I was just wondering what desktop environment people use on their linux systems?
Let me start off:
I use Gnome Desktop Manager (mostly on ubuntu).
Why?
It is simple, light weight, neat, organized and quite fast. I like the default configuration with a menu on top and another bar at the bottom.
KDE is just to heavy for me, Konqueror is a nice file manager (can’t stand it as a web browser) with many features. Still, KDE is to formal, too big and uses lots of your RAM. Also, it is too classical (like windows…).
Icewm is a mix of both, but then it is not as nice and colorfull as KDE (which is the only reason I’d use KDE, but I value speed more than eyecandy).
Other DE such as fluxbox are nice for live cds. You can have access to all your programs right from the desktop. You can’t really configure much, but you usually don’t do that on live cds anyways.
So what are your favourite Desktop Environments and why?
I used to be an FVWM user, but nowadays I’m happiest with IceWM. Once you figure out how to tweak it, you can make the desktop look prettier, though I’m not really big on eye candy. I certainly appreciate the speed, which blows away both KDE and Gnome.
One of the nice things about IceWM is that you’ve got nearly full screen for your apps - that tiny menu bar along the bottom of the screen takes up little space. And you can even make that go away by clicking the arrow > on the right side of the screen.
I really like KDE’s apps, and they all work fine with IceWM, so no need to actually run KDE. Be sure you’ve installed Koffice - some great apps there. Korganizer is an excellent calendar/PIM, Kthesaurus is just what the name implies, ditto for Kmail, and the latest KPDF can easily match Adobe Acrobat Reader. I make good use of Kworldclock too (shows you time zones around the world - very useful when you want to make international calls).
Of course, some of the GNU apps are fine too. I really like Gnumeric and GNUcash.
