Thoughts from the Outside

Why not install both? You'd then be able to select which one you want from the login, then run them both for a while and see which one naturally works for you.

But then, which version of KDE? The regular v3.5.9 or the funky new v4.0.3? (I'd pick the older one for the moment - KDE 4 needs a touch more work before it's stable enough for mass rollout)

Personally, I'm a KDE man. GNOME treats me like an idiot and I found it to be slow and not very responsive. Score 1 for the K!

I don't know if there's a slight confusion between RAM and hard-drive space here, hon. If you install both to your HD, when you select either KDE or GNOME in the Login screen - only ONE will be loaded into RAM.

Getting more RAM will work wonders for your PC - will you be adding it to the RAM already installed to make 768mb? Or are you swapping out the old one?

Go to bed! I had no idea it was so early over there! *smacks forehead*

Yeah, well, I forgive you this time...but I'm watching you, lady. 6 hrs behind you are, according to the vastly wise Internet. Any more monkey shenanigans at stupid-o-clock in the morning and I'll make my displeasure felt!

wyzwyk writes:

Surfing the net I came across your blog and was surprised to see that we really are quite similar in our interests. Like you I too am a newbie to linux, but perhaps even more so. Over the years I have become increasingly more and more disenchanted with Microsoft, not only their products (IE7 and Vista) but also their policies, company direction, and much of their philosophy in general. I know it's only a matter of time before I push them out the door in total. That will be a day I toast! ....to dumping a loser. But until then I need a replacement. What then? I toyed with the idea of a Mac but quickly discarded that notion for a number of reasons, mainly I can't, at this time, afford a new system. Besides, my system (hardware) is fairly new and powerful. I've got a quad CPU, tons of fast RAM and large hard drives. This brings me to linux. The number of distro choices offered to a newbie can be overwhelming. Like many I started with looking at the best known, but soon it became clear they didn't provide a great out-of-the-box experience. The search continued and narrowed. Like you LadyArtane I too looked at PClinuxOS 2007. While I loved the overall looks of the distro, especialy the KDE desktop options, I had some difficulties getting it to run smoothly. Close, but no cigar! Next I looked at Linux Mint 4.0 (Daryna) with the Gnome desktop. Bingo! Even though I like generally like KDE better I fell in love with that distro. I thought Daryna was beautiful, but now I want to marry her sister Elyssa. Oh what a fickle character I am. LOL On Monday (May 26, 2008) Clem and his staff hopefully will release the second beta of Linux Mint 5. Soon after will follow a release candidate and then the final release. Yeah! I look forward to that day as I think Mint will be my distro. When do you think we will get a look at the KDE version they are working on?
My gut feeling is that KDE 4 will eventually blow Gnome away, but as of right now it's really not yet a prime time player. While officially KDE 4.0 was considered a final release those in the know considered it merely a developers release, and the public will only start to see KDE 4 shine when it gets to version 4.1 to be released on July 29 this year.

When I came in from a long night of partying I was pleasantly surprised to find you had responded at length to my post. That was fast. It's always nice to talk to folks you have something in common with, double nice for me when it's about computers, and quadruple nice when it deals with linux. Throw in the fact that you're a lady, and an attractive one at that, and it's enough to make me feel like I won the lottery. LOL Did Christmas come early? Don't get me wrong Lady Artane, intelligence and an interest in linux is not gender restrictive, but sadly my female friends wouldn't know an operating system from an operating table.

Let's get back to the original thread of KDE vs. Gnome. I beleive that you misunderstood me when I said KDE was not a prime time player. KDE 3.5.8 is but not KDE 4 (4.04 now)....yet! As mentioned previously KDE 4 will receive its first major upgrade in late July of 2008 and will get bug fixes and minor upgrades monthly. If they roughly maintain this schedule we will probably see a second major upgrade come Jan. or Feb. next year. It's been my opinion that KDE 4 won't truly sparkle until it gets a year under its belt. You gotta like what the KDE folks are bringing our way. First you have updates to Qt, the cross platform development framework mainly used for making GUI programs. The port to the Qt series should use less memory and run faster. Oxygen is a new style guide and icon set. The icons will now be more photo realistic (by way of Scalable Vector Graphics). This is a definite step up from the cartoonish icons employed in a number of the themes. With Plasma we will have a new desktop and panel user interface which supports desktop widgets. Oh yeah, I love that software bling! Three cheers for I candy.... here comes KWin which will provide compositing effects similar to Compiz. In Phonon we will have a new multimedia API (Application Programing Interface), in Solid a new device integration framework, in Strigi a new search tool, and in Okular a document viwer that can be embedded in other applications. Personally I like a number of the KDE application programs over their Gnome counterparts. Does Amarok, or Dolphin have a Gnome equivalent? No, not in my opinion! Changing gears, what distro is going to have the best KDE 4 desktop? On June 19 openSUSE 11.0 goes final release. From the first time I looked at openSUSE I loved the fact you can tweak just about anything. Yes, kustomize is king! The problem I have with openSUSE is that it runs slow.... like a fat man waist deep in mud. Hopefully the new version will address this deficiency and put some zip in its step. Have you looked at Mandriva 2008? One of my friends who is a linux user said good things about the Debian based distro SimplyMEPIS 7 ...... good out-of-the-box. (so he says?) That might be but Linux Mint 5 is better looking, even if it is a Gnome desktop. GrantTLC had it right when he said "Why not install both?" It's too bad you have to log into the different desktops. Wouldn't it be nice if it was as easy as a simple single click?

Grant has the very latest - 2008.1

I tried SUSE once, but found the package management tool, yast, to be horrendously slow, particularly during the install. At the time the desktop itself didn't have that zip and zing I was looking for either so I moved on. MEPIS was great though. If Mandriva ever jumps the shark I might switch back to that one.

Nice to have you onboard, Wyzwyk.

To the lovely Lady Artane I say that I would be happy to add you as a friend, and to Grant I thank you for your warm welcome. As I said before, it's so nice to share with others on common interests.

Don't be fooled by my comments as I truly am a linux newbie. Years back when my "relationship" with M$ first began to sour I started to read on all things linux. I never stopped. Every month I take a trip to the local Barnes & Noble bookstore, grab a Starbuck's coffee, settle into a deep and soft chair, and then proceed to catch up on the 30 or so periodicals I follow. It's a poor boys way around subscriptions. I'm not proud,... but I am current! While I read a lot on linux I never made the jump to the O.S. simply because the out-of-box experience wasn't all that great... until now. When Linux Mint 5 goes final I will install it in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP on my rig.

Lady Artane, hasn't anyone told you that adding RAM is the single easiest and fastest way a person can boost a computers performance. LOL (I have not doubt many others have told you so) Your distro choice SHOULD NOT be dictated by something like that. Go to newegg.com, find the type and speed of RAM you need, find yourself a good deal (they always have something on sale), buy it, and put this issue to bed once and for all! I found 2-1GB sticks of DDR2 800 SDRAM for $37. Yes, RAM is CHEAP! The same goes for hard drives. You'll be happy and so will your computer.

F1rst-Kiss writes:

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Can I come in and say ''Me Too'' too?

I, likewise, am a sooper-noobie to Linux (roughly about a week & 1/2 to 2 weeks, pure head-first dive-in, no prior experience). I found your page because I, too, have been asking questions about ''Picklose'' 2007 KDE or 2008 GNOME.

I've been playing around a bit with several dustros -- particularly UBUNTU (my first trial) then PCLOS 2008 and most recently MANDRIVA, the latter of which I just decided to look into a few days ago because [1] ''VideoLAN Client'' has a player compatible with ''Mandy'' specifically (since I could not find out from anyone if it would be able to function in PCLOS, being a ''fork'' of Mandriva) and [2] I also wanted the opportunity to work in the ''K Desktop Enviro'', since the latest version of ''Picklose'' defaults with ''GNOME'' which, don't get me wrong, looks/feels/behaves quite nicely (and so far seems to be a helluvalot more stable than KDE), but still I have a certain attraction to things that ''jiggle'' when you manipulate them (it's a ''hetero-male'' thing).

Being completely newborn to this elitist's playground, I naturally focused primarily on these distro suites simply because they could be ''pre-tested'' via ''LiveCD''. I've found that I am not comfortable with UBUNTU... it just grates on my senses for some reason. And after nearly giving up on ''Mandy'' after a couple of days (mainly because of my difficulty in locating the 'preferences control panel', primarily so I could switch buttons & slow down the default tracking speed on my mouse) I began spending considerable time tweaking around in it and found myself progressively warming up to it -- especially when I figured out how to reconfigure the taskbar so that it is not such an excruciatingly chaotic visual assault as it presents itself in default start-up (granted, I'm STILL trying to figure out how to assign my own.photos to the 'screensaver').

I'd like to try ''Katie'' in ''Picklose'' too, but it seems like somebody played a cruel joke, and rather than keeping ''Katie'' as part of the 2008 version they dropped it in exchange for ''GNOME'', which means I'd have to use the 2007 version if I want the K-enviro. I'm concerned about this because ''2008'' suggests updates & improvements which are ''assumed'' lacking in the earlier version -- (being ''Linux'' ignorant, I'm not certain if there is any real cause for concern or not).

So my own dilemma is if I should discover I prefer the K-based P-2007 over the 'latest' 2008 G-based OS, will I be ''behind the times'' as it were, or are there actually going to be TWO SEPARATE BRANCHES of ''Picklose'' -- one KDE, the other GNOME -- and so I really shouldn't worry about it?

As for my ''conversion''... I somewhat doubt I'll become an exclusive ''Linux Lemming'' -- after all, to the utter shock & disbelief of ''Mac Fanatics'' everywhere, I ended my exclusive love affair with Apple Macintosh and purchased my very first Windows-based PC a couple of years ago and began learning Windows OS for the first time ever....... even so, I still work heavily in ''Mac''. So I'm somewhat anticipating the same sort of thing here, meaning I'll probably not give up entirely on ''Windows XP'' either (screw ''Vista''!), but I'd love to be able to handle & work in/with a ''Linux'' environment.

Welcome aboard F1rst-Kiss. As a super-newbie myself I too am constantly looking at all the latest releases of the more popular linux distros. After reading your post it is clear to me that you are unaware that Tex and the Ripper Boys are working on PCLinuxOS 2008 KDE as we speak. In a recent post on the PCLinuxOS forum Tex said that we should see the new version sometime in June or July providing he and his small group don't run into problems. Even though PCLinuxOS works with a rolling upgrade policy I believe they may be waiting to incorporate the first major upgrade of KDE 4 (v4.1) and a final release of Firefox 3. So, along with a good many others, be patient. It's coming.

You speak of Mandriva and PCLinuxOS but nothing of Linux Mint. Why not? This new release (Linux Mint 5 Elyssa) looks like it will be dynamite. After its final release next week Clem and his team will then turn their energy into creating KDE and 64 bitt versions. Oh yeah, a lot of good stuff is coming our way from Linux Mint. Even though you said in your post you weren't comfortable with Ubuntu, and knowing that Linux Mint is an Ubuntu descendant, you still owe it to yourself to try it out. It's a very different animal. While the lineage is the same as Ubuntu, the look, the feel, and the function set is definately not! In my humble opinion Linux Mint 5 may be the best out-of-box Linux experience to date, and certainly one distro every newbie should check out.