application and call me stupid but I hate mixing toolkits… Firefix looks like shit in a KDE env. Yes Konqi is nice - but I’m way too much used to Firefox now.

5. I don’t like using the mouse.

6. Basic stuff like a KDE network manager didn’t work when I was ready to try KDE. Well no network, no KDE.

As I’m a long time Linux user, I’ve used lots of desktop environments and window managers. I even used KDE1.2 (or KDE2) for quite some time. But alas, KDE never captured my imagination so it did not stick. After that I switched to WindowMaker and kept using that for a few years. Then with Ubuntu I just started to use Gnome as it was nice and clean. But Gnome seems to have lost its lustre and was also running quite slow. So currently I’m a XFCE user and I’m very happy with it.