Questions for deployments of GNOME

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Every time I try GNOME I'm left with an impression that it's a disparate bunch of applications with a window manager over the top. KDE seems more coherent as a whole, to me.

Every time I try KDE, it isn't long before something stops working, or fails to start. That doesn't seem to happen with GNOME; GNOME seems more stable, to me.

But then, those are just initial impressions... because every time I try either of them, it isn't long before I end up scurrying back to a blend of fluxbox and screen. 20 years of developing GUI programs and they're not actually getting any better, just bigger; everyone is convinced that they know The One True Way to present everything, and nobody can agree on what it is, whilst in the meantime everyone's so busy tacking "features" on the side that nothing ever gets smaller or works better. (No, I'm not going to go out and buy a brand new computer just because you can't be bothered to consider efficiency.) And then the most useful programs to me - bash, mplayer, vi, emacs, mutt, elm, xpdf, firefox, OpenOffice, seq24, dillo, links, LyX, Ted, TeXmacs... I could go on - don't even integrate with either system anyway!

If I have to live with a bunch of disparate interfaces and philosophies anyway, why on earth should I give up the relative simplicity, stability, speed and compactness of the command line? Honestly, until you can be vaguely useful to me without being annoyingly slow and/or crashing every 5 minutes on a box with half a gig of memory, a CPU which doubles as a storage heater, a plague on both your houses!