KDE Desktop Fun.

[Spacefreak]

Hey guys,
I attempted to use Gentoo as my first venture into the world of Linux. Well, after quite a bit of trouble I managed to make it work out fairly decently... but later decided to switch to Ubuntu to get used to the feel of Linux. Well, now that it's a touch obvious that I'm not very experienced, here goes my question. I'm about to be ordering a laptop that will be coming with Vista. I'm not too thrilled about it really, and am going to make it dual boot Vista and Gentoo. Last time I messed with Gentoo I had various problems, so I'm trying to get a feel for what I'm going to be doing once I get the laptop and start getting my hands dirty.
Right now I'm running Beryl... although not without a few complications. I was wondering what window management program you guys would suggest. The laptop will be coming with an nVidea graphics card, and I'm not sure whether or not that makes a difference. Also I have been trying to get some version of a dock working, and have been failing pretty hardcore. So again I was wondering on opinions of a good dock program that would be compatible with whatever window management program you prefer. Sorry if my questions have come across without the proper vocabulary, I wasn't quite sure how to word them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[papal_authority]

By dock, do mean something like this? As for distros, are you sure you want to fight with putting Gentoo on a laptop? Good on ya if you do, but the latest Ubuntu should be out in a few weeks (beginning of April IIRC). I'd use that if you want a painless install.
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The free market gave me gonorrhea.

[Spacefreak]

Appreciate your reply. As for the install, I fought with it enough when I put it on my desktop that I now have a pretty good grasp as to how to do it again. Helps that I pick up on things pretty quick.... though I didn't have a computer for about 5 days, lol. If I hadn't started with Gentoo I would have never gotten Ubuntu to work at all. In my endeavor with Gentoo every time I tried to use something set up as a general, if you don't want to customize it yourself use this, it didn't work. So, basically, every step of the way where they tried to offer a shortcut, the shortcut didn't work... in fact, one of them wiped out my hard drive, lol. So, I learned the process fairly well by doing everything myself. As for my Ubuntu install, I had to set up the hard drive with a windows program I got from one of my friends because it wouldn't section my hard drive into enough pieces to run windows and ubuntu at the same time. I got that worked out, and Ubuntu set up GRUB wrong, so I went back to my Gentoo training and fixed it myself. So I think I'm up to the task of throwin it on a new laptop, I'll have about a month to set it up before I start a charity bike ride across the country.
As for the dock program, not quite. I'm looking for something along the lines of kxdocker or kibadock. Something that resembles the Mac dock. I just liked the dock when I used my family's computers (all Macs.) and I came to enjoy it a lot when I used a docking program on my Windows machine, before I got fed up with it. Also, is there an approximate date for when KDE4 is coming out? I'll be trying to set up the laptop during or slightly before May. If KDE4 is to come out around then I may just hold off on adding a desktop environment until after that gets released. Thanks for the help.

[papal_authority]

Oh I see what you mean by dock now, the OS-X thing. There's a GNOME one and a gDesklets plugin that doesn't work very well. If you really like the Mac look, there's a nice icon theme that mimics it here.
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The free market gave me gonorrhea.