Is Linux Desktop Better Than Windows? (LinuxPlanet)

Is Linux Desktop Better Than Windows? (LinuxPlanet)

Of course, with Gnome, I've had the experience of needing to (effectively) rebuild the hard drive. It's not that things work slower, but things stop working-- Gnome specific things, not other things.

Because Gnome's configuration is all GUI based and huge and mysterious and saddled with stuff like GConf, the only way I found out of it was to move all of the dotfiles in my home directory into an "oldhome" dirctory, carefully move back the ones I really needed (like .bashrc and .cvspass), definitely leaving things like the .gnome directoy behind, and starting over configuring.

I don't have as much experence with KDE, but recently moving from Woody to Sarge on my machines at work, I found I had to scorched-earth a number of other user accounts similarly. (I think they *had* been using Gnome, and trying to move to KDE was just a mess.)

Personally, after getting frusturated with needing a GUI to configure Gnome, and too many undocumented configuration files that interact in ways that I couldn't figure out, I moved back to FVWM, which I find far more geek friendly. I don't recommend it to other people (I recommned KDE), since configuing it requires you to be comfortable with reading the man page to figure out the configuration file directives. But I know where to look when something is odd about configuration, and it never seems to drift in time as did Gnome configuration.

My point of all this is that KDE and Gnome are great user interfaces nowadays, but they *do* have the problem that your configuration can get munged up, and it can be hard to figure out how to extricate yourself from it if you don't know the standard old Unix geekly tricks. (And if you are standard old Unix geekly, you probably will be happier with something lighter weight like FVWM.)

-Rob