trouble choosing - gnome, KDE, other?

zambizzi · Guru Joined: 28 Aug 2004 Posts: 581 Location: Boise Idaho

First off, I've been using both gnome and KDE for years, on and off, and have been following their progress as well. I'm not *new* to either of these environments so please do not try and teach me about them...hopefully I'll be clear enough to explain what I'm really looking for.

For the last year I used gnome 2.x as my DE, which worked great until I upgraded to 2.8 recently, and many things broke...and many things became unstable, especially nautilus (crashed nearly every use).

So, disgruntled, I threw a bitch-fit and did a fresh system install and emerged KDE as my DE, hoping it would have improved significantly in a year. While KDE is a "nice" desktop, it isn't my style. I'm a minimalist and KDE is maxed-out, overly feature-rich, kludgy, and far too candy-ass looking for me (just my opinion, not meaning to rock any boats here!) - no matter what mix of themes/icons I have tried.

It's just too much to look at...and no amount of tweaking has made my desktop easy enough to look at. Period.

Now...I think I'd like to give gnome 2.8 another shot but I'd like to remove KDE (3.3.2). First of all, how much additional hard disk space would gnome add if I were to emerge it *before* removing KDE. And secondly, what type of damage, if any, would I do by removing KDE after I've installed gnome?

Aside from "gnome" "gtk" and "gtk2" what are some other USE flags I can use to speed up gnome? The newer versions feel so much slower than it did a couple of years ago.

And yet another question, are fluxbox/openbox solid alternatives to gnome? I know they're quite minimalist...but am I able to run *any* of the apps that I can w/ gnome in either of those? What are the downsides to using a lightweight gtk-based DE as opposed to just using gnome?

Thanks all, I appreciate your help!

-v

MarkByers · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2004 Posts: 10 Location: Denmark

Illissius · Guru Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 395 Location: Hungary

First off, have you encountered Reinhardt? Another icon theme you might like is Flat. Those are pretty damn minimalist.
As for the WMs, it is my understanding that you can run pretty much any app under them that you could under the DEs, they just might take (a lot) longer to start because they may or may not have to load up significant parts of the DE (libs, etc.) to do so, which would otherwise already be in memory.
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